Jennifer de Guzman

Publishing | Jennifer de Guzman announced that, after 10 years, she has left her position as editor-in-chief of SLG Publishing: “My decade SLG was, I suspect, like no other decade anyone has spent working anywhere. I had great co-workers and got to work with fantastic creators, all of whom I will miss very much. (Though because this is comics and a community like no other, we will always stay in contact.)” [Possible Impossibilities]

Retailing | Chris Powell, current general manager and chief relationship officer for Texas-based comic chain Lone Star Comics, has accepted the newly created position of executive director of business development for Diamond Comic Distributors. The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund board member will start his new position in March. [ICv2]

Miles Morales

Publishing | Marvel Editor-in-Chief Axel Alonso answers questions about Miles Morales, the new Spider-Man of the Ultimate Universe: “When a little boy or girl looks at Spiderman, they do not see race. They do not see anything but the bright colors and the human shape. I think it is very easy for them to project themselves into that suit and to imagine themselves in that suit. Part of the thrill for me is knowing that there are little boys who will now pick up a Spiderman comic and see that after the adventure and the mask is peeled back he will look like them. As a Hispanic, it is nice to see Spiderman’s [...]  last name resemble the last name of my son.” [Fox News Latino]

Publishing | SanJose.com profiles SLG Publisher Dan Vado, who talks about why he started working in comics: “I think comics decided for me; I don’t think I really had any choice. There was never any point where I said, ‘This is what I’m gonna do.’ Comics was always something I was going to do while I’d figure out what it I was gonna do, and I guess I never really figured it out.” [SanJose.com]

Kate Beaton

Publishing | The Beat names its comics industry People of the Year. [The Beat]

Creators | Brian Wood chats about his upcoming Dark Horse series The Massive: “The world it inhabits is sort of a minefield of current events, of divisive politics (global warming, regime change, corporate bad-behavior, etc) but all that has sort of come to pass by the time the story opens. The damage has been done, and so its less about why/how things got so bad and more about, okay, what do we do now? Powerful social themes, but not political in the same way DMZ is.” [Suvudu]

Creators | Comics writer and filmmaker Kevin Smith answers questions about women and comic shops as he touts his new TV reality series Comic Book Men: “This is a show about these four dudes who work in this store. There are no women [in the store] yet…There should be a Comic Book Women, and good willing, there’ll be a spinoff Comic Book Women, and I’ll make shit ton of money.” [ThinkProgress]

Super Pro K.O., Vol. 1

Creators | Jarrett Williams discusses his work on the Oni Press graphic novel series Super Pro K.O. [Spandexless]

Creators | Writer Kyle Higgins looks at what’s ahead for DC’s Nightwing. [USA Today]

Comic art | The collaborative art blog Relaunched puts out the call for contributors to “Watchmen Too,” a Watchmen 2 theme month. [Calamity Jon, Save Us]

Commentary | Don MacPherson looks back at some of his favorites of the previous year. [Eye on Comics]

Fandom | When asked during a 60 Minutes interview whether his company was thin-skinned, Groupon CEO Andrew Mason popped his claws: “We’re like Wolverine and our skin has been melted off, and we’ve had Adamantium fused onto our bones.” [Nerd Reactor]

Wonder Woman #1

• Sue at DC Women Kicking Ass lists 2011’s 10 best issues of DC Comics for female characters, highlighting issues of Secret Six, the pre-relaunch Batgirl and post-relaunch Wonder Woman: “…Enter Brian Azzarello and Cliff Chiang. From the first pages it was clear this run was going to be different. Stunning art and an unforgivingly aggressive storyline unafraid to shake up the status quo made Wonder Woman one of the two top selling female led books of the new 52 and a top 20 comic for the first time in years. Wonder Woman is back on top and all is right with the world.”

• ComicsAlliance compiles their complete best of 2011 list, which includes Atomic Robo, Criminal: Last of the Innocent and Batman: The Black Mirror.

• Josh and Elizabeth from Things From Another World count down their favorite comics of the year in video form.

• Ed Sizemore lists his top manga of the year, including Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths and Wandering Son.

• Kelly Thompson at Comics Should Be Good! shares her bests, and a few worsts, of 2011. Her bests include Princeless, Detective Comics and Uncanny X-Force.

• Ben Morse posts a gift-getting guide, or a “helpful guide to some of the good stuff that came out in the 12 months prior either already or soon to be available in collected form that you can use to divest yourselves of those newly acquired gift cards or wads of cash.”

• read/RANT list their 10 best of the year, including Paying For It and Ultimate Spider-Man: Death of Spider-Man.

• And finally, the year in Squirrel Girl.

Infinite Kung Fu

With only a couple days left in 2011, here are a few more “best of 2011″ lists from the past few days:

• iFanboy has chosen DC Comics as their publisher of the year. They’ve also listed their best collections of the year, including Infinite Kung Fu, Mr. Murder is Dead, Bone 20th Anniversary Full Color Edition and the Walt Simonson Thor Omnibus.

• ComicsAlliance finished up their countdown of their top comics of the year, with Daredevil and Love and Rockets New Stories Volume 4 taking the top two positions.

• The A.V. Club has posted two separate lists–one focused on superhero and mainstream comics, the second on “graphic novels and art comics.” The mainstream list includes a separate “Best of” section that includes categories like best new characters, best one-shot and “best fix.”

• Kelly Thompson lists 13 “fantastic female creators” for 2011 on Jezebel, which is a companion piece to previous lists she’s done (i.e. no repeats). This year’s list includes Marjorie Liu, Carla Speed McNeil, Renae De Liz and Kelly Sue DeConnick, among others.

• Newsarama looks at the top ten comic trends of 2011, including reboots, crowdfunding and teasers.

• Writing for Pop Dose, longtime blogger Johnny Bacardi shares his favorite comics of the year, including Chester 5000, Batwoman and Carbon Grey.

• Marc Mason at Comics Waiting Room shares his ten best graphic novels of the year, a list that includes Level Up!, The Sixth Gun trades and Anya’s Ghost.

• Roger Ash at Westfield Comics listed his favorites of the year, with Usagi Yojimbo topping his list.

• Jason Serafino at Complex includes Amazing Spider-Man, Red Skrull Incarnate and The Walking Dead in his list of the 25 best comics of the year.

• Rob McMonigal at Panel Patter lists his 10 favorite manga of the year, including Stargazing Dog, 20th Century Boys and Twin Spica.

• David Berry , writer of the Graphics Scenes feature at the National Post, lists the five best graphic novels of the year, which include Mark Twain’s Autobiography: 1910 – 2010 and Big Questions.

