November 16, 2006

• Girls write comics too. There's some truly outstanding stuff by: Julie Doucet, Trina Robbins, the late wonderful Dori Seda, Roberta Gregory, Shary Flenniken, and many more. They're mostly in the "underground" world, not at all like that DC/Marvel junk.
• God forbid a woman is ever portrayed as attractive in a drawing.
• Er... the current attitude appears to be: "God forbid a woman is ever portrayed as anything but a man's sexual fantasy and plaything in a drawing." Have you ever read a mainstream comic book?
• Yeah . . . female depictions in comic books tend to be not so good.
• In a lot of ways, women have never been presented better in mainstream comics than they are now. The thing is, if female characters are written shittily, the male characters are crap too. And the comic as a whole will suck. Just off the top of my head Gail Simone, Bill Willingham, Grant Morrison, Garth Ennis, Dan Slott, Tony Moore, and Devin Grayson all write good female characters because they are GOOD WRITERS (Well, Grayson can be hit or miss, but anyhoo). Complaining about how women are written in mainstream comics is like buying a bag of feces and complaining that there aren't enough kernels of corn in it. But it's always a sure way to make one's name in the cut throat world of fanblogging, especially if you don't actually have a heckuva lot to say. Check out the aforementioned Gail Simone's essays on comics. I don't agree with everything she writes, but damn if it isn't more insightful, productive, and interesting than most of the stuff I see nowadays, much of which seems to be a cynical attempt to ape Simone's rise from fan-critic to professional comics writer. Also: Have you looked at the men in comics? Who am I, as a slightly round man, supposed to relate to? This guy? This one? Him? The best I can come up with is this guy, and he gets his wide ass kicked regularly by a blind guy. And all villains to boot. Except for Foggy Nelson, and nerts to that, man. Heh, I have the Wizard Magazine with that Catwoman illo (That's about 10 years old, published when the "Have you actually ever seen a woman?!?" school of female representation was at its height) on the cover. Ah, Jim Balent, the one law he'll never obey is the law of gravity.
• Also: Have you looked at the men in comics? Who am I, as a slightly round man, supposed to relate to? Well, that's the thing. Mainstream comic books present a version of the world based on adolescent males fantasies. Therefore, there aren't any slightly round men as heroes, but instead virile, powerful, and ripped super-men. The women in comic books, by the same token, cater to adolescent male fantasy by being superficial sex-objects. The problem is not that this demographic is represented in the mainstream industry, but that it seems to be catered to to the exclusion of all others. Does anyone know whether the mainstream comic indusry is doing well these days? I'm not really keeping up with the scene these days, but I have noticed that the graphic novel section of Borders is more and more taken over by teen-girl oriented manga. Could it be that the big American companies are shooting themselves in the foot by ignoring all others outside their beloved adolescent boys?
• I just want to see a female superheroine, for once, without humongous breasts. I'm not kidding, I really think that is stupid. I mean, they really would be a liability in any kind of hand to hand combat, if you forgive the expression. Getting punched in the tits is not pleasant, I'm reliably informed. Don't try this at home. They're mostly pretty well muscled chicks, too. Have you seen gals who do weight lifting? The mammaries disappear. Same, in fact, with those who do light impact but regular aerobic exercise. So why do all these superheroines have great big norks? Adamantium breast-implants? What's more, the Amazons of legend, yes the female warriors that were the inspiration for Wonder Woman's lot, used to cut off their right breasts & cauterise it. Why? Because it interfered with using a bow. The physical representation of both sexes in comics has always been, well, a bit iffy. You've either got spectacularly bemuscled he-men in tights & revealing buttocky pants, or unfeasibly proportioned females with thighs like redwoods & massive bazoongas into bondage. All very fetishy. They're all written badly. No bias there.
