October has come, ladies and gentlemen, and that means its time to talk about scary things! Terrifying things such as witches, ghosts, bosses, serial killers, space elevators, mummies, global thermonuclear war, vampires, missionaries or the most horrifying thing of all: women yelling!

Personally, I’m not so afraid of women yelling as I am of the delicate social dance it takes to politely turn down a copy of The Watchtower, but every once in a while I get the impression that certain people find the prospect terrifying.

Take Vince for example. Vince had some advice for comic book fangirls hoping to affect a change. This advice is not new. In fact (as seen in Vince’s followup post) he’s already gotten support from some of the many people who have cheerfully offered such advice in the past.

That advice wasn’t new then, either. In fact, that particular advice is the advice that the vast majority of women have been raised from little pink-wearing babies on. We’ve all heard how “you can catch more flies with honey than you can with vinegar” Naturally, this advice was not received well. See, when you hear the same advice all the time and it happens to be advice that hasn’t worked in the last fifty years, you get more and more annoyed whenever you hear that advice.

I’d find the entire thing unremarkable, just another day in then blogosphere, were it not for something important that Vince missed that no one else seems to have pointed out.

See, he offers advice on ways of letting the comic book companies know that there is a decent-sized female fanbase. He points out that the absolute best way to get female-friendly comics is to show the comic book companies that they will make money off of them, and he is absolutely right. The problem is, he doesn’t realize that the most effective way of convincing DC and Marvel that we are a viable fanbase is act like comic book fans.

And how do comic book fans act?

They write letters. They flood message boards, blogs, and conventions. They are absolutely thrilled to see a stranger in Walmart wearing a Green Lantern shirt. They talk to hear the sound of their own voice and they write to read their own words. They devote (allegedly) 130+ IQs to analyzing symbolism in Wonder Woman. They haggle over back issues. They obsess about getting their significant others involved in their favorite hobbies. They scream at the sight of the Editor-in-Chief of a major company. They shout to get the clerk’s attention. They yell about how their favorite character was mistreated. They laugh at in-jokes. They boo the guy who killed their favorite character. They jostle each other to get a shot at an autograph or a chance to ask a question.

They criticize, condemn, and complain.

Not all of this applies to all fans (especially not you, I’m talking about those other fans who make you look bad), but as a collective group this is the sort of behavior you can see (except, of course, for the group containing you). Go to any convention. Its not a pleasant behavior pattern, its not very good manners and every once in a while someone decides to write a screed and start a fight telling everyone they’re overreacting over John Stewart in the JLA, not to worry about the idea the New Gods will die, that they’re being silly and melodramatic over Amazons Attack or that they’re just plain wrong about Captain America staying dead. I’ve done it myself several times and interact regularly with people who think I regularly overreact about fannish matters. That’s the way fans are. (Well, most fans. You are still the exception and we should all view you as a role model.)

Here’s the thing, though. No other form of complaint seems to get the “You get more flies with honey” advice. You get that advice when you complain about how women are treated, for some reason. You get tons of advice on how to let comic book companies know, in a non-threatening manner, that women want to read their product while the fanboys get to run roughshod over the message boards, the blogs, the livejournal communities and the conventions over much less weighty complaints, no one says a damned thing to them and the company eventually caves to their demands. Why? Because everyone know comic book fans are loud, bitter and arrogant, there’s no point in retaliating at the risk of losing their money.

The bottom line is that the most important thing is to convince the companies to actually try to sell to women. The more of us there are, the more attention we draw to ourselves and how women are portrayed in comic books, the more possible the idea of marketing to women becomes. They can’t simply say there’s something inherent in superheroes for men, they have to admit female fans exist. Honestly, I doubt it really matters to Marvel or DC what the temperament of the average female comic book fan is, only that she has money and there might be a way to get her to part with it.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 5th, 2007 at 11:00 pm and is filed under Fandom, Industry, Just Past the Horizon. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.