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“ The Problem Of Women In Comics: Where They Are (and Aren’t) [Opinion]
ComicsAlliance welcomes guest writer Rachel Edidin, who works as an editor at Dark Horse Comics.
Lately, between Womanthology and DC’s All-New-Almost-All-Male 52,...](https://64.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lqpay5O4oC1qcw9rdo1_500.png)
The Problem Of Women In Comics: Where They Are (and Aren’t) [Opinion]
ComicsAlliance welcomes guest writer Rachel Edidin, who works as an editor at Dark Horse Comics.
Lately, between Womanthology and DC’s All-New-Almost-All-Male 52, the popular lens has turned-as it is wont to do every year or so-to the Problem of Women in Comics, namely, whether there are enough of them, and if not, what, if anything, should be done to fix that. As often as not, those conversations have two side effects:
First, they erase the women who do work in comic, by ignoring them, by dismissing them as tokens, or by discarding wholesale the areas of comics where women are most numerous and visible. The difference between the questions “Where are the women?” “Why aren’t there more women?” and “Why are so few women here?” is subtle but savage, and too often, the latter two questions and their nuance are discarded in favor of the clean sweep of the former.
Second, they bypass context. The Women-in-Comics problem doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It’s the product of a myriad of factors, combined and compounded over decades, tangled inseparably with the structure and the very definition of comics as we recognize them. If we’re going to fix this (and I don’t think there’s any reasonable doubt that this is something that needs to be fixed) we need not only to address immediate problem — the comparative dearth of women in comics, particularly in shared-universe superhero and other high-visibility genres — but to examine what created and now maintains that inequality.
So, how did we get here? What steps would you need to take to create and calcify the kind of demographic inequality that has become endemic to comics? Turns out it’s not that hard, and I’ve narrowed it down to three simple steps.
1. Purge the mainstream of all but one narrow subgenre, produced by two publishers.
2. Spend decades persistently and systematically alienating female creators and readers from that genre.
3. Manufacture pretexts to dismiss or simply ignore any work that doesn’t take place within that narrow genre / publisher paradigm.
Rachel elaborates on those points in this excellent editorial for ComicsAlliance.
When she left DC Comics in September of last year, Janelle Asselin was one of the few female editors at the company. Asselin, who worked on the Batman line, was an editor on Birds of Prey as well as an associate editor on Batwoman, Detective, Batman and few other books. During her time at DC Comics, Asselin began work on 
hich is so easily dismissed by people on the other side. I wanted to write something positive - something that admitted the problems in the industry (which are plentiful) but more importantly offered what I saw as solutions. And certainly being in the midst of the early days of planning the New 52 and watching, from the inside, as DC hatched marketing plans and all that as I came up with my topic was…influential. 
aijoskobi