• The problem is that the industry is, overall, represented by that "DC/Marvel junk." They ARE the industry. Diamond (the major distributor used by almost all comic shops) will only carry indie titles at a certain level. That is, most indie creators, especially self-pubs, have to jump through hoops to be included by Diamond, and even if they do everything Diamond says to do, Diamond still may not carry them. I live near a famous, indie-friendly comic shop that was bought out by a chain earlier this year. What was the major event of the restructuring? The store was redesigned, but in terms of what they're carrying now, no more than two copies of any indie book will be ordered. If that. What do the new owners cater to? Superhero fans: the same people who buy these books that are full of questionable depictions of women. The industry itself isn't woman-friendly, though there are more women working in it these days than there used to be. Sometime in the last year, in some venue, a small independent company that doesn't produce what we think of as "indie" comics was asked about their ideal office setup. They replied, among other things, that they wanted to hire only very attractive female co-workers, and that it would be really cool if there would be a pole for said co-workers to dance on. Etc. There was no general outcry in reply to this. (I'm really sorry that I don't have more info about this, but my fiance the comics artist is the one who told me about it, and it was months ago.) It's pretty common for some major companies to hold their major-convention parties at strip clubs, too. Just a year ago, a major scandal broke at Mid-Ohio Con when a female creator accused the president of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund of sexual assault: I believe he is alleged to have grabbed her breasts in a hot tub. The last I heard, this wasn't prosecutable because none of the parties actually live in the area where the crime took place. This showed up on a lot of comics blogs, including that of Lea Hernandez, who is another artist who is aggravated with the depiction of women in comics (see her journal from January 2006 for some examples of sexism in comics: it's a topic she discussed frequently before her recent house fire). Even most "feminist" guys I know who are involved in comics only like comics geared towards women if they are actively arty and edgy. If something is girl-friendly, forget it - even if it has a similar style and themes in comparison to another book that they like that comes from a male creator with a male protagonist. (To wit: most guys I know don't like Blue Monday or Hopeless Savages, but they do like Scott Pilgrim - I like all three, and Scott is not materially different.) At any rate, vis a vis the depiction of women in superhero comics, all you have to do is read Marvel-approved "learn to draw" guidebooks to understand. How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way is how to draw very objectified women, and they don't really make any bones about it. What I think is interesting is that most of the women I know who are big-time comics fans are into superhero comics. There are comics I'm into (not as much as I was around a decade ago, when I was heavily into Vertigo and Slave Labor Graphics comics), but I'm apparently immune to the allure of the Capes.
• "Does anyone know whether the mainstream comic industry is doing well these days?" Terrible. Taken a huge downturn since the '80s.
• PS for Nickdanger - no, the industry is not doing as well as it was a while back, but part of that is that there was a "collecting boom" in the late 80s and early 90s, which crashed and took a bunch of the "direct market" (industry speak for "comics shops") with it. This was when people would buy 10+ copies of any issue in anticipation of its collectibility: the trouble is that those people never turned a profit, because everyone else had pristine copies of the same books. When people figured that out, they stopped buying so extensively. Superheros still do all right, outselling most other things in any shop. I think Wolverine is particularly popular these days, but it's been a while since I checked. Lesser superheroes from the major companies, characters like Ghost Rider, tend to be resurrected every so often, but usually only for a few issues at a time. Manga has been a weird thing for comic book companies. Some launched their own manga imprints (which generally haven't done that well). Some reworked some of their major characters in a manga style or created special titles that they hope will appeal to teen girls, even if they're just being written by people who write other, not-girl-friendly books. Others try to keep a kid-friendly superhero title or two in their line. I don't think the comics companies love the explosion of Fruits Basket and Kare Kano, but I don't think they have a similar product to compete with, either. I'm not sure if DC's manga imprint is still running or not. It seems like companies like TokyoPop (which has notoriously awful contracts for creators) and Viz/ShojoBeat have that market locked up. Most people I know think that the future, at least for indie comics that would be self-published anyway, is in webcomics. Costs are low, and promotion/distribution is a lot easier. Most popular webcomics that I know of are woman-friendly.