• JT Lindroos’ best books of the year list at Bookgasm includes a sub-section on Eurocomics, including Hilda and the Midnight Giant and The Empire of a Thousand Planets.

• Ryan Ingram at The Snipe had several comics industry folks, including Brandon Graham, Rebecca Dart and the staff at Lucky’s Comics in Vancouver, list some of their favorites of the year.

• Four Colours & the Truth has posted several year-end lists, including best comic series, best graphic novels, best digital or webcomics, and best anthologies.

Susie Cagle

Legal | Cartoonist Susie Cagle, who was arrested last month while covering Occupy Oakland, says she has been cleared of all charges by the Oakland Police Department. The Society of Professional Journalists sent a letter to the Oakland police condemning the arrest, which ultimately assisted in getting the charges dropped. The letter called out the department’s crowd management policy, which says, “Even after a dispersal order has been given, clearly identified media shall be permitted to carry out their professional duties in any area where arrests are being made, unless their presence would unduly interfere with the enforcement action.” [Fishbowl LA]

Conventions | San Diego City Council approved a plan to have San Diego hotels pay for a $520 million convention center expansion. The plan moves to a second hearing in January and requires a vote of two-thirds of the hotels that cast ballots for approval. [NBC San Diego]

Retailing | Mesa, Arizona, comic store Evermore Nevermore has closed after a little more than two years. Co-owner Bob Leeper blames the recession and light evening traffic downtown. [The Arizona Republic]

Retailing | Duff Franco, owner of Earth 383 Comics & Games in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, has launched a campaign to save the store following a break-in that resulted in the loss of most of his gaming stock. He plans a gathering on Dec. 17 to solicit ideas from customers on how to keep the shop open. [The Daily Advance]

Marvel

Creators | Marvel Editor-in-Chief Axel Alonso and Editor Jeanine Schaefer discuss female characters and creators at Marvel, with Alonso noting why it’s important for the publisher to hire creators from a variety of backgrounds: “In following the discourse about women and minorities in comics, the one thing I see brought up so often is the idea that people don’t see gender. ‘Oh, I don’t see gender,’ they say, ‘I just want good stories.’ There’s an idea that actively looking to hire women is counter-intuitive to good stories; the simplified version of this is ‘hire good writers, regardless of gender.’ Of course, I agree that the people we hire need to be good at this, first and foremost. But what this argument misses, in implying (and sometimes outright stating) that actively hiring people with different life-experiences is somehow creatively bereft, is that having a variety of viewpoints is the best way to not only tell better stories, but to grow your market, so that you can continue to tell those stories.” [ComicsAlliance]

Creators | The Comics Journal posts an interview with comics legend Jerry Robinson from 1994 about his life and career. The creator of the Joker, who passed away this week, is also remembered by Ty Templeton, Peter David and the Hero Initiative’s Jim McLauchlin. [The Comics Journal]

Organizations | Diamond Comic Distributors helped the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund raise almost $30,000 through a retailer membership drive. [CBLDF]

Conventions | WonderCon, scheduled for March 16-18 in Anaheim, California, has announced several additional special guests, including Jim Lee, Mark Waid, Art Adams and Joe Hill. [Comic-Con International]

Womanthology, the charity anthology of comics by female creators that’s using Kickstarter to raise money for publishing expenses, crossed the finish line just 18-and-a-half hours into their fundraising efforts. The crew behind the anthology raised $25,000 in less than a day, and as of this morning they’re raised more than double that — currently their total is at $51,844, but I’m sure it’ll go up even more before I post this.

“WOW! I am amazed, grateful, shocked, awed, astounded, baffled, flabbergasted and a whole fistful of other emotions!” wrote Renae De Liz, who organized the project, in an update on Kickstarter. “I mean, I had high hopes that we would make our goal, I had confidence in our book & all of our contributors and their abilities to help make this happen, but this completely blew me away at how it seemed the whole world came together to help! A-M-A-Z-I-N-G!!!”

De Liz says she will use the extra money to fund a larger print run for the current book and fund a second book that “that will include both men and women, and promote more opportunities for people to be published and work with their favorite creators.”

You can still donate to the project and qualify for some of the rewards; head over to Kickstarter to check it out.

My son is 10 and a romantic, as all 10-year-olds surely have the right to be. How then do I speak to him of this world’s masterminds who render you a supporting actor in your own story? How do I speak of the Sentinels whose eyes melt history, until the world forgets that in 1962, the quintessential mutants of America were black?

—from a New York Times op-ed piece on Matthew Vaughn’s X-Men: First Class by Atlantic contributor Ta-Nehisi Coates. In the piece, Coates praises the film as “the most thrilling movie of the summer…narratively lean, beautifully acted and, at all the right moments, visually stunning” — and at the same time finds the makeup of the film’s mutant heroes and anti-heroes an unintentionally revealing glimpse into the American psyche. “Here is a period piece for our postracial times — in the era of Ella Baker and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the most powerful adversaries of spectacular apartheid are a team of enlightened white dudes.”

Coates elaborates on both points, and more besides, on his blog. “It is easily one of my top five comic book movies ever, and significantly better than any of the other X-movies to date,” he writes, even after comparing it unfavorably to the racially homogeneous but racially aware Mad Men and calling it “a period piece blind to its own period.” He also offers a quick take on the pros and cons of the film’s treatment of women, a point examined in depth by The Mary Sue’s Susana Polo.

Elsewhere on the “sociopolitical examinations of the latest X-movie” beat, ThinkProgress’ Matthew Yglesias agrees with a point of Polo’s and argues (twice) that Magneto’s out-and-proud Brotherhood of Mutants has a far more appealing message than Xavier’s accommodationist group; Ezra Klein disagrees, pointing out that Magneto’s agenda is a supremacist one, and wondering if the real dividing line between rival mutant camps would be one between those who could profit monetarily from their abilities (eg. Storm selling her rainmaking services to agribusiness conglomerates and drought-stricken nations) and those who couldn’t; and Adam Serwer connects the film with Avatar‘s enlightened-colonizer-goes-native storyline as “another example of the way the quest for racial innocence so permeates American culture that it’s almost unrecognizable.”

Mary Marvel's '90s reintroduction, by Jerry Ordway

Let me start by saying that I am supremely unqualified to speak about what women or girls want from superhero comics. In this respect I am probably pretty similar to former DC publisher Paul Levitz, who (as you might have heard) told the Comics Journal:

I think the whole myth of superheroes is that they simply aren’t appealing to women as they are to men. I’d like to think I had a pretty good track record on that myself as a writer, as the Legion historically had a pretty good number of female readers, Chris Claremont on his years on the X-Men had a tremendous number of female readers, and there may be any number of other superhero titles that had a fair balance. But overall it would surprise me at any point if you started to have a title that was both a traditional superhero and a majority female audience.

