Chicks Dig Comics: A Celebration of Comic Books by the Women Who Love Them
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photography, recording or any information storage and retrieval system, without express written permission from the publisher.
Published by Mad Norwegian Press (www.madnorwegian.com).
Edited by Lynne M. Thomas and Sigrid Ellis.
Editor-In-Chief: Lars Pearson.
Cover art: Katy Shuttleworth
Jacket & interior design: Christa Dickson.
First Print Edition: April 2012.
First e-Book Edition: April 2012.
“Introduction” © Mark Waid
“Mary Batson and the Chimera Society” © Gail Simone
“Summers and Winters, Frost and Fire” © Seanan McGuire
“Tripping Through the Looking Glass, Stepping Into Gotham City: Cosplay, Creation, and Community” © Erica McGillivray
“A Matter of When” © Carla Speed McNeil
“The Other Side of the Desk” © Rachel Edidin
“Nineteen Panels About Me and Comics” © Sara Ryan
“I’m Batman” © Tammy Garrison
“My Secret Identity” © Caroline Pruett
“The Green Lantern Mythos: A Metaphor for My (Comic Book) Life” © Jill Pantozzi
“Vampirella, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Page Turn” © Jen Van Meter
“Confessions of a (Former) Unicorn” © Tara O’Shea
“The Evolution of a Tart” © Sheena McNeil
“Kitty Queer” © Sigrid Ellis
“The Captain in the Capitol: Invoking the Superhero in Daily Life” © Jennifer Margret Smith
“Burn, Baby Burn” © Lloyd Rose
“Tune in Tomorrow” © Sue D
“Comic Book Junkie” © Jill Thompson
“From Pogo to Girl Genius” © Delia Sherman
“I am Sisyphus, and I am Happy” © Kelly Thompson
“Captain America’s Next Top Model” © Anika Dane Milik
“Me vs. Me” © Sarah Kuhn
“A Road That has No Meaning: Revenge in Sandman” © Sarah Monette
“Mutants” © Marjorie Liu
“You’re on the Global Frequency” © Elizabeth Bear
“Crush on a Superhero” © Colleen Doran
Table of Contents
Introduction by Mark Waid
Editors’ Foreword by Lynne M. Thomas and Sigrid Ellis
Essays
Mary Batson and the Chimera Society by Gail Simone
Summers and Winters, Frost and Fire by Seanan McGuire
Tripping Through the Looking Glass, Stepping Into Gotham City: Cosplay, Creation, and Community by Erica McGillivray
An Interview with Amanda Conner
A Matter of When by Carla Speed McNeil
The Other Side of the Desk by Rachel Edidin
An Interview with Terry Moore
Nineteen Panels about Me and Comics by Sara Ryan
I’m Batman by Tammy Garrison
An Interview with Alisa Bendis
My Secret Identity by Caroline Pruett
The Green Lantern Mythos: A Metaphor For My (Comic Book) Life by Jill Pantozzi
Vampirella or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Page Turn by Jen Van Meter
Confessions of a (Former) Unicorn by Tara O’Shea
The Evolution of a Tart by Sheena McNeil
Kitty Queer by Sigrid Ellis
The Captain in the Capitol: Invoking the Superhero in Daily Life by Jennifer Margret Smith
Burn, Baby, Burn by Lloyd Rose
Tune in Tomorrow by Sue D
An Interview with Greg Rucka
Comic Book Junkie by Jill Thompson
From Pogo to Girl Genius: A Life in the Funny Papers by Delia Sherman
I am Sisyphus, and I am Happy by Kelly Thompson
Captain America’s Next Top Model by Anika Dane Milik
An Interview with Louise Simonson
Me vs. Me by Sarah Kuhn
A Road that has No Ending: Revenge in Sandman by Sarah Monette
Mutants by Marjorie Liu
You’re on the Global Frequency by Elizabeth Bear
Crush on a Superhero by Colleen Doran
Editors’ Bios & Acknowledgements
Credits
Introduction by Mark Waid
To you, Reader, the title of this book might evoke a good, hearty “well, duh.” I think it will. I hope it does, given how mainstream comics are today. But as a man fast approaching 50, I have to tell you that had Chicks Dig Comics been written when I was growing up, it would have been shelved under Fiction. Shortly after the invention of comic books, during their heyday in the 1940s, chicks definitely dug comics. Boys and girls by the millions devoured these dime pamphlets about superheroes, about cowboys, about science fiction and funnymen and funny animals and all sorts of other things. There was a comic for every taste and every upbringing.
Then came television, and it bulldozed comics.
Cartoons were no longer limited to comic books and rare nights at the movie theater. They were available right in kids’ living rooms at the turn of a dial. Same with heroes of the Wild West, spacemen with rayguns, soap operas, romances, and everything else a young boy or girl might find enthralling. And as long as those urchins had access to a TV, the stories were better than the ones in their comic books; they moved and had sound and, maybe best of all, they were free. Before long there wasn’t any money to be made in competing on the newsstand with illustrated adventures of knights and archers and interplanetary swashbucklers. By the 1970s, when I began my lifelong love affair with comics, the one genre that it did better than television – superheroes – was by far the predominant one. Comics and superheroes had become so synonymous that to this day our parents still assume all comics are about guys in tights and capes. The problem, of course, was that superheroes were designed specifically to entertain boys. Generation upon generation of girls, when given any regard at all by comics publishers, were asked to make do with (shudder) Archie or, alternately... well, nothing.
