The topic of the month in the online comics community seems to be comics journalism, and before everyone loses interest I wanted to take this opportunity to ask a favor of anyone who has the opportunity to interview a comic book industry professional for a news source.

Please, please, if you bring up the topic of women in comics, do it right.

It is getting to the point that I wince whenever I see the subject of feminism broached in a mainstream interview. With very few exceptions, the interviewer vaguely mentions recent issues (”There’s an ongoing trend of feminist comic book criticism” or “the fan outrage directed at the treatment of women in comics” or “the tendency of certain fans to go after anything that even remotely resembles misogyny” or some other generalization) to show that they are in touch with fandom. The interviewee then repeats the strawman of their choice (”Well, anyone who’s actually seen my art knows I draw strong women,” or “some of these fans are just looking for something to be angry about” or “..fat ugly girls…” or “I did ask the artist for a breast reduction” or “I was actually trying to draw attention to the issue…” or “I have daughters, how can I be a misogynist” or whatever else they can come up with) and more often than not the actual complaint never gets addressed. We, the readers, have no way of knowing if the industry professional is even aware of the complaint, or if they are just making assumptions based on a quick glance at the reports or if someone is telling them vague generalizations about how excitable women are over little things. We don’t know!
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I imagine most people who bother to read this feature know that I am one of the link-collectors for When Fangirls Attack (the other is Blog@Newsarama’s own Melissa Krause). That’s a project we started before we were invited to join the team here, and it has brought my great enjoyment and great stress over the past 20 months or so.

See, we have a “Link ‘em all and let the readers sort ‘em out” policy at When Fangirls Attack that occasionally gets an annoyed response. People don’t understand the point of linking patently anti-feminist rants and letting those arguments spread. We have a number of reasons for pushing the neutral policy (my own standards for a “feminist opinion” don’t necessarily match even those of my closest friends, becoming too one-sided chases some of the traffic away to the point where the only people who visit the site are already in the choir anyway, I have a bizarre compulsion to be as neutral as possible, Melissa and I have a collectively twisted sense of humor, I enjoy being angry), but really the best one is that conflict breeds eloquence. Most of what feminists do is spread awareness, based on the logic that if someone is aware of a problem they will take steps to minimize the problem. Analyzing social trends in media is a way of bringing awareness to harmful attitudes in our culture, and convincing people that things need to change. Arguing for social change in a culture where much of the population has been trained since birth to feel that things are the way they are as a result of human nature gets tricky. You need a good angle for your argument.
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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!
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As with many of these posts, this one stems from a time I went to the comic bookstore and saw something that annoyed me. This particular time I wasn’t even looking for comic books. Instead I’d been scouring used bookstores for the sequel to a trashy novel (that I hadn’t known was so trashy when the first book was loaned to me, but now I was hooked). I hadn’t even intended to look at the rack, except the clerk who helped me navigate the unfamiliar paranormal romance territory turned out to be the biggest Teen Titans fan I had ever met. She steered me into the comic book section to point something out when my eyes fell upon the reason I just can’t get back into Marvel comics.
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“If you tell a kid he’s worthless once, you won’t really cause much damage. You tell a kid he’s worthless every day for six months you’re going to mess with his head.”

The person who said that to me wasn’t discussing anything to do with comic books, mass media, pop culture, or politics. It was just a simple statement about children. I wouldn’t have connected that quote to this subject if not for an email conversation which was nitpicking a previous debate about race in pop culture. I’d failed in convincing my debate opponent that the comedic sidekick who talks a good game but falls to pieces at the first sign of trouble was a racist stereotype. She did not believe me, and likely still doesn’t even after I pointed out that the cowardly black guy has been around since before the Civil War because there are white comedic sidekicks and black competent sidekicks.
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Melissa and I were laughing and talking in chat as we tend to do when sorely offended by the outside world when she pointed out the comment made on her blog. She’d responded to a blog post, and now the original poster responded back. Hoping for a chuckle or a good fight I checked out the comment to find a reasonable question at the end:

But I really am curious how you see your fandom for DC intersecting with the portrayal of women in their comics. I agree that Jann Jones is not guaranteed to improve the situation–I think I made that point in my original post–but her hiring would, hypothetically, be a major turning point in the history of the North American comics industry. Do you ever feel like you’re being pulled in two directions at once? I don’t mean this as an insult; I’m always struck at how you and Lisa retain your enthusiasm for superhero comics in the face of the WFA project. It’s kind of a unique situation, and I was mostly interested in hearing your thoughts on that (apparently false) dichotomy. Again, sorry if my intentions were unclear.