What strikes me about Mr. Levitz’s comments (not just those but others in the article) is the apparent indifference they betray to the prospect of a big female readership. He seems to suggest that while he wouldn’t turn one down, it’s not something DC has particularly pursued. Many more men than women read superhero comics, so DC has focused more on the guys. Even when Sandman appeals to women, that ends up proving his point, because Sandman and Vertigo aren’t superheroes.

Again, at this point I am neither well-equipped nor especially interested in evaluating Mr. Levitz’s arguments. Nevertheless, the attitude that “we don’t need to go this way because it’s never panned out before” sounds rather short-sighted. In the current publishing climate, DC simply can’t afford to ignore women and girls. It needs all the readers it can get.

With all that in mind, I’d now like to talk about Mary Marvel.

* * *

Slowly but surely I am making my way through Showcase Presents Shazam! Volume 1, which reprints the then-new material from the first 33 issues of DC’s 1970s Marvel Family revival. As a youngster I read the later issues of Shazam!, when the series was retooled to reflect the live-action TV series. Needless to say, the comics were better — the show didn’t have the budget to transport the Capitol Building back to dinosaur times.

Anyway, the first twenty or so issues of Shazam! tried to evoke the feeling of Marvel Family stories from the ‘40s and early ‘50s. Producing these stories for DC must have been fairly bittersweet for original Marvel Family artists C.C. Beck and Kurt Schaffenberger, since DC’s allegations of copyright infringement essentially forced Fawcett Comics (the Marvels’ original home) out of business. Denny O’Neil and Elliot S! Maggin, the young DC writers working on Shazam!, may have had similar feelings.

Regardless, the results were whimsical and good-natured, sometimes to a fault. Beck’s more cartoonish style didn’t always translate well to early-‘70s fashions, and his design for new character Sunny Sparkle (“the nicest guy in the world”) could be an unnerving blend of big eyes, freckles, and teeth. Still, DC was apparently striving not just for continuity with, but fidelity to, the original stories; and with Shazam! reprinting them too, ‘70s readers could judge for themselves.

Now, for the most part, that all applies to the Captain Marvel stories. Before too long, though, Captain Marvel Jr. and Mary Marvel had gotten their own occasional features in Shazam!, each with its own artistic style. This too was faithful to the Fawcett originals, when artist Mac Raboy drew Junior’s adventures in a more realistic style. Mary’s stories fell somewhere in between — not as cartoonish as Cap’s or as realistic as Junior’s. Dave Cockrum and Dick Giordano were among Junior’s Shazam! artists, whereas Bob Oksner drew all of Mary’s solo adventures. (Oksner also started drawing Captain Marvel stories with issue #10.)

To be sure, there were only four new Mary Marvel solo stories in Shazam!’s thirty-five-issue run. Each was written by E. Nelson Bridwell, and none were over eight pages. In issue #10′s “The Thanksgiving Thieves” (February 1974), Mary foils looters trying to take advantage of the annual Thanksgiving parade. “The Haunted Clubhouse” (issue #13, July-August 1974) revolved around the Mary Marvel Fan Club’s unfortunate choice of headquarters. Issue #16′s “The Green-Eyed Monster” (January-February 1975) featured a girl jealous of Mary’s heroic career; and issue #19′s “The Secret of the Smiling Swordsman” (July-August 1975) pitted Mary and Uncle Marvel against a dandified art thief.

Clearly the format of these backup stories meant that they had to be fairly simple and straightforward, with no real opportunity to develop continuing subplots or their own supporting cast. Still, each is charming in its own way, and each gives Mary the chance to show off her super-powers. They’re the kinds of stories you’d expect a superhero to wrap up in six or seven pages, but at the same time they present Mary as a resolute character utterly confident in herself and her abilities. Oksner’s soft-focus artwork updates Mary appropriately for the 1970s, giving her an indeterminate young-adult look without sexualizing her noticeably. Later portrayals of Mary caricatured her as innocent to the point of gullibility, but here she is dealing with situations which don’t have much nuance. If Mary’s solo adventures had continued, perhaps they might cumulatively have made her look bland or pedantic. Nevertheless, I can see this version of Mary Marvel developing into a capable, professional character not unlike Power Girl or the Earth-1 Supergirl.

Indeed, the Marvel Family adventures where Mary fights alongside Cap and Junior bear this out. In the book-length “Evil Return of the Monster Society” (issue #14, September-October 1974), Mary barks orders to her big brother: “I’ll save [the people]! You go after the monster!” Aliens capture Mary Batson in issue #17′s “The Pied Un-Piper” (March-April 1975), but when she’s freed aboard their ship, she immediately changes to Mary Marvel and starts busting heads. Finally, in issue #20′s “The Strange and Terrible Disappearance of Maxwell Zodiac” (September-October 1975), Mary fends off a “platoon” of Sumo wrestlers, thinking “[e]nd of lesson in hospitality!” afterwards. Kurt Schaffenberger drew these stories, and his thicker lines and more deliberate style gave Mary a more action-oriented look. Likewise, Denny O’Neil (who wrote issues #14 and #17) and Elliot S! Maggin were able to “go bigger” with these stories, so Mary got to strut her stuff that much more.

These various formats actually make Showcase Presents Shazam! a decent advertisement for tracking down the original back issues. Most featured at least one reprint (up to issue #25, I think), and issues #12 through #17 were 100-page Giants. I realize there are many factors weighing against such collections today, but quite a few 8-page stories could fit in one of DC’s new 100-page $7.99 reprint books. Such short stories would also fit ideally into an e-reader library; and at the risk of getting too far ahead of myself, might even spur more ambitious Marvel Family hard-cover reprints. There is such a wealth of Marvel Family material in the DC vaults that its absence from the shelves mystifies me. If DC has any interest in reaching out to women or girls, why not see how they respond to a couple decades’ worth of Mary Marvel stories?

Currently, of course, Mary and Billy are pretty far down the DC bench. They’ve lost their Marvel powers and will be seen next in January’s Shazam! one-shot. Here’s hoping DC has cogent, constructive plans for putting them back in action. I recognize that Billy’s age makes it structurally difficult for him to be a continuing character. He can’t be a “kid who turns into an adult” forever — at some point, he has to grow up. I suspect “growing up” also went into the decision to turn Mary to the dark side in Countdown and Final Crisis. Still, apart from (maybe) being too similar to Supergirl and/or Power Girl, Mary could fit easily into the present-day DC lineup. From the ‘40s through the ‘80s, she was a character who knew her place in the world and enjoyed using her abilities for good. That’s corny, but she made it look fun.