• Perhaps it's not mainstream, but I've just been reading Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis and been blown away. There's your women in comics (and nothing comical about them, neither).
• (To wit: most guys I know don't like Blue Monday or Hopeless Savages, but they do like Scott Pilgrim - I like all three, and Scott is not materially different.) For what it's worth, I like Blue Monday _and_ Hopeless savages, and also Scott Pilgrim - I've never thought of Hopeless Savages, in particular, as a particularly girl-friendly comic, but now that I think about it... hmmm. There _are_ fights, and music trainspotting, but the focus is on the relationships - it's sort of an American version of shojo manga, in a way, isn't it? Hmm. Hadn't thought of that. I'm sympathetic to the idea, personally, that mainstream superhero comics have such stylised and formal image styles that men and women will have absurd, grotesque and improbably body types - although Mike Allred and Darwyn Cooke, as examples, have done Marvel/DC work that doesn't follow the breast-is-best paradigm. However, that doesn't really excuse the narrative tics - for example, that if you want to show that your villain is extra-villainous, you get him to rape and/or kill the hero's girlfriend in a suitably unpleasant manner. We're back to Gail Simone on this one, with women in refrigerators - a list which seems to suggest that sexual violence, breast cancer and fertility issues (love the entry on Scarlet Witch) are rather common in the narrative treatment of women. Also, don't date Daredevil.
• I'm a hardcore fan of superhero comics, and I'm a woman. This discussion goes around every so often amongst female superhero comics fans (more of us than you'd expect, but far fewer than the guys) and usually comes down to the consensus that you have to roll your eyes and ignore the art, unless it's (Jim) Balentine proportions, then you mock. A lot of the time the same artists drawing the zeppelin breasts are also drawing the male characters with extra muscle groups in their necks and shoulders that do not exist in nature. The people who write the character descriptions for trading cards and "handbooks" (which is where they're getting those character heights and weights) are, indeed, most clueless. I remember sporfling the first time I read that a 5" 11" heroine (Storm of the X-Men) was supposed to weigh 120 pounds. These same handbook writers also describe male characters who are regularly depicted with legs like a redwood trunk as "6' 4" 190 lbs" as well. I think they're all aliens with no grasp of human anatomy.
• My favorite - I guess ye'd class 'em as comic books? - were the various softcover editions of Walt Kelly's Pogo. Haven't seen anything a tenth as good since.
• HEY! These posts are too long. If you can't fit your comment in a word bubble, occasionally broken up by sexy poses, I would ask you to refrain from posting in this thread. buying a bag of feces and complaining that there aren't enough kernels of corn in it That is a colloquialism I never want to read again. Have you seen the swimsuit issues? Complaining about women in comics is like complaining about women in Playboy, except comic readers are hornier. Anyone ever scanned through a romance novel? Wanna talk about some fantastic depictions of human beings. There is a lot of shit in pop culture, picking on one aspect is rather useless.
• Yeah, but what if EVERY novel carried at your local bookstore was a romance novle? What if that was the only genre of novel that could get published? Wouldn't you get a little sick of it?
• So how come the main link don't work no more?
• Yeah, but what if EVERY novel carried at your local bookstore was a romance novle? What if that was the only genre of novel that could get published? Wouldn't you get a little sick of it? But it is not. There is a lot of good indie crap, that has been around for years. Does it need to be co-opted by Marvel. I don't want it co-opted by Marvel. Look at the movie industry, the first wave of big budget indie films were pretty good around 1999-2000, but they have just gotten worse over the last 5-6 years. No leave the indie kids to do their indie thing, and dorks like us will find the meat and potatoes when we want to. I was a big ElfQuest fan when I was a little kid, then my tastes got more "eclectic."