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Leslie Caribou blogged last week about how she reacted when she learned that in the not-too-distant past superhero comics not only welcomed women, but were actually marketed to them:

And when I think about those fangirls during WWII, I think about what we have in common. Did they run through fields imagining that they were flying, just like I did when I was little? Did they tie blankets around their shoulders as a makeshift cape, and insist upon wearing them in public despite their parent’s efforts to get them to leave said cape at home? When they missed their loved ones who were away at war, did reading comics help ease the pain, just like the death of a comic book character helped me cope with the loss of my grandmother? And when their fathers came home in a casket, did they wish that Miss America or Miss Victory had been there to help them? Did they wish that a superheroine had been fighting alongside their father, to protect him from the enemy soldier who had killed him, as I have wished for a superhero to be real so many times?

We shouldn’t be asking if comics are for women. That’s stupid. There is nothing about having a pair of X chromosomes that makes you dislike comics. What we should be asking is: What happened since then? Where did the cartoonists, the fans, the characters go? Did women suddenly become uninterested, or did the developing comics subculture exclude women?

Amazons Attack ended Wednesday, and I got a look at the last few pages even though I dropped the miniseries long ago. A number of readers have proclaimed that “Will Pfiefer killed Wonder Woman” and I’ve taken it upon myself in my personal blog to tell them (in a few admittedly not very polite posts) that they are overreacting a bit. The usual fighting has commenced, and it leaves me thinking about exactly why I dropped the miniseries. Strangely enough, it wasn’t for any of the more prominent criticisms.

(Yes, I am about to nitpick this miniseries after I just spent two days telling people they were overreacting to it.)
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One of the things that people who only know me through this feature here might not realize is that I am crazy for 1960s Green Lantern stories. I love them, I seek them out, I will shell out a reasonable amount of money for the pleasure of reading them.

As everyone knows, there’s a lot of sexism (and racism — though I don’t see why we can’t bring the Hal’s mechanic back and call him “Tom” now. They’ve retconned out far less significant details than a racist nickname) in 1960s comics. There’s a lot of women fainting, preening and scheming to get married that is simply silly and embarrassing now. I know time and time again I see a panel from the 1960s posted with “It could be worse, girls!” or I see someone at a convention talking about how far we’ve come with female superhero portrayal since the Silver Age. And we have come a long way in some ways, but to be honest I can think of a few instances were things were done right early on, where the portrayal of a female character was revolutionary and the writers since have made it worse while updating the stories.
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The blogging community seems to have been quiet about this little bit from WWC, so I’m going to do something unusual and quote an item from the mothersite in case it was missed in the flurry of convention news.

From Vaneta Rogers’ New Worlds Order panel report:

A blind member of the audience said he enjoyed the audiobook version of Infinite Crisis. Would there be more audio books of the Crisis aftermath, joking that, “I’m completely in the dark about it.” There may be 52 in audio. “Usually when we do a novelization, there’s an audio version of it,” Didio said, adding that 52 is due to be a novelization.

Paul Levitz then said he remembered reading into a reel-to-reel for a blind friend. “It would be a great thing in this world of internet posted stuff that may or may not be legal to just have homemade read-alouds of your favorite stories for people who cannot read them,” he said.

(Also thought I’d point out that it was the Publisher putting this idea out there.)

After a hell of a day at work, I booted up my ancient desktop computer to write this column and was almost immediately greeted with an instant message from Chris asking if I read Supergirl that week. He was punished for abruptly interrupting my train of thought with being told about my day. Chris’s good mood was not diminished by this, and he was ready with a preview of his Supergirl #20 review:

But the real draw here–no pun intended–is artist Renato Guedes, who does some truly wonderful work. Ever since her return at the hands of Mike Turner and the launch of the series with Ian Churchill, the latest version of Supergirl’s been criticized (rightly, if you asked me) for her rail-thin, oversexualized appearance, but here, Guedes’ work blows them all away, and he does it without offering exploitation and calling it beauty. Here’s hoping these guys stick around for a while, and that this book finally gets the readability it deserves.

He then told me to put it in my WFA and smoke it, so I thought I’d do him one better by putting it in this post as an example of why positive blogging is pretty much impossible when you’re worried about how women are portrayed in comics.
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I want you all to read this, and then read it again and imagine my voice (I’m an Alto with a slow Pennsylvania/Oklahoma accent). Then read it aloud to yourself, because you need to get this burned into your heads whether you are a fan or a creator.

When people criticize a sample of writing as sexist, they are not criticizing the writer personally. They are criticizing writing sample. More specifically, they are criticizing the idea espoused in that writing sample, and idea which is quite likely such an ingrained trope that the writer never thought twice about.
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Today I visited the Post Office.

