Comic Read’her’ship: Girls In and Around Comics
When I first started seriously collecting comics, when I was 11 or 12, hanging around my LCS (that’s Local Comic Shop for the layperson), sifting through back issue bins, scoping out the new stuff on the wall every Wednesday, never do I remember seeing a girl enter the store of her own free will (occasionally a girlfriend/wife or daughter would be forcibly dragged in at the behest of their male counterpart). At that time it would have been a miracle to witness, at least in my eyes, a girl come in to actually look at and read comics. I think I would’ve immediately fallen in love if it did, but that’s another story entirely; the real point here being that female readership in comics has always been low, especially up to that point (which would’ve been the mid 90’s). While this fact is still relatively true, at some point female readership (traditionally referred to as being a ‘fanboy’) started to blossom. The point of this essay is to examine the when, why and how of this happening, the ladies who helped it along and what kept (and in some respects continues to keep) them away in the first place.
Most evidence will tell you that comic book readership is still predominately male and most comic creators, be they writers or artists of some kind (comics require pencilers, inkers, colorists, letterers, all delicate art forms in and of themselves), are male as well; “a 2008 survey by a mainstream publisher found that 90 percent of superhero comic readers are male” (Quinlan). However, significant anecdotal evidence (including that of yours truly) implies an increase in female readership, like this quote from Eric Reynolds, an editor at the graphic-novel publisher Fantagraphics: “When I used to go to the San Diego comics convention, the only women were children or wives of fanboys who looked oppressed being there…now it's just as common to have a woman come…and for her husband to be the tag-along” (Yabroff). This sentiment is corroborated elsewhere, as well: “Retailers report more female customers than a decade ago, and women are appearing in greater numbers at major comic book conventions and trade shows” (Lavin). However, even with these anecdotal reports testifying to an increase in female traffic at shows and the LCS, what exactly these women are reading is still up in the air. Since the early 80’s there has been a slow and steady influx of women entering the world of comics on the other side of the page, as creators themselves.
Tights and Fights and Everything In-Between
Superhero comics in particular have traditionally been a man’s world, telling tales of muscle-bound heroes and their dastardly villains; women were rarely seen within the pages of comics unless relegated to either ‘damsel-in-distress’ or simple ‘eye candy’ status. However, as the political climate in the West changed, so too did the depiction of women in comics. Early pioneers like Chris Claremont, during his record-shattering and highly praised 17 year run on Uncanny X-Men, first introduced strong willed, powerful female characters that rivaled and often times surpassed the strength and depth of their male equivalents on the page. Also during this time we saw the first female writers step in to write the ongoing adventures in the heavy-hitter, core titles of premiere publishers Marvel Comics and DC Comics; Louise Simonson and Ann Nocenti are early innovators in this regard, creating characters and storylines during their respective tenures that are still a major part of continuity today ( Simonson herself is responsible for the creation of Apocalypse, Archangel, Cable and the death of New Mutants member Cypher, while Nocenti created fan-favorite Daredevil villain Typhoid Mary during her highly political run on Daredevil). As time passes, more and more women are entering the field of superhero comics as creators, notably writers Devin Grayson (the first female writer to earn a monthly writing assignment on a flagship Batman book) and Gail Simone (blogger-turned-writer most famous for being the first female ongoing writer of Wonder Woman) and artists like Jan Duurscema, Jo Duffy and Amanda Conner (who have each respectively drawn popular interpretations of major characters like the Incredible Hulk, Spider-Man and Power Girl, among others). While this is clearly a positive trend and (hopefully) the work of these women is inspiring even more women to both read and create superhero comics, their involvement, while strong and influential, is still marginal when considered in the context of the whole (I listed above nearly all the women I know of personally working in comics today or in recent history; if I were to list all the male creators, I would likely die of old age somewhere around the Boa-Bob names); the world of indie comics, however, is a very different story.
Indie-Anna Jones: Women of the Underground
Since the early 80’s, the worlds of underground comix (intentionally misspelled to help disseminate the difference) and small press, independent comics have been heavily populated by female creators. Creators like Trina Robbins and Aline Kominsky were among the first women to break out in the underground comix movement, publishing Wimmin’s Comix (originally titled Wimmen’s Comix), an anthology collecting stories by female cartoonists dealing with gender issues and other feminist concerns. As popularity for underground/indie books grew, more and more female artists/writers emerged, publishing much more personal stories, often autobiographical, as opposed to the superhero comics that dominated the market. Soon, creators like Alison Bechdel and Diane Dimassa surfaced, publishing their own intimate stories about feminism and lesbianism, unwittingly helping to form yet another sub-genre in comics, ‘lesbindie’ comics (Shaw). These books, while doing political good in creating visibility for lesbianism (and, although admittedly to a lesser extent, women in comics), also make a much broader point about women in comics, demonstrating their marginalization, as their inclusion in the comic world is mostly relegated to these types of books.
