I thought, if enough women gave comics a try, a fair go, if they let Batman get to first base, things would really start to change. Of course, expecting everyone to love something just because you do is a creative and commercial dead end. But I was a goofy fangirl at the time, and didn’t yet know that.
I Begin My Journey of Self-Discovery and Heat Vision
Later in life, comics had taken an ugly side road into a thicket of socio-sexually oddball shock stories. Following the massive and mainstream success of works like Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns and Alan Moore’s Watchmen, some marketing genius decided that cruelty sells, and that the circus crowd wanted blood by the buckets. I’m not talking about horror comics, I’m talking about the typical superhero fare, with many titles seeming to go out of their way to present the most gruesome and pointlessly vicious tableaux.
Beloved characters were killed and mutilated because they were beloved. Batgirl, a cheerful, independent and optimistic character, blessed with photographic memory and her own agency (and a yellow purse, I think all crimefighters should carry a yellow purse) was shot in the spine in a home invasion story and discarded with all the care of a used tissue. The Joker actually takes her clothes off and takes pictures of her as she’s bleeding, her spine ruined.
I was still a comics fan, but this story, and the even stupider ones to follow, shook my faith. I couldn’t help feeling that, headcanon be damned, I’d been chumped into buying a product made by people who actively loathed me and my gender. I had made friends online with an executive at one of the big two companies and finally, I asked him flat out what percentage of the readership was female – he had no idea. No one knew, he said. What he didn’t add was the obvious follow up – that no one cared. Comics were selling like crazy... who cared if only boys bought them?
So I started a website that became a bit of an unexpected phenomenon. Women in Refrigerators listed and discussed the trend, quite popular at the time, of killing and/or depowering longstanding females, often with a creepy and depressing sexual component. The site was covered in newspapers around the world, even in Harper’s Bazaar (and it still sort of haunts me to this day, people wanting to debate it with me at cons as I’m on my way to the restroom).
The flood of bad PR brought thousands of female readers out of the woodwork. Many creators wrote and said that they too had been dismayed by this trend. And it clicked with people. Creators had to face that female readers existed, and that the Internet allowed them a voice they hadn’t previously had.
To their surprising credit, rather than shout me down, the comics industry instead decided to give me a career as a writer. The trusting saps! Er, I mean, those lovable scamps!
I’d become aware through the Internet and the WiR website that female creators and readers and commentators did exist, and when I started getting regular work, I was thrilled to meet them. I imagined a sorority of like minds and purpose, and somehow imagined us all sipping lemonade by the Comics Girl Secret Fort immersion pool.
The reality was a bit disappointing. Despite some women having had positions of extreme power, like Publisher Jenette Kahn at DC Comics and Executive Editor Karen Berger at Vertigo, the actual “community” didn’t seem to exist. There was a non-profit organization known as Friends of Lulu that seemed to intend on taking that role, to mixed reviews, but my experience was often a bit of a harsh wake-up call. While some female creators, like the aforementioned Trina Robbins and rising star Devin Grayson, could not have been more welcoming, others, even those who had supported my fan commentary, were plainly put out by the idea of another female writer – it was as though there were only room for one or two in the entirety of superhero comics. They had taken on the aspect of prisoners of war, and seemed to regard new inmates with a bit of open hostility.
At conventions I could go a full hour and never see another female. At the first “Females in Comics” panel I attended, there were nine women on the panel and four people in the audience, one of whom was my husband. Powerful talents like Lea Hernandez and Devin were routinely accused of having their work actually written by their husbands or boyfriends.
That was a dark time. But hopeful, too. A raft of British writers had brought a different, less exclusive, gender sensibility to comics. Warren Ellis wrote great bastards, but some of those bastards were powerful, fascinating women. And the popularity of X-Men and New Teen Titans and Swamp Thing, and perhaps most especially Sandman, said that change was coming... we might have to wait, but it was most definitely coming.
So I began to think the problem wasn’t recruitment, but content.
Surely if the content was there, the women would follow?