• But it is not. There is a lot of good indie crap True, but often quite difficult to find. Let me rephrase that, quite, quite, quite difficult to find. For monkeys blessed with a decent comics shop, enjoy the diverse fruits of a medium whose potential has been too long squandered. For those of us with your typical, run of the mill shop, enjoy Power Girl's breast jiggle.
• "I just want to see a female superheroine, for once, without humongous breasts." Now you make Ralphie cry.
• I read only underground comics, so I have no complaints. I agree with the complaint about how women are portrayed in mainstream comics, but I have to ask, what do you expect? The audience is adolescent boys and men. That's like going to a mainstream action movie and complaining that there's no coherent script. It would be nice if the makers of these comics changed their minds and started drawing women more realistically, but ain't gonna happen. That's not what sells comics.
• BMI Marvel U. vs the "Real World" for the serious and Know your SUPER CROTCHES for the not so...
• I'm with the pissed girls; when When WHEN will comic book artists have the goddamned common decency to draw a woman with attached earlobes?
• That's not what sells comics. I don't know, it seems like many Manga books (by no means all) focus on appealing to a different audience than mainstream comics and their sales appear to be stellar, whereas traditional super hero comic books are increasingly sidelined.
• I'm a grown man who loves action movies and superhero comic book, but I can't stand the airbags on most female comic book characters. The same thing happens in videogames where the character is just supposed to be someone with a gun, and the men are in armor or military fatigues, but the women are in little more than bikinis. Would it kill them to make a female character who looked like a real woman?
• Love and Rockets . Also yes, Persepolis.
• I adored the Girl-Wonder wants Artists! thread. This image, especially
• Strangers in Paradise has realistic women, especially Francine. Wil Eisner's Contract with God and his other later graphic novels have men and women with warts and all.
• IN RE: Indie Comics et al.: Seriously, in the world of the internet, is anything really "quite quite difficult to find" anymore? I mean, a few links back we had this big list of products "NOT AVAILABLE IN THE USA!!!", but I'd be willing to bet most of them could be had with a few clicks and a credit card. And indie comics should be even easier to find/procure--esp. for people with as much interest in and knowledge of the scene as many of the posters here seem to have. Blockbuster doesn't carry all the movies I want to watch, and Best Buy doesn't stock them all. That's why I shop/rent online. And it's not hard. Oh, and I love Power Girl, Wonder Woman, and Spider-Woman, and always have. And I don't care who knows it! Nyah!
• Holy crap I think Power Girl wins the huge booby contest. Those things are pretty f-ing ridiculous! I wasn't familiar with TP's characters so I google imaged them and stumbled across this. (barely SFW) Some of the costumes transfer pretty well. But all the pictures are of a pornstar, and she is really naked.
• Oh! Aria!
• My mom used to harrass me about my comics. Mom: "You know those aren't realistic depictions of women, right?" Me: "Mom, Superman turns coal into diamonds by squeezing hard. I know how to separate fantasy from reality." Mom: "...I see your point." Also, do I get points for liking smaller breasts on real women? I always just kind of ignored Power Girls' gino-boobs. Not relevant to the story
• Also, Aria as Firestar is really hot. (oh, rimshot!)
• Pretty telling that the standard poses for a pr0n model are pretty much the same as for a superheroine, innit? Aside from the odd self-boob-grab in the Fantastic 4 one. Maybe since she's the Invisible Woman she thinks nobody is looking at her as she fondles herself.
• I never really got into the Superhero comics. As a kid my regular comics were Star Wars and other English comics that included sports teams and the Commando and Battle comics. Also the Asterix and Tintin books. The military titles greatly assisted in conversing with my German wife upon meeting her. "Gott im Himmel!" "Donner und Blitzen" "Schnell, schnell!
• Maybe since she's the Invisible Woman she thinks nobody is looking at her as she fondles herself. I like to think so. .... .. . OH GAWD! Its true we are pigs! *weeps* peaks at Aria pics again
• We're not pigs...we just respond easily to uh, visual stimuli.
