I cannot speak strongly enough about how interrelated I think women and children readers are and how both are extremely important to the future of comics. Women make 80% of the retail purchases in America. EIGHTY PERCENT. And that means that more often than not, if a kid is shopping, it’s with mom. So if the comic industry wants to have a future and hook readers young, they need to target both women and children. If a woman is reading comics, she’ll be more likely to let her kid read comics. And if a kid is raised in a house where one or both parents read comics, I think we all already know that he or she will be more likely to read comics. Kids who never know comics exist are going to have a hard time finding them when they’re at an age that most superhero comics are geared towards. And even better in all of this is the fact that if mom reads comics, she’ll have no problem with her daughters reading comics, which increases the future female readership of comics as well as just the future male readership of comics. There’s no loss here for the comics industry. It just takes foresight. Creating more comics for kids and women, making sure they know they exist, and making sure they’re accessible could genuinely change the future of the industry. Some publishers are already doing a great job making stuff for one or both (Top Shelf and Archaia both leap to mind). We just need a greater segment of the industry to take those demographics seriously.
That’s just one response from Janelle Asselin, former DC editor (now at Disney, working on kids’ magazines, I believe), in an interview over at the wonderful DC Women Kicking Ass tumblr that’s well worth checking out; Asselin talks about her graduate thesis on (the lack of) women in comics, and it’s both eye-opening and depressing. Go read.
February 2nd, 2012 at 1:16 pm
All this sounds good. But surely fathers play a role in raising kids and influencing what they read, right? I know if and when I have kids, I will share my love of comics with them. Don’t most comic book reading dads do that?
And if not, what does that say about fatherhood these days?
February 2nd, 2012 at 11:44 pm
Well, I am glad someone finally told them.
Can’t believe the comics publishers did not already know that the more readers the better.
February 3rd, 2012 at 12:45 pm
Hey Jane G . . .
That’s the most idiotic response I’ve seen to the honest analysis of a problem in a while.
Of course this industry knows that more readers is better. They’ve just forgotten how to get more.
How would YOU attract readers?
February 3rd, 2012 at 2:18 pm
Haven’t really given that much thought as it’s none of my business and I have no way to affect anything beyond the comics I myself purchase.
Are you saying that the analysis did not go beyond stating the obvious? (I don’t bother following links to other sites, I expect Mr McMillan to include all relevant information in his quotes.)
February 4th, 2012 at 7:58 am
Comic book publishers would love to attract more women, but a lot of the hardcore audience hates women…so that’s kind of a problem. And by ‘hates women’, I mean that they prefer the alpha-male centric form of superhero comics. This means that women are presented as sexual props either as virgin-types or whores, which holds very little attraction for many women. And if you try to incorporate more of that content, the fans scream “liberal feminist agenda”!
Also, they’ve been milking the white-male-power fantasy teat for so long that they’ve driven away most of the other readers who just outgrew those kinds of ideas and went in search of more satisfying and edifying fare. So now when they experiment with better and more diverse content, there is no audience left to support it, so they go back to WMP fantasy. (For comparison – Rap music is black male power fantasy – note the similarities to the way it treats women and the ease of non-black artists to penetrate the genre)
This is the same problem that comic books have with minorities. I read a lot of comics as a kid, but should I ever have kids myself, what exactly would I want them to read in comic book stores? In the 80′s there was Milestone…now there’s what exactly? That is not to say that the only books I read had black characters in them, but there were a few. Now between the sexism, the faux-morality, and casual racism, why would I want my kids to read much of what is made in comics these days? There are of course some great books. There always are, but those would have to be selected on an individual basis.
So to Dave, I would say that they haven’t ‘forgotten’ how to get more readers, they just can’t. They can’t expand without an outcry. “What! Superman (the illegal alien born on another planet) doesn’t fight for the AMERICAN way!?! – That’s the liberal media agenda!!” or “Men are sexualized too, so it’s not sexist that wonderwoman fights half-naked!” or “Spiderman can’t be black!! This is Affirmative Action and Political Correctness run amok!”
This goes on and on…
So much so, that those of us who care about the content we ingest, tend to just leave rather than fight a losing battle. So sadly, my kids will read far less comics than I did as a kid. They’ll have real books in their bookshelves.
I really just have better things to do than fight over comics. As a customer, if a store doesn’t have what I want, I go elsewhere. If that store cares, then they’ll stock what I would buy, if they don’t then I wish them good luck on their journey.
SG