And Now I Look and See Mary Batson Everywhere
The world changed and the companies haven’t yet figured out how to exploit it, exactly. Twilight and Harry Potter and manga have shown females will purchase genre books with a vengeance if given the opportunity and an enticing enough read.
The female readership is there, and growing. It’s our only growth demo in a tough economy.
I think that battle is over. That snowball isn’t going to stop rolling downhill.
Many, if not most, of the best commentators on comics online and in podcasts are now female. The fan community is female in percentages unimaginable just a few years ago. Aspiring female creators come to us for advice in numbers equal to males, a good sign for the future. And most wonderfully, a list of names like Ivory Madison, Nicola Scott, Sara Pichelli, Marjorie M. Liu, Amy Reeder, Kelly Sue DeConnick, Kathryn Immonen, Amanda Conner and many more not only produce top-notch work, but have discovered something lovely... the audience doesn’t care what their gender is, even if some publishers still struggle with it on occasion.
And that’s just superhero comics. The webcomics, manga, and independent realms have not just female parity, but often dominance.
Comic conventions are run for and by females now. After attending the latest San Diego Comic-Con, I can’t even express how female it all felt, how so many booths sold products aimed at females, how girls were buying the books and weren’t dragged there by their boyfriends. How the LGBTQ community has gained such a powerful voice despite years of being intentionally ignored and sidelined.
It feels a bit like birth.
It’s thrilling.
Oh, there are slip-ups. A recent huge initiative to re-launch the DC Universe titles somehow managed to employ only two women out of almost a hundred creators. There are still an awful lot of costumes and covers and poses that seem wholly about the male gaze to the exclusion of all else. And there are still few women being given the opportunity to work on the icon-level titles.
But the war is over. The readers know it. The smart retailers know it. The companies that make the comics are flailing about a little bit, but even they know it. They are going to have to produce product that the female reader enjoys to survive.
I can’t tell you how different that is from when I started, or even further back, when I was a little girl and such a thing could only be imagined in the mind of a kid who thought it made perfect sense for Batgirl to wear high heels when fighting.
So, the problem has evolved again. We have a female audience, and it’s growing. They are recruiting themselves without our help. They are directing the content with their dollars.
But now we still have an odd holdout. Acknowledgement.
There are still people in power, at every level, who don’t see what’s directly in front of them. As an example, I recently attended a lovely convention in Calgary, Canada. The audience had a tremendous female contingent, and I was at my booth in Artist’s Alley signing hundreds and hundreds of comics for women and girls both.
At one point, my husband struck up a conversation with a young man right in front of my booth. I had 12 women in my signing line. Looking down my row, every single artist, mostly male, had at least one female in line for an autograph or sketch, every single one, and many had several. There were also at least two other h
ugely popular female creators, the gifted Amanda Conner and the wonderful Agnes Garbowska, each with long lines of women ready to buy things from them.
In the very epicenter of that, the young man turned to my husband and said, “I don’t care what anyone says, women are never going to read comics.”
We won the war. But it may take a while for the opponent to realize he’s got a musket ball right through his awareness.
I can wait.
I get to see the female readers and talk to them. And I know that comics mean as much to them as they did to me, as much to them as comics have meant to male readers.
I have spoken with women who were inspired by Wonder Woman to get in shape, or to leave abusive relationships. I’ve spoken with women who used comics to get through chemo, or to survive the loss of a loved one. I’ve talked to women who were inspired by female comics creators to make their own art and stories. I’ve seen the love in the cosplayer’s art, and the passion in the female comics retail employees who hand-sell the comics they believe in every day. And yes, I’ve spoken with several women who felt that comics had helped them through potentially life-ending depressions.
One of those women made something I wrote for Wonder Woman into her personal mantra:
Keep Faith.
Trust to Love.
Fight with Honor.
But fight to win.
Comics, the good ones, they can inspire, they can fire the imagination, they can please the senses and the heart and feed the soul. They have a healing power, an emotional heft. I’m still crazy about them after all this time. The transformative and creative power they have held over my life can’t possibly be overstated, and there are thousands out there who feel the same.
So, yes, absolutely. “It’s just comics.”