“Women in Refrigerators”
So why is that? What is it about comics and/or those behind them that 1) turns women away from comics and 2) consigns them to such a plight within the books as characters? The first of these questions, I think, is the easier of the two to answer: simply put, women aren’t interested in comics because there are alarmingly few female characters worth reading about. Gail Simone, mentioned above, broke into the industry writing a blog dissecting this very topic, called Women in Refrigerators (a reference to the gruesome death of a female lead character in the book Green Lantern, wherein she was raped, killed, chopped up and left in the refrigerator of her boyfriend, the Green Lantern). Simone told Newsweek: “At that time, the trend was towards grim stories where female characters were killed…[w]e only had a handful of female characters to look up to” (Yabroff). Without compelling, well-rounded and interesting female characters (and in fact the blatant misogynistic treatment of the few female characters already existing in comics), most female readers find little of interest to them in the average superhero book. I don’t intend to claim that this is universally true, however; there are and have always been female readers of all superhero comics, regardless of the gender of the characters therein, but they have always certainly been a very small minority.
The second of the aforementioned questions is considerably more difficult to answer. One could argue that comic publishers are caught in a dilemma fueled by circular logic: female characters in books don’t sell well because there is no female readership, but there is no female readership because there are no female characters in books. Looking at the issue from another perspective, one could find evidence to support an industry dominated by a fundamentally sexist attitude (although I think that view may be a bit misguided, especially today). Either way, the question still remains: what can be done to increase female readership and open up the world of comics to more female creators?
So What Do We Do?
Well, maybe change is already happening in the industry. More women are reading comics and more and more female creators are breaking into the mainstream industry. Just as writers matured in the early 80’s, moving from simple beat-em’-up, essentially plot-less to the more intricate and involved stories we read today, comics have naturally begun to shift and progress with the times and its audience. Accordingly, many books with strong female readership are actually written by men; Brian K. Vaughan’s Y: the Last Man (consequently drawn by female artist Pia Guerra), which, according to Ms. Magazine’s Christine Cupaiuolo, “shows the power of comics and science fiction to address feminist issues,” is a perfect example. Fan-favorite writer Brian Michael Bendis initially paid his dues publishing black-and-white noir stories featuring tough female leads for small press publishers before moving on to high acclaim revamping old, forgotten-about female characters in a similar vein for premiere publisher Marvel Comics. So maybe comics are moving forward, even if it’s only step-by-step and not by leaps-and-bounds.
Works Cited
Cupaiuolo, Christine. “This Is a Woman's World.” Ms. Fall 2004, Vol. 14 Issue 3, p13.
This article refers to Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra’s book Y:the Last Man with brief quotes from Vaughan himself regarding the book and its feminist nature. This resource was helpful in demonstrating the forward (although slow) moving nature of comics today.
Duffy, Damian, eds. Out of Sequence: Underrepresented Voices in American Comics. Champaign, IL: Krannert Art Museum and Kinkead Pavilion, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2008.
This book was also a very valuable source of information in my research for this project. The chapter titled ‘Women in Comics’ was even written by Trina Robbins, the pioneering woman of the underground comix movement I mentioned in my article. Again, even though I already knew much of the information therein, it was a valuable source of corroboration for my claims.
Lavin, Michael R. “Women in comic books.” Serials Review Vol. 24. Issue 2 (1998): 93-100.
This was definitely the most invaluable resource I found in my research. This article echoed much of the historical/biographical information regarding female creators in comics I already knew anecdotally (and from my own experience collecting), lending credence to the claims I make and trends I refer to in my article.
Quinlan, Adriane. “A Real Life Comic Book superhero.” Newsweek 9 Aug 2010, Vol. 156 Issue 6, 48-50.
This article from Newsweek was valuable in finding some of the ever-elusive statistics on female readership in comics. While it is generally assumed that the majority of comic book readers are men, little to no research has officially been done to verify this assertion (that has been made available to the public, anyway). This source provided this much-needed commodity.
Shaw, Adrienne. “Women on Women: Lesbian Identity, Lesbian Community, and Lesbian Comics.” Journal of Lesbian Studies Vol. 13. Issue 1 (2009): 88-97.
This article from the Journal of Lesbian Studies focuses on four major lesbian comic book creators and their respective work. I was already familiar with Alison Bechdel but this source expanded on my knowledge of her work and opened me up to the other creators mentioned. The phrase ‘lesbindie’ (pronounced lesbie-indie) is admittedly a colloquialism and not widely accepted as a legitimate label for this sub-genre of comics, Shaw’s article does dig into the deeper issues behind and within the work of these four creators, and I found that both refreshing and very useful.
Yabroff, Jennie. “Holy Hot Flash, Batman!” Newsweek 14 Jan 2008, Vol. 151 Issue 2, p59-59.
Yabroff’s article champions creator Gail Simone, also discussing her rise to prominence after initiating the ‘women in refrigerators’ blog. What I found particularly useful in this article was the discussion of male readership versus female readership and the quotes from Fantagrahics publisher Eric Reynolds substantiating the growing number of female readers.
