Inspired by this Comics Alliance article, which stated, regarding many female comic characters, “They read like men’s voices coming out of women’s faces.”
This isn’t to say men can’t write good women, or shouldn’t write women. It’s great when anyone writes fantastic female characters. But as far as I’m concerned, a lot of comic writers have never written women at all, only hollow wooden sex puppets.
(Prints of this if you want them.)
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“ Coran Stone Continues to Make His Action Movie Mark on Comic Book and Cartoon Icons [Art]
By Brian Warmoth
Coran Stone cartoons only exist on our fantasy lineup of animation channels. But you probably already know that. Last year,...](https://64.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lx6onrOQuN1qcw9rdo1_1280.jpg)
Coran Stone Continues to Make His Action Movie Mark on Comic Book and Cartoon Icons [Art]
By Brian Warmoth
Coran Stone cartoons only exist on our fantasy lineup of animation channels. But you probably already know that. Last year, Stone’s ThunderCats and Super Mario Bros. art had us hooked with his soft color palette and happy facial expressions. This year he went even deeper, however, showing us such eyeball-shocking concepts as a hypothetical Inspector Gadget, Mega Man, RoboCop and Iron Man team-up.
Finally, someone dares to draw an Optimus Prime who transforms into a hundred-foot semi truck.
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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.
Shia LaBeouf’s Self-Published Comics May Be a Secret Code from Space
By Matt D. Wilson
Better known as an actor, the son of Indiana Jones, and a renowned scholar in the language of Cybertronian,Shia LaBeouf made a surprise appearance at the C2E2 comics convention in Chicago this past weekend, signing self-published comics that the Chicago Tribune described as being “borderline philosophical” and having “crude, child-like drawings.” I unfortunately missed the signing, but when I discovered that my local shop, Chicago Comics, was selling two of his three comics in the store, I dashed from the convention over to pick them up.
They are… an experience to read. If I didn’t know any better, I might say they’re secret messages sent from space robots to warn us of impending armageddon. Or maybe they’re just some freshman-English-level poetry thrown into a couple picture books. Probably the latter. One of the two LaBeouks I bought, Let’s F***ing Party (above), has no narrative at all.
I sketched and inked Monday’s comic on my iPad using ProCreate and the JaJa stylus. Then I sent it to my Mac via Dropbox to do layout and color. Since the iPad’s max resolution isn’t as big as my comics, I ink each panel full screen. Here’s what the inks for all three panels looked like when I imported them to Photoshop.
this is art
this thing right here is how you will be remembered after you die
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 graduate thesis in publishing at Pace University. The topic was one that I have a lot of interest in — increasing the sales of comics among women. I follow Asselin on Twitter and kept tabs on her progress over several months. With the thesis finished, I set up some time to speak to her about her findings. The following is an interview with her about the findings of her thesis and thoughts about women in comics.
Janelle, you took on this thesis when you were an editor at DC Comics, which as you say in your piece, focuses on male readers. Tell me about how you came up with the topic.
I knew when I started my masters program that I wanted to do as much as I could to turn what was a generally focused publishing program into being comics related. I often used comic companies for assignments and things like that. So I knew that I wanted my thesis to be about comics from the very beginning. My thesis advisor had me come up with two possible topics, so I chose women and comics as one and copyright and comics as the other. Through the course of doing some basic research and talking through both topics with friends and family, it became clear that while both interested me, the topic of women and comics was the one I was really passionate about. I worry that a lot of times, commentary on the topic of women and comics veers into the negative, w
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.
That seems to imply you had some questions about how they were choosing their targets for the new 52. Were you surprised about the lack of targeting of female readers (i.e. the identification of the male 18-34 target)?
I wasn’t surprised, but it was hard to think - I’m working on a book like Birds of Prey which I’m OBVIOUSLY pushing to be aimed at women 18-34, and instead the whole part and parcel was aimed at one narrow demographic. I don’t think it’s a good idea to ignore a demographic that could be so valuable and which is largely so untapped at this point.
The truth is people are leaving [superhero comics] anyway, they’re just doing it quietly, and we have been papering it over with increased prices. We didn’t want to wake up one day and find we had a bunch of $20 books that 10,000 people are buying.
DC Comics Co-Publisher Dan DiDio on the upcoming line-wide relaunch.
As the DC Comics relaunch approaches, Co-Publisher Dan DiDio offers some unusually frank reflections in an interview with The Los Angeles Times on the necessity of reaching out to new readers, why they raised the prices of their comics, and why it didn’t work.
(via comicsalliance)
Behold the Check DC Comics Wrote in 1938 for the Exclusive Rights to Superman
By Andy Khouri
An astonishing artifact from the beginnings of American comics history was unearthed this week, the check written by DC Comics to Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster for the exclusive rights to their then-new character, Superman. The young comic book creators sold Superman to the publisher for a mere $130 (split between the two of them). Their character would of course go on to inspire an entire genre of superhero fiction across all mediums and generate millions upon millions of dollars in sales of comic books, movie tickets and other countless forms of merchandise.
This hugely important document was released into the world Monday morning by The Infinite Horizon writer Gerry Duggan in the form of a digital image via Twitter, where it went viral among comics industry users. Among them was Invincible Iron Man and Casanova writer Matt Fraction, who observed that Detective Comics Publisher Jack Liebowitz, who signed the check, misspelled both of Siegel and Shuster’s names. The careless error was among the first of many indignities the pair would suffer in their dealings with Liebowitz, DC Comics and later-DC parent Time Warner, the corporation whom Siegel’s heirs continue to battle in copyright court even now.
5. ”we learn from our mistakes” – this probably applies to you as much as the rest of us, but can you tell me what mistakes you’ve had to learn from while working in comics?
I spent the first few years of my comics career trying to be accepted to the “cool kids club.” After much heartbreak I learned two very important lessons. 1) There is no “cool kids club.” There is no secret meeting of the powerful individuals in your chosen creative field. There isn’t actually any power at all. There are cliques and groups of friends and there is some overlap, but there is no one unifying body that can welcome you into the fold. Be nice, be honest, do good work, make friends and eventually you will be the center of your own cool club. And 2) You do not need permission from anyone to be the thing you want to be. You have to give someone that power over you, and no one actually deserves it.
This interview might contain every piece of good advice that I know. I guess Im done forever.
In May 2006, I had a joint release party with Ryan North (of Dinosaur Comics and now writing Adventure Time comics too) for Scott Pilgrim vol 3 and i think the first collection of Dinosaur Comics. This is a promo image I did for the party.
siphersaysstuff