• Yeah, dj, I read the odd Battle comic. But mostly it was its sister publication 2000AD.
• I used to read 2000AD also, and the spin-off Judge Dredd Comic.
• Persepolis isn't really germane to this conversation: it's a European graphic novel. (And, am I the only person who noticed in reading it that Marjane Satrapi was, even in hardship, quite privileged compared to those around her, and made some very foolish decisions during her adolescent stay in Europe?) The argument seems to be specifically about mainstream comics: yes, if you just want to read pictures with word balloons, you can find great stuff from the traditional book publishers and the indie comics publishers (and even from mainstream companies' "alternative" imprints like DC's Vertigo). But if you specifically want to read superhero comics, and don't want to deal with all this baggage related to the depiction of women, you're usually outta luck. We're not just talking about a broad medium, we're talking about a particular strain within that medium. Otherwise, it's like saying that Aerosmith and Death Cab for Cutie are the same genre because they're both bands that make music with guitars, drums, and a singer. That's intellectually dishonest: they're the same medium, but a completely different genre with few overlapping fans. For one thing, by mainstream fanboy standards, most indie comics creators are terrible artists. Satrapi is a good storyteller, but her illustration skills are mostly design-oriented and certainly could not carry her through a career doing the sort of superhero comics in question here for a mainstream US comics company. You could say the same thing about most of the other "art comic" artists I'm mentioning in this reply. Also, Satrapi's work is not even published by a "comics" company - it's published by Pantheon, an imprint of Random House. Increasingly, the "graphic novel" is seen as a separate, "serious" genre (not just a compilation of cape comics), often to be released by "respectable" publishers (Pantheon is a heavy hitter). Few comics publishers are "respectable" in this sense, and they're all indies: Fantagraphics, Top Shelf, etc. There are other popular indies, like Oni and Slave Labor, but they are seen as companies that put out "fun" books, not "literature." I think most people will grok what I'm talking about, the perceived dichotomy between "art" and "entertainment." Graphic novels and/or art comics are not aimed at anything near the same audience as mainstream comics, except insofar as they are both people who are willing to absorb stories in the form of sequential art. Other books in this category: Epileptic, Gemma Bovery, Fun Home, Blankets (the first two were initially published serially, but they're more "art comics" that lead into the graphic novel format than anything else). I suspect that some of Top Shelf's other stuff, esp Alex Robinson's work and Moore/Gebbie's new Lost Girls, can at least help someone intelligently comment on the treatment of women in mainstream comics, even if they are not mainstream themselves. So, yeah, of course books like those I mentioned above, along with Acme Novelty Library, Eightball, and other famed indies, are not usually prone to these "mainstream entertainment" problems. And if you look around, not too hard, in the catalogues of companies like Fantagraphics, you can find stories that are just as offensive (from the feminist POV we're discussing here) as stuff from the mainstream superhero comics, just in a different guise and maybe with more balance. I sound like I'm picking on graphic novels and art comics, but I'm not: they're what I read. I loathe mainstream superhero comics. They have all the excesses of both soap operas and action movies. That said, they do have female fans, and alienating fans is always a bad business decision. But female fans should stand up and be alienated... as long as eyes are rolled nothing's going to change.
• TP - just to play devil's advocate, comics are so subjective that people usually want to page through them before buying (hence the you have a credit card and internet connection! what's your problem! argument doesn't quite fly for the people who like to complain about indie scarcity). Or they're upset that it's not available to other people to discover their own favorite comics on a shop rack. Some people - often people to whom supporting independent businesses is important - are also really concerned with shopping locally as much as they can. Some disregard that aspect and think about the benefits of buying stuff with as few middlemen between them and the creator as possible - IE the creator makes more. FWIW, I agree with you. Also, if someone is really into big-name indies, they can always have their local comics shop set up a pull for them, to be sure the stuff that interests them will be ordered. Most are happy to do it. (The people I know who are all upset about the demise of the indie-friendly end of the local place are very anti-pull, but you can't usually have it both ways in the US unless you live in one of a handful of major cities. And setting up the pull shows the shop that there is lots of local interest in a particular title.)