Love & Rockets: Not good enough for the guys in some basement comics store in Brooklyn

At Publishers Weekly, Jennifer de Guzman tells one of those creeps-in-a-comics-store stories that are familiar to so many of us female types, and she wonders why, in this day and age, so many women still feel uncomfortable in comics stores.

I have had a few of those experiences myself—in fact, I quit buying comics in 1986 because I was fed up with the way I was treated in my local comics store, and I didn’t go back for almost 20 years. But I also know it doesn’t have to be that way—I am fortunate to live close to two excellent, and very female-friendly, comics stores, Comicopia and Hub Comics, both of which come close to the ideal I sketch out below. So I’m not here to complain.

No, I’m here to dream. It’s one thing to have a comics store where women feel welcome; it’s another to design one with them in mind. Well, OK, maybe just with me in mind, but I’m guessing I’m fairly typical. Here’s what my ideal woman-friendly comics store would be like:

A clean, well-lighted place: You can tell most comics stores (and liquor stores, for that matter) are guy hangouts by the utter lack of comfort. Fluorescent lights, wire shelves, grey indoor-outdoor carpet, cinderblock walls. We women like things nice: Real wallboard on the walls, natural light, eye-pleasing colors, somewhere to sit. Maybe even a plant or two. And…

Nothing grotesque on the walls: Or on the shelves. You know those zombie Spider-Man and Mary Jane wedding figures? We think they’re creepy. And the enormous poster of a woman with a wasp waist and melon tits? Not a turn-on (well, for most of us anyway). What I personally find creepiest, actually, is the dead eyes on so many comics women; that makes a lot of comics unreadable for me, and I sure don’t want them staring at me while I shop. There’s no need to plaster the walls with beefcake or ballerinas, just downplay the male-fantasy vibe.

Helpful staff: The same rules apply here as in any retail establishment (except, apparently, some comics stores): Staff should be respectful and polite, not ogle the ladies, and not be dismissive of our choices.

Let me tell you about that store in 1986. It was in a basement, and almost all the comics were displayed in cardboard boxes, but I could have gotten past that. The reason I quit shopping there was that every time I bought a comic, I felt like I was failing some sort of test. Whenever I asked for something, the staff treated the request with obvious disdain, and they never chatted with me or made recommendations. Meanwhile, my then-boyfriend had no such experience and kept telling me I was imagining things. The comics I bought there—Love and Rockets, Tales of the Beanworld, Omaha the Cat Dancer—have held up pretty well over time, so I don’t think the problem was the comics. And you know what? Even if it was, the staff’s job is not to judge my choices, it’s to sell me the comics, preferably in a polite and respectful manner.

A wide variety of comics in stock: Women are careful shoppers. We like to hold things in our hands before buying them, not pre-order them sight unseen. And we don’t want to come back if you don’t have something the first time. On the flip side, we like to browse, and if you put out a lot of things, we’ll probably buy more.

Discounts and deals: We also love a bargain. Send us a coupon for 30% off one item, and we’ll buy three. If we buy ten comics, toss in a free one. Knock off 10% every now and then. Women hate to pay full price, but even a modest discount makes us much more likely to buy; what you lose on the individual items, you will make up in volume.

Location: Going to a comics shop is usually a social event for me—I go with a couple of friends, and we usually have lunch beforehand or coffee afterward, so obviously a conveniently located coffee or noodle shop is a key enticement. Also, we women seem to spend our lives doing errands, so a store that is located on the way to something else, as opposed to requiring a special trip, is a store I will go to much more often.

Chocolate! Put it by the register, and we’ll pick up a truffle or three every time we shop. Trust me on this one.

It could be that the proverbial sweaty man-cave is an effective retail model for a certain type of customer, and maybe we should let the guys have their own stores. But I have observed over the years that guys often enjoy a comfortable environment and a good deal as much as women do, and a shop designed along these principles might find a robust clientele of both sexes—including some men being dragged in by their girlfriends.

Girl comics

Comics publishers often think they know what girls like, but once we get out of Disney Princess territory, it’s harder than it looks. DC had a good try with their Minx line, but they made a lot of missteps; they totally ignored the popularity of manga and produced a first round of books that were like the graphic novel equivalents of Afterschool Specials. They got better, but by then it was too late. It’s very, very hard to connect with teenagers.

Rather than sit in a air-conditioned office and think about it, creator Hope Larson (Chiggers, Mercury) did something original: She asked the girls what they like—actually, she polled 198 women who reported having read comics in their teens and tweens.

Somewhat surprisingly, given the way online discussions usually go on this topic, superheroes emerged as the favorite genre, although manga was a close second (yes, I know manga is a medium not a genre, but I didn’t write the survey). X-Men was the most popular series, followed by Sandman, Batman, Rumiko Takahashi’s manga (Ranma ½, Inu Yasha), Spiderman, Sailor Moon, and comics by Alan Moore and CLAMP. And this:

The thing that drew most respondents to their favorite comics was the characters: Either relatable, realistic characters (like the misfit X-Men) or “kick-ass” wish-fulfillment characters.

A compelling story and strong artwork were of nearly equal importance to teen readers, with the story being slightly more important.

Many also craved dark or “adult” subject matter.

This particular group has a definite skew toward the traditional comics genres and models—over half get their comics at comics store, a quarter had been to a Free Comic Book Day event, and superheroes are a big part of their world. At the same time, they expressed some discontent with the way things are: They want “more and better female protagonists,” including “strong, in-control, kick-ass women calling the shots”; they don’t want anything pink or sparkly; they don’t care for hypersexualized characters or plots that rely on sexual violence; and they want to see good stories in a variety of genres, with male and female protagonists. Also, many feel uncomfortable in comics shops, for all the usual reasons. They want to see comics made available in more places and they would like publishers to reach out to girls.

It’s worth reading the whole post not just to get all the details but also to see the readers’ comments and reactions to Larson’s findings.

Back in headier times (2007), I wrote a blog post about the expansion of the comics market in which I noted that graphic novel sales had quadrupled since 2001. Here’s Milton Greipp’s explanation for that:

I think the biggest factor was Tokyopop’s expansion of their authentic manga line and bringing in original material for girls. Suddenly there was huge growth in a business that was usually flat, and it opened up new opportunities for other categories as well.

