Danielle Corsetto
Comics A.M. | TCAF wrap-up; Robocop license moves to BOOM!
TCAF poster by Taiyo Matsumoto
Events | Heidi MacDonald beats everyone else to the punch and files the definitive report on the Toronto Comic Arts Festival, which featured a flurry of graphic novel debuts and appearances by artists as diverse as Taiyo Matsumoto (Tekkonkinkreet) and Andrew Hussie (Homestuck). [Publishers Weekly]
Publishing | BOOM! Studios will publish a line of Robocop comics beginning in August. Dynamite Entertainment had the license previously, but company President Nick Barrucci said the rights reverted to the licensor, who granted them to BOOM! [ICv2]
Publishing | Brian Truitt takes a look at Valiant’s lineup for the second summer of its new life, and he talks to the creators about the relaunch and their plans for the future. [USA Today]
Comics A.M. | Should feminists give up on superhero comics?
Catwoman #1
Comics | Dismayed by the portrayal of Catwoman in DC Comics’ relaunched series, Alyssa Rosenberg of ThinkProgress asks whether feminists are wasting their time in hoping and lobbying for better portrayals of women in mainstream superhero comics. While she understands the desire to walk away, the decides in the end “it’s worth it to keep nudging”: “… Even if the industry doesn’t change, there should be voices in the background when folks read these books pointing out their problems. The key is getting folks who really just want to see, say, Catwoman bang Batman and nothing else to hear those critiques and to find a way to engage with them constructively, which is really, profoundly difficult. But I’d rather live in a world where people who don’t want to hear the works they like criticized have to work to shut them out, rather than leaving them to relax into the blissful sounds of silence.”
At The Atlantic, Noah Berlatsky points out that not all comics are like Catwoman or Red Hood and the Outlaws, and recommends some alternatives. Meanwhile, Tom Foss jokingly suggests that the “new” Starfire is merely replacing longtime New Teen Titans creeper Terry Long. [ThinkProgress, The Atlantic]
Women and superheroes: We’re just not that into you?
Darwyn Cooke's superheroes with personalities
The latest round of conversation about women in comics was sparked by Adam P. Knave’s piece bemoaning the lack of women creators in the comics field (which he defines as monthly comics, obviously dominated by superheroes). Adam believes the root cause is that superhero comics have made themselves unattractive to women by portraying women solely as sex objects or targets of abuse. This led Heidi MacDonald to point out that there are plenty of women in the rest of comics, just not at DC and Marvel. And they are doing quite well, too.
Danielle Corsetto, for example. The Girls with Slingshots creator was interviewed by Carl Watkins of Guerilla Geek, and he asked her if she thought it was easier for women to break into webcomics than “traditional” comics. Her answer is revealing:
Yes, although I think it has more to do with the genre than the medium. Most comic books are aimed at boys, are serious, and have a focus on superpowers. Most popular webcomics are character-driven and have to do with the characters’ lifestyles, or observations about science or philosophy, and almost all of them could be clumped into the broad category of “humor.” While I know plenty of women who genuinely love to read about superheroes, I think that, generally, most women prefer to read (and write) about how characters interact with one another, and not how they’re gonna pulverize each other.
So perhaps it’s not just the terrible portrayals of women but also the type of story that’s being told? Saying “women like this, men like that” is a sure way to get yourself called an idiot on the Internet, and certainly there are plenty of women superhero fans, but I can see her point. There’s a coldness to superhero comics that I find off-putting, and they often bore me in the same way battle-action manga do. That sounds like a value judgment, but it isn’t: The people who read Twilight and Vampire Knight are mostly female, so it cuts both ways.
On the other hand, perhaps if more women were writing superhero comics, there would be more superhero comics that women would want to read.
Alterna Comics to publish revised and improved Plastic Farm
Alterna Comics is publishing a new edition of Rafer Roberts’ Plastic Farm: Sowing Seeds on Fertile Soil, an underground comic that he has been working on since 2000; you can read it online at his Plastic Farm website.
Roberts has been busy lately. He just did a guest strip for Danielle Corsetto’s Girls with Slingshots, which brought an influx of new readers to his site, and his Plastic Farm minicomics (issues 15-17) were nominated for a SPACE prize. In addition, he went back and cleaned up and relettered his old pages for the new book, and he put up a before-and-after set at his site to show what a difference that made. Plastic Farm: Sowing Seeds on Fertile Soil is in the April Previews for a July 1 release.
Girls With Slingshots: Five Years, Two Girls, One Cactus
Five years ago today, Danielle Corsetto launched a tiny little webcomic called GIRLS WITH SLINGSHOTS.
The comic, which debuted at SPX on October 1st 2004, details the foul-mouthed misadventures of two twenty-somethings – Hazel Tellington and Jamie McJack and their talking Scottish cactus, McPedro. Since its debut, GIRLS WITH SLINGSHOTS has grown from a cult-hit to a massive webcomics phenomenon with over 70,000 readers a day. Continue Reading »