I saw a fascinating article up on the Washington Post yesterday, discussing the gender gap regarding publishing — which I would imagine could be extrapolated to all its forms, including comics.
The title? Appropriately enough: “The key to literary success? Be a man — or write like one.” Now, there’s been maxims tossed around about romance-starved women buying Nora Roberts books and chewing up advertising space with soap opera consumption, but Julianna Baggott has a different theory:
In my grad school thesis, written at 23, you’ll find young men coming of age, old men haunted by war, Oedipus complexes galore. If I’d learned nothing else, it was this: If you want to be a great writer, be a man. If you can’t be a man, write like one…
When I invented the pen name N.E. Bode for “The Anybodies,” a trilogy for younger readers, I had to choose to be a man or a woman. The old indoctrination kicked in. I picked man. The trilogy did well, shortlisted in a People magazine summer pick, alongside Bill Clinton and David Sedaris. I was finally one of the boys.
The whole article is well worth a read. There’s another thought in here that really is good food for thought that can be extrapolated to comics nowadays — we have Geoff Johns, Brian Michael Bendis, Matt Fraction, J. Michael Straczynski, Ed Brubaker, Jason Aaron representing the Y chromosome. But on the other side, with Gail Simone, Amanda Conner, Marjorie Liu and Nicola Scott, as Baggott says, women being listed as concessions?
Something interesting based on the Girl Comics announcement from awhile back is that many of the women writing aren’t really being seen in a regular monthly comic nowadays — you have diehards like Louise Simonson and Ann Nocenti and the return of talent like Kathryn Immonen and Devin Grayson, but you aren’t regularly seeing them in the spotlight the same way you are a Bendis or a Johns.
And another tangent that springs to mind: could you spring the argument in the other direction, and argue that male writers with a penchant for strong female characters — let’s use Greg Rucka, as my arbitrary definition as the leader of the pack in this regard — is it them “writing like a woman”? How would this explain things like, say, Wonder Woman sales, or sales on the buzzworthy Detective Comics? I’m curious as to the discussion that could come from this — what say you, Rama readers?
[Hat tip to Johanna]
January 6th, 2010 at 2:14 pm
You’re mixing the issue. Baggott raises the question (and then ignores it), but the issue isn’t whether or not you have to be or write like a man to get PUBLISHED, it’s whether you have to be or write like a man to get awards for writing. Publishing itself isn’t the issue, it’s the institutions that choose the supposed “best” books.
So, yes, people are still eating up Nora Roberts’ books like crazy. Baggott’s point is that no one is giving Roberts’ any credit for that.
January 6th, 2010 at 2:46 pm
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January 6th, 2010 at 2:46 pm
Type it in a search engine.
January 6th, 2010 at 2:56 pm
“Publishing: It this a man’s world?”
The hell does “it this” mean?
“you have diehards like Louise Simonson and Ann Nocenti and the return of talent like Kathryn Immonen and Devin Grayson, but you aren’t regularly seeing them in the spotlight the same way you are a Bendis or a Johns.”
Because they don’t bloody DESERVE IT! Let these women achieve HALF of what Bendis OR Johns have over the years and then come crying about bias. Whatever happened to EARNING praise and not having it expected automatically because you have a vadge (except in Rachel Pollack’s case)?
January 6th, 2010 at 4:10 pm
Typo in the headline.
January 6th, 2010 at 11:04 pm
Tom, that’s moronic. Nocenti and Simonson both wrote some classic stories and Simonson, at least, wrote X-Factor AND the New Mutants, but never got the kind of credit that Claremont did.
Regardless, go to some research on the subject. The comic book industry has been a boys’ club for decades, and for much of that a WHITE boys’ club. Diversity has been hard to come by at the big publishers.
January 6th, 2010 at 11:15 pm
“Because they don’t bloody DESERVE IT! Let these women achieve HALF of what Bendis OR Johns have over the years and then come crying about bias. Whatever happened to EARNING praise and not having it expected automatically because you have a vadge (except in Rachel Pollack’s case)?”
You’re going to make a woman very happy one day.
January 6th, 2010 at 11:44 pm
@Kyle Garrett – One of the ways that comics tend to be different from the mainstream book publishers, though, is that many (not all) of our awards ceremonies are pretty egalitarian in terms of who gets recognized. Things like Superman and Batman can win awards in comics, whereas there’s nobody handing out awards to Roberts–but there’s also nobody handing out (many) awards to Stephen King, either.
January 7th, 2010 at 2:24 am
Yeah, this is kind of what I’ve bee thinking/saying lately. There’s such homogeneity in the Marvel and DC’s go-to creators. And for the ones who aren’t Johns or Bendis, the majority of fresh names that come to Marvel and DC are male as well.
In mainstream comics stories, even with great comics with characters like Batwoman and Wonder Woman, the majority of the time men are the default heroes, the default point of view. It’s possible that that ingrained idea (it’s ingrained not just in the comics industry, but all over society) carries over to the idea of male comics creators being the default as well.
I admittedly don’t know too much about how people break into the mainstream comics industry, but as far as I can tell it seems to be a matter of who you know, and getting the chance to show those people the talent you’ve got.
If women are seen as unusual, as perpetual oddities that are by default viewed as outsiders and assumed to be inferior because of it, they’ll never be able to have the same effectiveness as men in networking, making the right connections and finding their way to success in mainstream comics.
January 7th, 2010 at 11:08 am
Stephanie Meyer and J.K. Rowling are ROFLing. If you think awards matter, great. If you manage to connect with an audience, however, they’re precisely meaningless.
January 8th, 2010 at 12:02 pm
But Matt, even JK Rowling had to resort to using her initials to fool people (in the beginning, at least) about her gender. Stephenie Meyer got to use her real name because, well, there was no getting around that a woman wrote those books. They were teenage vampire romance, I don’t think anyone would have believed a man wrote those.
And Tom, you’re an idiot. Show me a woman who has been ALLOWED to do what Bendis and Johns have done, to have significant control over an entire superhero universe. And you can’t tell me none of them are up to it– right off the bat, I’d trust Gail Simone and Louise Simonson to come up with amazing universe-wide stories, but it will probably never happen.
January 8th, 2010 at 4:46 pm
Alexa – Wait a week and you’ll get to see Gail Simone’s announcement. She was hinting at “something exciting” next week on her Facebook profile today, and rumblings at DC have been that a huge, post-”Blackest Night” announcement is happening at that time. That said, I’d have preferred it were Simonson; Simone’s work is really hit or miss, and while she has some really notable hits, she also has some REALLY notable misses for my money.
March 17th, 2010 at 3:14 am
Could you kindly translate your website into Italian as I’m not so comfortable reading it in English? I’m getting tired of using Google Translate all the time, there is a little WP plugin called like global translator which will render all your posts by default- that will make reading posts on your great blog even more enjoyable. Cheers dude, Writing Guide!
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May 10th, 2012 at 12:50 am
The key to literary success? Be a man — or write like one.” Now, there’s been maxims tossed around about romance-starved women buying Nora Roberts books
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