Graphic novels were booming at the time, and now they are slumping a bit, but the lesson remains: You grow your audience by broadening the appeal of your offerings. That may mean toning down the misogyny (perceived or otherwise) of traditional superhero comics or offering different types of stories and storytelling in order to attract more readers. It may mean putting graphic novels in different sections of the bookstore, rather than grouping them together, or even putting them in Costco or Target. It should definitely mean giving female creators like Larson a bigger voice (her books rock anyway). Manga sales may be slipping at the moment, but the fact remains that girls and women make up half the world (slightly more, actually), so reaching out to them can mean bigger sales and a greater variety of books—and not doing so is shortsighted and foolish.

Green Lantern #57

On Friday, DC released the “Brightest Day” solicitations for August, revealing the return of an old Green Lantern character. “BRIGHTEST DAY continues as what readers have been asking for finally arrives: a male Star Sapphire in the form of the Predator,” reads the solicitation text for Green Lantern #57. “But how is this entity unlike the others? And what does it want with Carol Ferris? Meanwhile, the White Lantern is defended by an unlikely hero …”

Debuting in 1984, I believe, the Predator was a manifestation of Carol Ferris/Star Sapphire’s subconscious. I’m not sure if those stories are still part of DC’s continuity, but that character looked like the one in the image above, at any rate (read more about him here).

Current Green Lantern readers, however, probably know the name “The Predator” as the sentient embodiment of love, the Star Sapphire’s equivalent of Parallax, the bug-looking creature that’s the embodiment of fear, or Ion, the giant fish/whale thing that’s the manifestation of willpower. Both have been known to take a host from time to time, as we saw when Kyle Rayner became Ion and, more notoriously, when Jordan was possessed by Parallax. Based on the solicitation text, I’m guessing the “unlike any others” part refers to the fact that the Predator is also the host of the love entity … kind of a mash-up, I’m guessing, of the two concepts.

In any event, there’s a male Star Sapphire now, something fans “have been asking for.” That’s not hyperbole; I’ve heard that question asked multiple times at multiple conventions over the last few years. Another common question, though, has been, “Why do the Sapphires wear such humiliating costumes?” So it’s easy to see how a guy in a full-body suit might not be so well-received by some folks. Former Robot 6 contributor Lisa Fortuner offers commentary on the debut of the new Predator on her blog:

Yes, that’s right! DC has decided to introduce a male Star Sapphire, and not only that–he’s the Predator! Meaning he’s hosting that big lizardy entity that lived in the violet power battery, the equivalent of Ion or Parallax.

So not only can men tap into love and harness it, this one is actually better than any woman who makes up the… um… Well, I bet Carol beats his ass. Let’s check out the character design!

…

What?

So he gets to be more in touch with the Violet and more powerful than all the women, and he gets to be fully dressed. Not just fully dressed, but hosting the embodiment of love and lust–the thing that is causing all of these really gorgeous alien women to run around with practically no clothes on–and he’s covered head to toe in black with only purple accents. Oh, and he gets macho silver armor.

And a macho name like the Predator.

Yeah, that’s just…

Yeah, just…

…

By the way, while looking for additional information on the Star Sapphires for this post, I came across this on deviantART — a design for a male Star Sapphire that actually looks like he belongs in their corps.

Castle Waiting

To celebrate Women’s History Month, the Flashlight Worthy blog asked ten bloggers (male and female) to nominate their favorite comics by and about women. The range and quality of the list is a reminder that talent knows no gender—or genre: the nominations include Jessica Abel’s La Perdida, Linda Medley’s Castle Waiting, Alison Bechdel’s The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For, and Fumi Yoshinaga’s All My Darling Daughters.

If you’re reading this column, you’re probably hip enough to know that all manga does not feature big, sparkly eyes, but in case you missed that memot, Paul Gravett has an explanation and lists six worthy series that don’t have a sparkly eye in the bunch.

Sean Gordon Murphy sets snobbery aside to look at the good points of house styles.

Suzette Chan explains how Faith Erin Hicks tweaks the tropes of boarding-school stories in The War at Ellesmere.

Kate Dacey mulls over the dilemma of being a feminist and a yaoi fan in her review of Hinako Takanaga’s Little Butterfly.

Carlo Santos takes the second volume of Alice in the Country of Hearts as seriously as anybody is going to, and he does some nice analysis of how the book relates to its inspiration, Alice in Wonderland.

Robert Greenberg expresses his disappointment in Eric Liberge’s haunting tale of the Louvre, In the Odd Hours at ComicMix.

Tom Horgen takes a look at Joe Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.

Matthew J. Brady takes a spin throuh Jason Shiga’s choose-your-own-adventure book Meanwhile at Warren Peace Sings the Blues.

Sean Kleefeld finds some early sequential art—on plates!

from Kick-Ass by Mark Millar and John Romita Jr.

According to blogger Erin Polgreen, the answer is yes. Making the case at (of all places) Spencer Ackerman’s national-security blog at the progressive website FireDogLake, Polgreen alleges that in books ranging from Superman: Red Son to Wanted to Kick-Ass, Millar portrays even strong female characters like Lois Lane, Wonder Woman and Hit Girl as inveterate second bananas to their books’ male protagonists. She also gets some shots in at what she sees as the dubious racial politics at play in Wanted and Kick-Ass, where the ethnicity of various non-white minor characters is played as a punchline.

It’s interesting to see an argument against Millar’s treatment of “minority” groups (women are, of course, the majority, but you wouldn’t know it from comics) hinging on something as comparatively innocuous as his female heroes not proving as heroic as his male ones, given the far more violent and ignominious fates he frequently doles out to his characters. For example, if I were in one of his comics, I’d take out a big fat life insurance policy on any gay and/or black people I knew in-universe the second he came aboard. And with regards to women specifically, you’d think the treatment of rape in books like Wanted and Ultimate Comics Avengers would have at least raised Polgreen’s eyebrows, if not her ire. But hey, we report, you decide.

Girl Comics #1 (1949)

Yesterday Marvel announced a new three-issue anthology mini-series called Girl Comics, which will be edited by Jeanine Schaefer and created exclusively by women.

As you can see in the comments section for my original post, there’s been a mixed reaction to the project, particularly because of its title. You can also find even more commentary on it over in The Beat’s comment section, where they story broke.

So where exactly did that title come from? Well, as Douglas Wolk pointed out in the Beat comments section, it seems to stem from an old Atlas comic that was published from 1949-1952 (before its name was changed to the even more unfortunate Girl Confessions). Atlas, of course, is the company that eventually evolved into Marvel Comics and also published Strange Tales — which you may recognize as the name of another recent Marvel anthology. So there’s some symmetry there, and you have to wonder if they’ll be using any other old Atlas titles in the future (I vote for Bible Tales for Young Folk; you can find a complete list of titles Atlas published on Wikipedia).

