This week Lisa has some unavoidable day-job stuff keeping her from writing her column, so she recruited Karen Healey of the blog Girls Read Comics (And They’re Pissed) to contribute a guest column. Enjoy! And thanks to Karen for pitch-hitting this week.
Where are the girls reading superhero comics?
Not the superhero-comics-reading women of the real world - anyone with an interest in the subject, an internet connection and a couple of sparking neurons can work out that they exist, whether the observer is happy about it or not. But where are the female comics characters who read comics?
You see, superhero comics being as fabulously meta-fictional as they often are, male superhero comics fans feature in abundant variety.
We get stereotypical fanboys, like She-Hulk’s Stu, Chas and Lewis.
We get would-be joke heroes, like Sensational She-Hulk’s Gopher.
We get plenty of young heroes who read comics, like Jack Power of Power Pack, Impulse (when he was, y’know, alive), and X-Men First Class’s Beast, Iceman and Angel.
We get older heroes who read comics as a boy, like Ex Machina’s Mitchell Hundred.
We get Superboy Prime, a villain who thinks he’s a hero, basing his “heroism” on the DC Comics he fannishly devoured.
We get people like Virgil Ovid Hawkins of Static and Green Lantern Kyle Rayner, who not only read comics, but make them.
And we even get nameless bystanders, like the young boy in Watchmen, who reads pirate comics as an analog for the superhero comics of our world.
Whether for comedic effect, realism in characterization or warning about the dangers of obsession, these comics-reading characters are a fascinating insight into what the industry thinks of its audience. If you are, like me, a fan of ironic commentary and meta-fiction, people in superhero comics reading superhero comics is one of the things that makes comics awesome.
But if you are, like me, a woman reading superhero comics, then you may feel somewhat excluded from the fun.
Girls reading comics are in shamefully short supply. She-Hulk herself reads “Marvel Comics”, since they’re legal documents - but that’s usually for work, not pleasure. Jack’s sisters read a lot, but comics don’t appear to be in their piles of library acquisitions.
When I read that The Authority’s Engineer was a DC Comics fan – a fan who wanted to be a hero, and knew she would have to make herself one – my reaction was not a mere happy recognition, but a fist-clenched “YES!” Finally, a comics fan more like me; an acknowledgement that reading comics wasn’t a wholly masculine activity!
Sadly, Angie’s the only one I’ve ever seen.
I’m happy to admit that my knowledge is far from encyclopedic. I’m sure there are other women in superhero comics who are fans of superhero comics. But I’ve never encountered them.
Help me out. Where are they?
And can we have some more?
November 2nd, 2007 at 1:15 pm
Everyone in the Waid-and-Kitson Legion of Super-Heroes is a big fan of 20th-21st century comics. That includes the main Legionnaires and the thousands of non-superhero legionnaires who also belong to the movement. And I’d say just as many girls as boys are included in that.
November 2nd, 2007 at 1:41 pm
Wow…whining about the lack of female comic book characters who like comics.
With so much to care about to focus on this is just bitchin to bitch.
November 2nd, 2007 at 2:00 pm
With so much to care about to focus on this is just bitchin to bitch.
And you’re just bitching about someone else who is “just bitchin to bitch.” Your point?
And besides which, you’re wrong, because this doesn’t read as “just bitchin” at all to me. It reads as someone making an observation, and wishing things were different. If we can’t do that without being accused of “just bitchin,” than 99 percent of all commentary, on any subject, is “just bitchin.”
November 2nd, 2007 at 2:07 pm
Can’t suggest any other female character comic readers, but that was exactly my reaction to seeing Angie with a stack of Green Lantern backissues too.
It’s not just that she’s a geek too. It’s that she chose to become a superhero, she worked for it. She doesn’t have some hideous trauma motivating her, just a stack of longboxes and a vision. So much love.
I’d also love to know if there were more characters like her, with that kind of backstory. I always need new characters to follow.
November 2nd, 2007 at 3:34 pm
Of all the current characters I can think of, JSA’s Cyclone is the one I’d expect to be a comic reader — probably of the True Hero Facts variety.
November 2nd, 2007 at 6:37 pm
Wow…whining about the lack of female comic book characters who like comics.
With so much to care about to focus on this is just bitchin to bitch.
Oh, hell, I’m sorry, I didn’t realise that what bothers me has to conform to what bothers you. It also somehow totally escaped me that pointing out one problematic aspect of one genre completely uses up my quotient of critique forevermore, condemming me to spend the rest of my days mutely accepting everything else I - oops, I mean, “you” - care about.
Dang! Thank goodness I had you to point it out!
November 3rd, 2007 at 12:43 am
Everyone in the Waid-and-Kitson Legion of Super-Heroes is a big fan of 20th-21st century comics. That includes the main Legionnaires and the thousands of non-superhero legionnaires who also belong to the movement. And I’d say just as many girls as boys are included in that.
Awesome! I’ll definitely have to check that out.
November 3rd, 2007 at 5:27 am
In the back-up to a recent issue of Welcome to Tranquility, we learn that (perhaps unsurprisingly) Mangacide’s a huge otaku fangirl.
November 3rd, 2007 at 9:58 pm
She’s… a fangirl of otaku?
November 5th, 2007 at 10:33 am
I think they meant she’s a huge manga fangirl. Which she is, and which should’ve been crazy obvious, considering her name and preferred style of dress.
It was rather awesome to behold, how reading manga taught her to lighten up and accept that she could grow energy tentacles out of her back.
November 5th, 2007 at 3:32 pm
The second issue of the Astro City miniseries “Local Heroes” features a woman comic book fan who is also a successful comic book writer! There’s a page or two of her filling gaps in her collection while at a con, as I recall.
Hope that helps!
November 6th, 2007 at 10:09 am
“Wow…whining about the lack of female comic book characters who like comics.
With so much to care about to focus on this is just bitchin to bitch.”
Matthew E, I’d like to direct your attention here: http://girl-wonder.org/girlsreadcomics/?cat=22
And here: http://girl-wonder.org/girlsreadcomics/?p=36
November 6th, 2007 at 2:14 pm
Hmmm . . . this is a good question. Off the top of my head, I can think of two examples:
-In David Mack’s Kabuki spin-off miniseries, Scarab, the character Tiger Lily is a comic creator. I believe she creates comics about herself and her own Noh comrades . . . Kabuki’s a fabulously metafictional title sometimes (the Noh operatives have a cartoon show, comics, and all kinds of merchandising based around them . . . though I believe their *real* existence is more or less secret from the public).
-In one of the collected volumes of Ed Brubaker’s Catwoman run (I think it was either “The Dark End of the Street” or “Crooked Little Town;” I’m not at home so I can’t check), there’s this great little metafictional two-page “Secret Files” story entitled “Why Holly Isn’t Dead.” Holly Robinson reads a comic book and complains to Selina about a character being inexplicably brought back from the dead, which is exactly what Brubaker had done with her.
Of course, episodes like that wind up being among my favorite moments in superhero comics. It’d be nice if there were more of them.
January 29th, 2008 at 12:44 am
Nicely put. This definitely helps to demonstrate the industry’s bizarre idea of male as the “default.”
One tiny quibble, though. The comics-reading bow in Watchmen is named Bernard. We learn that he (and the newstand operator) are both named Bernard just before the big event.
February 2nd, 2008 at 2:13 pm
Molly Hayes from Runaways is a Wolverine fangirl.
Go Runaways!