Women in comics

[Frank]

The aforementioned Colleen Doran illustrated Sandman too. The world of comics which don't involve folk hitting each other over the head has given us Julie Doucet, Dame Darcy, Sarah Dyer and Bride of the Beast, Melinda Gebbie. The reason why more women don't draw mainstream comics is because they're read predominantly by and therefore designed to appeal to not just men, but the kind of adult men who're still prepared to buy comics about folks hitting each other hard over the head.

Same reason Katherine Bigelow's the only female action movie director you've heard of, yet it's as common for women to be in charge of TV drama as it is to find them in the worlds of book, magazine and newspaper publishing, fine art, photography and music. All of those industries - like comics - essentially recruit from the audience which enjoys them, and the majority of comics don't appeal to a great number of women - and aren't intended to.

Asking why more girls don't write and draw superhero comics is like asking why it's only men's names you see written in snow with piss.

[JOE SOAP]

It's patently obvious the problem is more that some men just don't bother their arses to read or seek comics by women that might expand their tastes rather than limiting them to the usual comic-shelf fare the industry would rather push upon them and let's face it, because of the proportional imbalance, men also create the vast majority of shit comics too.

[Richmond Clements]

It's patently obvious the problem is more that some men just don't bother their arses to read or seek comics by women that might expand their tastes rather than limiting them to the usual comic-shelf fare the industry would rather push upon them and let's face it, because of the proportional imbalance, men also create the vast majority of shit comics too.

Well put, Joe. But I think this says it better:

Asking why more girls don't write and draw superhero comics is like asking why it's only men's names you see written in snow with piss.

[JOE SOAP]

I will always be Godfather I to Sauchie's Godfather II.

[Richmond Clements]

We all are.

[Ancient Otter]

Also Naoko Takeuchi, whose Sailor Moon property redefined both the use of anime in western programming, and also changed the aesthetics of western animation to allow the use of more traditional anime techniques - without SM there'd be no Teen Titans Go, Totally Spies, Martin Mystery, etc.

How did I forget the author of the biggest selling manga in North America in recent years? Not bad for a twenty year old property.

Alex De Campi...forgot her too. And I'd say she would be one of the few mentioned on this thread to be delighted to create something for 2000AD, as she's one of the few American writers that has name dropped 2000AD (particularly Nikolai Dante) for years, even before DC started publishing them. She's working with Simon Fraser on a project at the moment too....

[TordelBack]

The reason why more women don't draw mainstream comics is because they're read predominantly by and therefore designed to appeal to not just men, but the kind of adult men who're still prepared to buy comics about folks hitting each other hard over the head.

The really telling thing for me is how many webcomics are produced by women.  Away from the narrow world of the mainstream comics market there is an audience and few of the usual impediments to growing it.


BTW in case the Prof and anyone else is wondering, I've read a good chunk of Doran's A Distant Soil - it's not to my tastes. 

[Frank]

The really telling thing for me is how many webcomics are produced by women.  Away from the narrow world of the mainstream comics market there is an audience and few of the usual impediments to growing it. BTW in case the Prof and anyone else is wondering, I've read a good chunk of Doran's A Distant Soil - it's not to my tastes.

I remember a fair number of girls aged 12 to 16 being into the super-powered soap opera of the X-Men and the few action/fantasy films which didn't go out of their way to appeal exclusively to arse-scratching males. Only a few years later, the majority of those girls had moved on to material whose emotional maturity and aesthetic more closely matched their own. The success of Twilight and Harry Potter demonstrate that there's still a large female audience for fanciful tosh (written by women), but there are not many more teenage girls reading mainstream comics nowadays than there are women creating them.

Like you say, when you remove the impediment of an industry which is always having to ask itself what would Bart Simpson think of this book? the numbers of female readers and creators reflect the composition of the reading public more closely. Deadline and Fantagraphics' Nineties output introduced me to the novel sensation of having reading material in common with the hipster girls whose pants I was desperately trying to get into, but following that Nineties boom comics have sold exponentially fewer copies each year. I suppose it's inevitable that publishers will concentrate on their core constituency and the stuff which appeals most to them ... and mostly only to them.

[TordelBack]

I remember a fair number of girls aged 12 to 16 being into the super-powered soap opera of the X-Men and the few action/fantasy films which didn't go out of their way to appeal exclusively to arse-scratching males.

And this is an interesting point.  We understand that the comics buyers of today's superhero shlock are basically (a fraction of) the very same blokes who bought yesterday's superhero shlock: there's an enormous inertia there.  The same pattern regrettably applies to 2000AD. 