Here’s a quick round up of thoughts from around the web. We’ll start with Johanna Draper Carlson, who shares her thoughts on her blog:

I dream of a day when a comic created only by women doesn’t get tagged with a stupid title like Marvel’s Girl Comics. In fact, I dream of a time when it’s not even special enough to remark upon, instead of being some kind of attention-getting stunt that ends up resembling a plea for charity. “Please pay attention to us — look! we’re letting the women do superheroes!” But we’re not there yet, still.

She also breaks down some of the responses by Schaefer and adds, “Don’t give me an event, give me real changes in your hiring and employment practices and your publishing slate.”

Johanna adds that she plans to get the book because of the creators who are involved, which seems to be a common sentiment from just about every quarter. In fact, Kirk Warren at Weekly Crisis says he loves the concept but hates the name:

However, the name is my problem. I absolutely hate defining works of any kind by the people involved, whether it be their gender, race, affiliations or what have you. Yes, promote this as an all-female creative effort, but Girl Comics? Seriously? They didn’t call Strange Tales, an indie creator filled anthology, “Indie Comics”. They wouldn’t call an all African American created comic “Black Comics”.

Rachelle Goguen at Living Between Wednesdays calls the title “unfortunate,” and talks about what she hopes from the book:

This is what I am truly hoping for with Girl Comics: I want the comics to be ridiculous enough to match the ridiculous title. I want it to be silly and fun and gratuitous and shamelessly girly. I want the male superheroes exploited. I want a shirtless Daredevil centrefold. I want a soft focus every time Winter Soldier appears. I want a round table “Who would you do?” discussion between all of the women on that cover (especially Sue Storm, because you know it would make her uncomfortable at first). I want Namor to appear in this series for whatever reason. I want a bunch of ladies to pull a prank on Tony Stark because he deserves it. I want to see dating and drinking and shopping punctuated by the occasional ass-kicking. I want Iron Man and Captain America to finally kiss.

And one of my favorite comic book-loving feminists (and former Robot 6 contributor), Ragnell, seems fairly positive about it as well:

All female creators, writing about superheroes. There’s no pushing towards female characters or girly stories, just the stories female creators wanted to make. With a stupid name, yes, but someone’s even found a historical reference there.

This… might actually be a good idea… come up with by Marvel.

When Fangirls Attack has a good roundup of other blog posts on the project.

As for me, I’m looking forward to the project like most others because I’m a big fan of many of the creators who are involved, but I also hope it leads to many of them getting even more work at the House of Ideas. Right now the list of creators includes a few women who work regularly at Marvel and a lot who don’t — and it would be nice to see that change not because they’re women, but because they’re damn fine creators who make damn fine comics.

The Hurt Locker

This is not a story about comics — but in a way, it is: In a fairly devastating piece in the New York Times and a no-holds-barred interview with Jezebel, film critic Manohla Dargis lays out the sorry state of films made by and for women in Hollywood today.

Dargis presents the evidence in painstaking and depressing detail. First there’s the good news: hits like Sex and the City, Mamma Mia, and The Twilight Saga: New Moon have made it all but impossible to dismiss women as a “niche” audience. (Which stands to reason, since they’re 51% of the population after all.) The bad news, of course, is that these films — and most romantic comedies and Sandra Bullock vehicles, to name a pair of other standard and successful “femme-driven” film types — are not very good. Dargis argues that their success stems from a massive number of female moviegoers desperate to see themselves represented somehow, anyhow, on screen.

Another silver lining: women-directed films have some hot Oscar prospects this year, led by Kathryn Bigelow’s masterfully suspenseful Iraq War action-drama The Hurt Locker. But Bigelow had to struggle for years to get that movie made, while equally worthy male directors with similar track records cruise from one big-budget star vehicle to the next. And the critical success of The Hurt Locker or Nora Ephron’s Julie & Julia can’t mask the fact that the major Hollywood studios released a grand total of 11 films directed by women this year. Want a comics connection? Soon-to-be Marvel parent company Disney had one; DC owner Warner Bros. had none. Meanwhile, perhaps Bigelow shouldn’t hold her breath on Oscar night: In the Academy Awards’ 81-year history, only three women have been nominated for Best Director, none of whom went on to win.

But Dargis doesn’t argue that the remedy is for female film fans to blindly support any movie directed by a person with a uterus. (“So does that mean I have to go support Nora Ephron? Fuck no. That’s just like, blech.”) Nor does she spend much time kicking the lousy but prominent women-oriented movies in the teeth. Nor does she see much hope for the notion that putting women in positions of authority at the studios will trickle down to create more opportunities for female directors and better movies for female audiences — the recent stint during which four of the six big Hollywood studios had female head honchos is proof enough of that. Indeed, she concludes that the studio system is all but impregnable for women. And here’s another comics connection for you: in part, she blames “the vogue for comics and superheroes” for marginalizing female voices.

So what does she suggest as a solution? A sort of step one is already taken care of — women audiences have been turning movies into hits at a prodigious rate lately, which may help break the vicious cycle of not making movies for women because “women don’t go to the movies.” But mostly, Dargis rests her hopes on people on the creative front lines who care, or presumably care, about the lack of good movies by and for and about women finally putting their money where their mouths are. “I also hope that the money people, including [Sandra] Bullock, whose production company actually makes hits, like ‘The Proposal,’ start giving female filmmakers a chance to do something other than dopey romances,” she writes. “(Good romances would be a start.)” For her part, Dargis says she worked hard to get Bigelow on the cover of the Times‘ Arts and Leisure section.

There’s been much passionate advocacy about women in comics lately — on the page, behind the scenes, in the shops, lining up at cons. But precious little of it has centered on the comics equivalents of Bigelow and The Hurt Locker. It stands to reason that superhero fans will debate superheroine costumes, or cheesecake covers, or the nomenclature of showcase titles, or which fandoms threaten to eclipse their own at San Diego, and so on. But just as film is more than romantic comedies, comics is more than superheroes, and just as the future of women in Hollywood cinema depends on much more than The Ugly Truth, the future of women in comics depends on much more than Power Girl and She-Hulk. The advancement of women in comics ultimately hinges on producing more and better books by and about and for women — on carving out an ever more prominent space for C. Tyler, Carol Swain, Danica Novgorodoff, Kate Beaton, Hope Larson, Lynda Barry, Lilli Carré, Phoebe Gloeckner, Vanessa Davis, Jillian and Mariko Tamaki, Julia Wertz, Lisa Hannawalt, Miss Lasko-Gross, Lucy Knisley, and on and on. And even within the superhero world, it depends a lot more on the staff of Girl Comics — and what they do afterward — than who or what’s on the cover.