• > I just want to see a female superheroine, for once, without humongous breasts. Alan Moore's Promethea; she has multiple incarnations but most have normal-sized breasts.
• I understand where you're coming from, verbminx--I was responding specifically to the "difficult to find" argument. I've got a friend (ON THIS VERY BOARD!) who's a big comic geek and introduced me to comic torrents, but I think that both of us use the torrents as "page through" opportunities and then go out and buy the stuff that we liked. Like it or not, I think that's probably the way it's going to go in the future for those who're looking for obscure comics--they'll have to watch the messageboards/review sites, get some screen grabs, and then either order or actively hunt for it. Perhaps not ideal or "golden age," but it's what it is. Or maybe it is "golden age"--as a buttload more comics are available to me now through this method than ever were in the 80s/90s at my local comix shop. And, as you point out, if you order direct from the indie publisher/creator, he/she makes more. WRT Power Girl, a possibly apocryphal story goes that artist Keith Giffen and inker Wally Wood decided in the JSA comic they were assigned to make Power Girl's breasts bigger each issue "and see if anyone noticed." So now they're kinda one of her powers. They distract the piggish super-villains while she crushes them (the villains) into paste.
• re roryk's most recent comment: coincidentally, I just started reading Promethea - something I avoided in single issue form when it was first coming out because it looked like a superhero comic. The art is certainly similar. The character is definitely "attractive" in that way, but not totally unreasonable. Have V2, but am still waiting for V1 from the library. Paging through it and reading bits, but won't sit down to read it straight through until I have all of it in front of me. I think Moore is kind of a special case in "superhero comic" terms, because when he does a "mainstream" comic you can be sure it'll be dense and literate and, if it involves superheroes, will subvert and/or comment-on the genre. Which certainly seems to be the case with Promethea, along with the course in magical thought....
• My wife really, really liked the first two issues of Promethea. It almost made a comics reader of her. But, unfortunately, Alan Moore's desperate need to impress everyone with how smart he is eventually turned her off. *sigh*
• I don't mean issues, I mean books.
• Does Neil Gaimen's Death count as a superheroine? Also, there is Desire - neither male nor female, but still very beautiful. And no one could say that Despair was drawn to be a sex object (though she is a fascinating character).
• Only Death of all the Endless could be viewed as sexual, I think -- and I think that's more to do with death as a concept than Death as a character. Delirium has moments of overt sexuality but she's so bizarre that she has moments of everything. I can't think of any gratuitous sex or degradation of women -- all I can think of is the stripper who was one of the Muses (or something else, I can't remember off the top of my head), and the Barbie character. The only other major female character was Lyta Hall, and she was a superhero, but also a mother -- more mother than superhero.
• I think the stripper was the goddess Ishtar. Desire - well, sexuality springs from lust (mostly), and lust is all about desire. So Desire by default is a sexual character. But that's a given, so his/her sexuality isn't something that is a great issue. Awful things do happen to women in the tales though. One of Dream's early loves, Nada, deflowered herself with a stone to discourage Dream from courting her, and she winds up for thousands of years in Hell for rejecting Dream. Another of his exes, the Muse Calliope was held captive by two men in succession, who raped her to gain inspiration for their writing. Not to mention what Lyta Hall had to go through in her misguided attempt to avenge her son. In mitigation, horrible things happen to the male characters as well, so I can venture to say that the tales of the Endless isn't a WIR example.
• > I just want to see a female superheroine, for once, without humongous breasts. looking at my bookshelves, another one has occurred to me. though i'm not sure she counts as a superheroine. kabuki by david mack.
• Goodbye to comics. One woman's story of a busted vagina, a syzygy, rape pages and why she is no longer working in comics. (via metafilter)