Don’t get me wrong. Certainly, girls could enjoy superhero comics. Judging by the fan mail pages published, many did. But if there were any in a 500-mile radius of me when I was an adolescent, they were well-hidden. In the 1970s and ’80s, I can promise you that the general public considered comic books (a) as much for boys as Barbies were “for girls,” and (b) no kid sister or female schoolmate I ever met had done much more than page through one here and there, probably by accident.
Wait, it gets worse.
As the 1980s and ’90s continued to whittle this former mass medium down into a niche market, publishers realized to their horror that once its little-boy audience grew too old for comic books, the industry was doomed. These not-terribly-farsighted publishers doubled down on their existing demographic, “solving” the problem by allowing superheroes to “grow up” with their readers. Stories became more sophisticated and more complex. But they also became more overtly sexualized and pandering, full of busty super-babes and male power fantasies, and even less about anything your average female high school or college student could take even remotely seriously. Comics had become the very definition of nerdboy-Peter Pan culture, and if you think that in the early 1980s when I was in college and eager to get laid that I’d have risked being seen
wearing a Flash T-shirt and reading a Captain America comic in public by any eligible girl anytime, anywhere, you’re insane.
And then Neil Gaiman came along and saved our collective ass.
I overgeneralize. As you’ll no doubt read in some of the essays before you here, Gaiman and his legendary and multiple-award-winning Sandman series – a beautifully told fantasy/horror myth that had as little to do with capes and spandex as possible (I say to the four of you out there unfamiliar with it) – became comics’ unquestioned gateway drug for hundreds of thousands of young female readers worldwide. And those readers, charmed by the magic of the medium, didn’t leave once they were done with Sandman. They stayed on to create a new audience hungry for comics of all types. Terry Moore’s Strangers in Paradise. Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis. Daniel Clowes’s Ghost World. Bill Willingham’s Fables. And, yes... Batman and Spider-Man, still. (Again, no one’s saying that women aren’t allowed to dig superhero comics. It’s just that, in my experience, they’d appreciate a little more consumer choice.)
It is now 2011 and, yesterday, I accompanied my girlfriend to the Midwestern university at which she teaches so I could sit in on one of her lectures. It was about Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese, a graphic novel for young adults that placed in the 2006 National Book Awards. My girlfriend, who wears Green Lantern jewelry, a Luke Skywalker jacket, and Dr. Horrible T-shirts, is a full-fledged and unapologetic geek for nerd culture, and the fact that she even exists is not the best part of this story.
It’s that, of all those students, two of those students were men. The rest were women. And they could not have been more captivated or come away hungrier to read more comics. I don’t know where they were when I was 12, but I don’t care. What matters is that they – you – are here now.
I’m sorry the comics medium left you for a while, but it’s back now, more interesting and diverse than ever. But don’t take my word for it. Read on.
Mark Waid
Fortress of Solitude, Indiana Annex, 2011
Mark Waid has been a comics professional for nearly three decades. Though he has served as an editor, a chief creative officer, a publisher, and a production guru, he is best known as a writer, having authored some of the best-selling American graphic novels of all time, including the multiple award-winning Kingdom Come from DC Comics. Further biographical information, including his comics “how-to” blog essays, can be found at markwaid.com.
Editors’ Foreword
The title of this book describes a phenomenon so manifestly self-evident that we find it difficult to come up with more to say on the topic. Heck, the title isn’t even original: The Sequential Tarts’ website, Tara O’Shea (Lynne’s co-editor for the Hugo Award-winning Chicks Dig Time Lords), and Kate Tapley (maker of cute tote bags on Zazzle) all came up with it, as well at different points in time. Clearly, we hit a bit of a zeitgeist. Yet what may be self-evident to us is clearly not so to a portion of the industry.
We decided that the best response was to throw a louder party.
Chicks dig comics.
Women and girls read, buy, collect, love, write, draw, produce, edit, letter, color, dream, and really, really, dig comics. Reminding people of this fact is so incredibly easy, we thought we’d make a book about it. As editors, we had no difficulty finding contributors; on the contrary, we had to regretfully turn people away. There are a lot of us out there. We are legion.
If you dig comics, we’re here to let you know that you’re in good company. Lots and lots of it. If you don’t dig comics yet, but you’re looking for places to start, this volume has lots of options: fantastic characters and stories to fall in love with, creators to seek out and enjoy. We are not monolithic. There is no one-size-fits-all female comic fan. We’ve done our best to show not only the diversity of comics as a medium, but of its fans. Some women found their way to comics through Pogo, others through Vampirella. Some fell in love with Green Lantern, and others with Aquaman. Women express their love of comics through writing or drawing them professionally, through cosplay, through criticism, fan fiction, and the organization of conventions devoted to comics.