"Truth: Red, White & Black" star Isaiah Bradley, by Joe Quesada

With its unique blend of Marvel-minutiae mastery and near-total frankness, Marvel Executive Editor Tom Brevoort’s Blah Blah Blog on Marvel.com tends to be an extraordinary document even on days when it’s not touching the third rail of fanboy politics. But in his most recent post, Brevoort does exactly that, addressing the question of why, despite having a great big universe at its disposal, Marvel’s comics tend to star white dudes from the U.S. of A.

Responding to a reader question regarding the difficulty of sustaining books with international leads, like Captain Britain & MI:13 or Alpha Flight, Brevoort expands the issue, likening the situation to the plight faced by “series with female leads, or African-American leads, or leads of any other particular cultural bent”:

Because we’re an American company whose primary distribution is centered around America, the great majority of our existing audience seems to be white American males. So while within that demographic you’ll find people who are interested in a wide assortment of characters of diverse ethnicities and backgrounds, whenever your leads are white American males, you’ve got a better chance of reaching more people overall.

Interestingly, Brevoort seems to view “American” as a far more key component for a book’s success than “white” or “male”: He goes on to speculate that books whose leads are black or female and American will have an easier go of it than books whose leads are white and male but foreign.

There’s an awful lot to chew on in there, from the assessment of Marvel’s audience to the characterization of their interests to the comparison of international characters with women or minority characters to the whole chicken-egg question of which came first, the demographic or the subject matter. Is Brevoort’s analysis a common-sense observation, a self-fulfilling prophecy, or something else entirely? What do you think?

So I sent out the Bat-Signal to my fellow Good Comics for Kids bloggers and asked what they thought.

Robin Brenner: I find it especially distressing that the SDCC crowd, made up of fans who have been typically dismissed and marginalized by the larger culture including comics fans, fantasy fans, and sci-fi fans, seem to think it’s perfectly warranted to dump on fans who you would think they have a lot more in common with than traits to divide them.

At anime cons you can witness the particular breed of enthusiasm teenage girls bring to the table: the ear-shattering squeals, the glomping, the elaborate and fantastic costumes, and the intensity of fannish behavior on display. I admit, the old-fogey part of my brain does startle at the sheer decibel level teen girls can reach, but at the end of the day, I have to smile: how brilliant is it that fans are so excited, so devoted, that they now represent a substantial fan audience? As someone who’s been a part of fandoms that have been dominated by men for, well, pretty much my entire life (including science fiction, fantasy, and comics), it’s refreshing to see women and girls get some attention.

Not so at Comic-Con. The last time I attended, I was struck by how different it felt than my local anime cons, and there was always this edge of awareness that this world tolerated me, but it wasn’t really courting me nor acknowledging me as a fan. I do think that came down to my being both a woman and a manga fan, as well as the fact that while I am a fan of comics in general, there is less at San Diego that is geared for me or would have been inviting to any of the teenage girls I work with every day. In fact, much of it was intimidating and dismissive. I can only imagine how much more teenage girls felt ignored.

Women and teenage girls are described as invaders. Well, remember, we do represent half the population, and if you want comics to survive in the long run, stop treating us like aliens coming in to muck up your well-laid plans.

Esther Keller: As a school librarian, I see that the girls are far more enthusiastic about what they’re reading than the guys. Seven years ago, when I ventured into the world of comics, it was still marginalized by much of the adult population. It was the advocacy of librarians (let’s face it, we are still a predominantly female vocation) and teachers (again, predominantly female) that helped comics gain the respect it deserves. Considering what women have done for the comics industry, why is this disdainful attitude out there? Are the men intimidated by us?

Kate Dacey: For me, it’s comments such as these that truly rankle:

“And now, you want to talk about the TWILIGHT fans. Hell, Val they aren’t even fans of the story. They just want the actors. If it was just author Stephanie Meyer there, and no movie, no actors, the turn out would be just about nil.”

“I am not going to insult women by being Ok with their fandom of complete rubbish. It’s like if they were superfans of Highlander 2 or the works of L Ron Hubbard or Dan Brown… Having said all that, I have not read or seen Twilight. I just go by the opinions of my intelligent female friends and the critics I like to read.”

What bothers me most is the underlying assumption that girls (and women) don’t know how to be proper fans, that they’re only there for the hot guys and couldn’t care less about the books or the creator—an assumption that ignores the fact that girls’ voracious reading habits helped put Twilight on the map in the first place, and suggests that their investment in the story is purely superficial. The other thing that bothers me about these statements is that many of the folks dissing Twilight have never read it or watched the movie, yet they feel perfectly qualified to assess its merits solely on the basis of who likes it. Teen girls love it, ergo it must be junk.

Esther: If Stephenie Meyer attended Comic-Con, there would be a huge presence. I can name at least 50 young ladies from my school who’d want to fly over to San Diego to meet her. They “stalked” Robert Pattinson and Stephenie Meyers equally. Personally, I enjoyed Twilight. I enjoyed the enthusiasm for the books way more than the books themselves. I loved it when I couldn’t get one of my 8th graders to shut up until I finally read Eclipse, and that this year I didn’t have any copies of Twilight on the shelf until the end of May. Some of these girls can pick out details that I probably never processed. So Kate, I’ll have to concur, the people posting just don’t see how involved these fans do get into the details of the story. They choose to close their eyes, because it’s inconveniencing them and the fandoms they want to concentrate on.

Robin: Frankly, I find it bizarre that these classic comics fans, many of whom could teach a course on Silver Age comics and all the permutations of, say, the X-Men, completely dismiss fans being exactly the same way about what is undoubtedly female-driven literature: supernatural romance. I’m particularly intrigued by the comment about Dan Brown—whatever I may think of the quality of any of these books, why is it fine to dismiss the legions of fans these tales have?

Lori Henderson: Until now, there hasn’t been a reaction to girls like this at SDCC that I’ve seen in the last 20 some years that I’ve been going. If anything, girls had been welcomed. SDCC is so big now that these reactions to Twilight and its fans are downright discriminatory. Has it always been this way and I just never noticed? Or have attitudes toward women in comics changed in the last 10 years?

It’s been brought up that Marvel and especially DC have a misogynistic view of women, and objectify them more than try to appeal to them, so is this reaction a reflection of the companies’ portrayals of women, or have the companies just been portraying women as their fans see them and we’re only just now see the true face of comic fandom?