However, away from the panel-filled page, fangirls seem less discerning: my wife is/was a big Xena fan, and we used to attend Tapertverse cons which were easily 75% female attended - and there are armies of female Whedon fans, George Martin fans, Tolkien fans... it's not an inherent problem with women not embracing violent nonsensical melodrama.  And on the other side of the coin, this thread has shown that women do read and create comics - just not these comics (and i'm talking about raw numbers here, obviously plenty of women do read superhero/2000AD books, it's just that they're a small percentage of a small readership), 

It's something specific to the nature of the 'boy's comic' that doesn't appeal.  But I wonder if, taken as a proportion of the whole population that doesn't read/obsess over/make superhero comics, is the male/female disparity in those who do even significant.

[Mardroid]

I remember a fair number of girls aged 12 to 16 being into the super-powered soap opera of the X-Men and the few action/fantasy films which didn't go out of their way to appeal exclusively to arse-scratching males.

I was chatting to a colleague at work about cartoons and she happened to mention she used to really be into the X-Men cartoon!

I don't think she's really a comic book reader, but I'll admit she went up in my estimation somewhat.  (Not that she was low.) That series did get a bit silly , but overall I found it entertaining although it was aimed at a lower age group than me at the time (like it matters).

I suspect there are plenty of other girls (and lads for that matter) who enjoyed seeing that stuff on the screen and never made the transition to comics. A shame perhaps, but there's a potential audience.

Of course I'm talking comics in general rather than 2000 AD which has no TV screen presence, apart from occasional repeats of a certain Stallone film.  And now I find myself thinking of that rather nifty ABC Warriors promo we saw a good while back. (Sigh.)

[Professor Bear]

Jeanette Khan was head honcho of DC from 1976 to 2002, and so can largely be credited with their successes until around then.  Oddly, 2002 was when I started to move away from DC as it started to become a bit of a parody of itself - weird that.  Worth noting that half DC employees were women during her time in charge, compared to ten years of DiDio power-lunching in strip clubs and oddly there are not so many ladies on the books of late, apart from recent management hire Bobbie Chase, who had a short but influential run with Marvel as EiC back in the 90s and gave us memorable Peter David, Erik Larsen and Todd McFarlane outings as well as pushing X-Men and Spider-Man into becoming million-selling comic books.  Here's hoping she is a good influence on Bob "parade of complete and utter shit" Harras.

[Definitely Not Mister Pops]

Slightly off topic here, but it does relate to 'nerd' culture.

I've heard Dorothy Fontana wrote a lot of Star Trek TOS episodes under the name D.C Fontana, so that her work would be judged on merit instead of being judged by her gender. She also used the pen names Michael Richards and J. Michael Bingham.

Also J.K Rowling. Did she use her initials (or at at least, was she advised to) so that boys wouldn't be put off?

[Mardroid]

Also J.K Rowling. Did she use her initials (or at at least, was she advised to) so that boys wouldn't be put off?

I don't think women authoring kids books* is as much of a perceived issue is it? Not that women authoring comics  (or anything for that matter) should be an issue. (It isn't for me, but as this thread stated, they're under-represented in the medium. Not so much kids books surely?) I certainly remember Enid Blyton books being very popular. I used to like them myself as a nipper.

*I know plenty of adults like them too, which is fine. A good story is a good story at the end of the day. I've only read the first and it did strike me as primarily aimed at kids though.

[Dandontdare]

Slightly off topic here, but it does relate to 'nerd' culture.

I've heard Dorothy Fontana wrote a lot of Star Trek TOS episodes under the name D.C Fontana, so that her work would be judged on merit instead of being judged by her gender. She also used the pen names Michael Richards and J. Michael Bingham.

Also J.K Rowling. Did she use her initials (or at at least, was she advised to) so that boys wouldn't be put off?

I think this has become a tradition or an affectation rather than a necessity these days - The Bronte sisters all published under fake male names, as did George Eliot of course, because women just would not get published or taken seriously back then. It was probably still useful in certain situations until quite recently though, as that Fontana anecdote shows.

I remmber being surprised as a kid when I found oput Enid was a girl's name!

I believe that men wanting to write romantic fiction these days are told by publishers to adopt a female pseudonym 'cos women feel weird reading, or would be les likley to buy, romances written by blokes

[JOE SOAP]

I think this has become a tradition or an affectation rather than a necessity these days

When not wearing tight-boots, our own Mike Carroll goes behind the curtain, puts on the heels and becomes Jaye Carroll to flog his own version of 50 Shades of Grey.