Each contributor speaks the comics-based truth as he or she has come to understand it. Some find their own reflection in stories that resonate. Others seek solace in heroes that can be braver than they are. Some of our essayists are having a great time and good-natured discussions with fellow fans. All our contributors, male and female, share with you the fundamental ways in which comic books have molded and changed their lives. Because comics do that.
We’re here to tell you why we love this medium and the sheer variety of stories that can be told using it.
Turn the page, and join the celebration.
Mary Batson and the Chimera Society
Gail Simone is a critically acclaimed and multiple award-winning author of comic books and animation, including fan-favorite runs on such titles as Wonder Woman, Birds of Prey, Deadpool, Secret Six, and The Simpsons. She is also an outspoken voice on social issues.
“It’s just comics.”
I have lost count of how many times I’ve heard this expression. Sometimes, it is prefaced with the exhortation to “Relax,” or, “Take a chill pill,” despite the seeming scarcity of these alleged pills at my local Rite-Aid. Sometimes, the word “comics” is replaced by the archaic and increasingly inaccurate term, “funnybooks.”
If you get into an argument on the Internet over whether or not Iron Man’s armor should have a nose, be prepared for an endless harangue of discourse from outraged readers, no matter which position you post (I’m pro-noses, as a comfort issue). But if you should dare to post a question about ethics, or about a lack of inclusion in modern comics, then you can fully expect that readers will immediately circle the wagons and go into shutdown mode. Inevitably, you will be told that, yes, “It’s just comics.”
And it’s true, of course. It is just comics.
Except when it’s more.
I apologize for personalizing this essay, considering the distinguished company I inexplicably find myself in by being invited to participate. But as I lack the remarkable breadth of research that, say, a Trina Robbins has, I have to view the movement of women in comics through my own crack-addled eyes. I’m looking at the role women have played as creators and as characters in the books themselves through three separate points in my life, and I’m now wondering if we somehow won the war when I wasn’t looking, and the opposing side just hasn’t made it official, yet. It seems women have quietly infiltrated everything to do with comics. The evil plan is working. I happily offer my services as flag waver.
I also humbly offer my flawed and microscopic perspective on the question of “Why aren’t there more females in comics?” as witnessed up close and personally. The answer seems to be evolving.
Portrait of the Essayist as a Goofy Fangirl
When I was a little girl, I lived on a farm in rural Oregon. No television, and not much to do. We were poor, so comics, even at the wonderfully low price points they had then, were a bit of a luxury. I would mainly get them in careless heaps at garage sales and the like. To this day, the “careless heap” is still my preferred storage method for comics – no Mylar bagger, this reader!
I remember getting a huge stack of reprint comics from somewhere... 100 page DC books and Marvel reprints of their classic Silver Age stuff. The stories just fascinated me, perhaps even more than the current, “real” (read that as “in continuity”) stories. It offered a glimpse of history, a feeling that what I was reading was part of something bigger. How wonderful to find this alternate history that was at once bizarre and improbable, but also so much more just and entertaining than the real world. Who wouldn’t prefer reading about the Blackhawks to grim reality?
The one problem was, even in my child’s mind, I felt like comics had taken a huge step backwards. The Lois Lane in the Golden Age reprints was smarter and funnier and tougher than everyone else at the Planet, including Clark Kent. But the Lois of la
ter years had lost that spark almost completely.
Characters like Hawkgirl and Mary Marvel were obviously valuable commodities in the Golden Age. Mary had her own comic filled with adventures that were actually intended to be read by young girls, something I felt never entered the minds of the otherwise very talented creators at Marvel, for example.
DC had its shameful parade of oddly unfemale-women, but in particular, those Marvel comics almost seemed to actively promote the message that women are all venal, selfish, boy-crazy, overly emotional, and not particularly bright. As much ground-breaking work as they did, reading the dialogue these guys gave the Wasp, Marvel Girl, and the Invisible Girl was cringe-inducing, even back then.
It didn’t help that I didn’t know any other girls who had this secret shame, this love of comics, at the time. A female comics fan was a chimera, and there was no evidence to the contrary for a long time to come. Every great once in a while there would be a girl’s letter on the letters page, or a girl’s name would appear in the credit box. These were extremely rare occurrences and I clung to them like the last life preserver on the Titanic.
It can’t really be overstated – things were different for comics fans then. We grasped greedily at any real-world acknowledgement that our passion even existed. The idea that you could theoretically go to a theater and have your choice of several big-budget comic book adaptations at one time would have sent our heads into an orbit from which we would be unlikely to recover.
And having the temerity to be female and a comics fan, well, that’s really simply not to be done. And so I, and I’m sure many others, adopted the early habit of creating my own stories featuring these characters – where once in a while, the girls won, or participated, even. Years later, I would hear a term from the fanfiction community to describe this practice: “headcanon.” The mythology you make in your head when the real one doesn’t quite include you.
Despite all that, I thought at the time that the problem was recruitment.
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