These men need to change their attitude toward women, and that change should start at the comic companies that perpetuate them. They need to stop portraying women as objects and start as real people with real lives.

Kate: Now that Yen Press has announced that it will be publishing a Twilight manga, I’m fearing a second backlash against young female con-goers, since there are still a core group of tights-and-capes fans who dismiss manga as “comix for chicks.” Tom Crippen’s recent post at The Hooded Utilitarian exemplifies what I’m talking about:

I don’t get manga. I look at a page and want to look away. Reason: the stylization of figures appears to me to be highly uniform, and it’s not a particular stylization I like. Solid black hair, googly eyes, the kids who look like adults, the adults who look like kids, etc. The look turns me off. Further, its kindergarten feel makes it hard for me to believe worthwhile stories could be told using this stylization, or at least told to their advantage… Because my aversion to manga is so sharp and immediate, I have never given the comics a chance… I should have asked straight out: What am I missing? … Point one: the googly eyes, etc., belong to just one style of manga. The girls’ stuff, apparently. There are lots more out there.

Once again, girls’ taste is being called into question: how could they like something so divorced from reality that it has a “kindergarten feel” that’s ill-suited to “worthwhile stories”? This unwillingness to try and understand why manga—or, for that matter, Twilight—appeals to girls is maddening. I respect Crippen’s right to dislike this particular approach to storytelling, but it’s frustrating to read blanket dismissals of the medium that are couched in sexist, condescending language like this.

Sabrina Fritz: I have read all of the Twilight books, and I thought that while they weren’t the worst thing that I’ve ever read, they also weren’t the best, and I don’t think they necessarily deserve the fanbase that they’ve garnered. That said, I’ll give the manga a try with an open mind and see how it turns out.

Esther: This vehemence against manga and pigeon holing the format as something that’s just for girls is ridiculous. Yes, the guys who come to my library love super hero comics, but they also read manga. They like the manga oriented to them. Naruto, Bleach, SGT Frog, Dragon Eye, Hoshin Engin, Hikaru No Go….. Oh and BTW, I had plenty of guys borrowing Twilight this year. This gives me hope. The young men I work with will be a lot more accepting and respectful to women and their tastes than the men who are supposedly their role models.

Robin: I agree, Lori, that the change needs to come from within—from both the publishers and the fans. When I was last at Comic-Con, I attended a lovely dinner with a few women but mostly men, and at one point the conversation turned to why we women had pretty much stopped reading superhero comics and were now more drawn to manga. The gentlemen at the table, all great guys and fans and not at all the type that would spew bile aimed at girls, nonetheless were completely puzzled as to why women would be so bothered by the way female superheroes are drawn (not the writing, but the pin-up style art that is prevalent). I had a tough time explaining it at the time, but the next morning I came up with the right switch that got them thinking: what if we took Batman, dressed him up in a thong, and sent him out to fight crime, all the while featuring many panels of him lounging around in his bedroom or talking on the phone in a tiny towel. When I mentioned this to a few of my (straight) male comics fan friends, their reaction was very much a look of horror and an exclamation of, “I don’t want to see that!” My response was “…And so you see my point.”

Esther, I think you make a good point—that a lot of the current fans, the teenagers themselves, do not have even remotely the same baggage as many adult fans do, nor are they even aware of the various schisms. My teens all read everything, but by and large they read more manga (guys and girls both) than Western comics at this point. Everything is much more cross-media and cross-gender to my teens, and they are far less worried about who reads what than my generation was/is. I too had a lot of guys checking out Twilight, sometimes just to understand why all the girls were so ablaze, and, as one teen guy put it, “Vampires and werewolves. They fight. That’s cool.” As these guys grow up (and I hope this is true of some of the younger fans in their 20s and 30s that have also embraced manga and indie comics), they’re likely going to scratch their heads in confusion about such hullaballoos.

Lori: Twilight doesn’t need the “manga style” to get an audience, but a graphic novel in the manga format will fit perfectly in the YA book section next to the Twilight novels. Format isn’t really the issue with these commenters though. Manga haters are going to hate manga no matter what the subject it, and comic fans are going to hate a graphic Twilight no matter the format, or even if Alex Ross did the art. The problem is the attitude toward teen girls and women who want to enjoy comics without the objectification.

Eva Volin: The librarian half of my brain wants to sit the fanboys down and explain to them about the birds and the bees, about brain development, and the statistics on reading patterns and buying habits of girls vs. boys. To remind them that teenage girls have expendable incomes, too, and ask if they’d really rather the girls spend that money somewhere else, like at a chain bookstore, or Hot Topic, or on eBay. Or at the booths in the dealers rooms where they sell cell phone charms of Naruto characters or the twins from Ouran High School Host Club. The librarian half of my brain wants to reason with people who would rather stomp their feet than get with the program and embrace this new generation of fan—a generation who, if encouraged, could save the comics industry.

But the fact that this argument has surfaced again, and that the comments have been so sarcastic and hateful, tells me that rational thought is not welcome here. And the fangirl half of my brain is pissed. How dare you tell me that Twilight fans aren’t “normal people,” you, who counted with pride the number of times you saw Star Wars? Posts and comments like these tell me that, even after being a comic book reader and fan for twenty-five years, I’m still not welcome. They tell me that I should expect to have my favorite books looked down upon. That the books I enjoy are too “kindergarten” and too obviously for girls to be worth a second look. That because I have two X chromosomes I need to have sequential art explained to me in small words and if I’m in a comic book shop it must be because I’m there to buy books for my son or nephew. And to all of that I say, “Bite. Me.”

I’m going to SDCC. I’m going to line up to see the panels I’m interested in. I’m going to cheer for the artists whose work I enjoy. I’m going to ask questions and get autographs and maybe even do a little cosplaying. And I’m going to spend money at booths that have the merchandise I’m interested in. Lots of money. And if you don’t want my business, don’t worry. Call it women’s intuition, but I’ll be able to tell. And I’ll remember. And I’ll take my business, as well as my nieces’ and their friends’ business, to someone else’s booth.

Robin Brenner is teen librarian at the Brookline Public Library and a former Eisner judge and Eisner nominee; Kate Dacey is a grad student and manga blogger; Lori Henderson is a manga blogger and the mother of two pre-teen girls; Esther Keller is a school media specialist in Brooklyn, NY; Eva Volin is the supervising children’s librarian for the Alameda Free Library in Alameda, CA, and a former Eisner judge; Sabrina Fritz is a 16-year-old manga blogger.