Early this month when I discovered every Target in the city had sold out of it, I ordered the Transformers Arcee movie tie-in toy over the internet. The other day I received a package with my receipt and a toy. But instead of my little blue motorcycle (the Autobot Arcee) there was a green dinosaur (the Decepticon Undermine). I emailed the lady who sold me the toy about the mix up, she apologized, provided the address of the customer who bought Undermine and assured me that she was already told to forward Arcee to my address. It occurred to me on the way to the post office that I was one of three women in three different states involved in the buying and selling of Transformer toys. (It was especially interesting that I was only involved because toy companies wrote the female Transformer out of the movie, and under produced her toy.)
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I’ve been so long-winded since I started this. Now seems like a good time to give everyone a break from my writing and offer links to other people. Here’s what I’ve found in the past week:

Cheryl Lynn Eaton’s post on race and feminism in superhero fandom continues to make the rounds, and she’s the featured interview in this week’s Sequential Tart.

Jazz’s role in the Transformers movie leads Karen the Oddity Collector to interesting conclusions that apply to any media.

From the gaming world, Caucasian Adventures (Found via GWOG)

And finally, the motherload of race in genre fiction and fandom linkposts (with a section devoted to comics): The People of Color in SciFi and Fantasy Blog Carnival!

Sexism, racism, homophobia and art that borders on the pornographic are not essential characteristics of the superhero genre.

Weird powers, funky costumes (fun colorful costumes, not painful ones), cheesy concepts like aliens and fairies and walking gods are essential to the genre. Identity confusion is essential to the genre. Conflict between good and evil and other shades on the moral scale (from the irredeemable villain to the misguided villain to the misguided hero to the hero of the high ground) is essential to the genre. The responsibility to use your natural abilities is essential to the genre. Right versus wrong is essential to the genre. The power to protect yourself, your friends and your family is essential to the genre. The power to change the world is essential to the genre (and is one aspect that would appeal to a feminist in particular). Escape from the everyday helplessness of life is essential to the genre.

No one who asks the publishers to put some damned clothes on Star Sapphire or to stop killing off all the female characters is asking to change anything that is essential to the genre.

This week, Manstream Comics posted some panels (please note that Manstream links can have icons or pictures which may be considered NSFW) from Fantastic Four #547

The complaint was not about the pencils and the posture (though there is a smaller debate on how she is drawn going on in the comments) but that Storm is upset that someone suggested her hair was not real. Many Manstream readers felt that it was a portrayal of a vain, frivolous woman and not the Storm they knew and loved.

Cheryl Lynn (of Digital Femme fame) had a different interpretation:

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By now we all should know just who is taking over Justice League of America and who the first addition to the team roster will be.

This is one of my favorite characters, and its been too long since I’ve done a post on him. Now, I’m going to take a detour here and fan identification is still very heavy in my mind, but trust me this one ties into the theme of this column.
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Early on this week, Misty Lee (notable as the significant other of one Paul Dini) made a comment in a podcast that caused some uproar. She, repeating a statement made by an unidentified source, strongly suggested that complaints about the way women are portrayed in superhero art “usually” stemmed from “ugly, fat girls” and that she wasn’t bothered by the way women were drawn because she wasn’t threatened by them and enjoyed looking at them.

This comment has spawned the posting of pictures, the mincing of words, and some stunning commentary on how a woman’s worth in our society is tied to her physical appearance. I don’t have much to say about the comment itself, but instead I want to get into the metaphorical meat of this strawman, the assumption at the root of the comment.

See, what kills me with that comment (and some different and more polite opinions that stem from the same basic misconception) is the automatic assumption that the female fans are in some sort of strange competition with the female superheroes. That complaints about hypersexualized and demeaning images somehow stem from the natural insecurity of a mortal woman who compares herself to a goddess or, in the case of Ms. Lee’s statement, a downright unattractive woman who compares herself to the ideal.

It amazes me that it never occurs to certain people that the problem is not one of jealousy or lack of attraction, but of identification with the character.
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Because I didn’t join the team until a while after they moved to this site, I don’t have any “Just Past the Horizon” from one year ago. However, last year about this time was a busy period for Melissa and I at When Fangirls Attack. I would say that last Spring was the time the “Feminist Comics Blogosphere” was fully realized as a community in its own right.
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Today we’re going to do something a bit different for this feature. I attended Wiscon last weekend and sat in on the panels about comic books. Wiscon is a science fiction convention for feminists, so its panels were perfectly applicable to this column.

I have two panel writeups for you (and I’d like to thank Rachel Edidin for help with both). One on sexism and superhero comics, which is in Part 1 of this week’s feature, and one on Fun Home, which is just beyond the jump.
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