Except when it’s more.
Summers and Winters, Frost and Fire
Seanan McGuire is an award-winning urban fantasy and science fiction author from Northern California, where she has learned to love reptiles and fear weather. Her comic collection began when she was nine, with back issues of ElfQuest, X-Men, and Amethyst, Princess of Gemworld. Her fate was sealed, however, when her mother brought home a box of old Warren comics from a yard sale. Since then, she has become a devoted regular at her local comic store (Flying Colors Comics and Other Cool Stuff), acquired more Marvel comics than anyone likes to think about, and memorized the Summers family tree. Her current favorite titles are Hack/Slash, The Boys, Fables, Girl Genius, and X-Men: Legacy.
If you ever want to start a fight in a room full of female X-Men fans, all you have to do is ask the question that makes my comic book store clerks quail with fear: “Who do you think Cyclops should wind up with? Jean Grey or Emma Frost?” It seems like every girl who follows the X-Men has an opinion, even the ones whose opinion is “Scott Summers should keep it in his pants and let us worry about Wolverine’s love life for a little while.” A friend of mine has this whole elaborate theory of predicting personality types based on the Jean/Emma divide (and it works, too, which is the scary part). It’s a big deal.
Jean Grey, for the unaware – those DC fans in the audience – was one of the original X-Men, along with Cyclops, Angel, Beast, Iceman, and Professor X. Her role on the team was vital: She was the token girl. That was her purpose, her personality, and her reason for being. Every team needs a girl, right?
Jean had red hair and green eyes and was beautiful and smart and good and basically perfect. So perfect, in fact, that most of the girls I knew either loved her or hated her, because we could never compare. All of the original X-Men fell in love with her at one point or another, including Professor X, as did many of the newer X-Men, but it was Scott Summers who won her heart. This is important.
Moving on to powers: Jean started out as a telekinetic. Later, she developed telepathy, increasing her power level. This was followed by a much larger power jump, one which merged her with the eternal Phoenix Force, creator and destroyer of universes. As Phoenix, Jean could fly, rearrange matter on a subatomic level, read minds, and look good in skintight red spandex. She kept gaining and losing the power of the Phoenix (and dying, or supposedly dying, or whatever) until Grant Morrison’s run on New X-Men in the early 2000s, where, having been stranded on Asteroid M, Wolverine stabbed her in the gut rather than allow her to burn to death. Jean Grey died for real, re-awoke as the Phoenix, saved the day, was killed again by Magneto, and was buried, allowing her spirit to ascend to the White Hot Room.
You with me so far? Good.
Now, Jean may have been the first girl associated with the X-Men, but she didn’t stay the only girl for long. By the time she died (for the last time), there were dozens of female mutants running around the various X-titles, including one who was vying for Jean’s place in Scott’s heart: Emma Frost, the ice-cold former White Queen of the Hellfire Club. Emma, like Jean, was a telepath. And that’s about where the similarities end. Rather than being a sweet redheaded All-American girl, Emma Frost was a controlling blonde, born into money and descended from there into depravity. She was practically a cautionary tale for young mutants: Be good, or this will happen to you, too.
Emma was introduced much later than Jean – 1979, as opposed to 1963 – and was originally a villain, which is why she was able to get away with buying all her clothing from Frederick’s of Hollywood. Bondage gear is totally a costume when you’re a bad guy! She never really managed to hold onto a code name, either. She was occasionally called “the White Queen,” but that’s hard to shout on a battlefield. As her redemption progressed, she became one of the two instructors for the students of Generation X, and started getting called “Headmistress” a lot. After the Gen X kids split up, she moved to Genosha, where she worked for Magneto, teaching young mutants how to handle their powers.
Here’s the fast-forward sequence of events from there: Sentinels attack Genosha, oh no! Everybody dies! Except for Emma, whose secondary mutation [1] is triggered by the trauma, giving her the ability to transform into living organic diamond! Lacking anywhere else to go, she turns to the X-Men! Scott and Jean are having marital troubles, on account of Jean periodically being an untouchable cosmic force, and him wanting to live a normal-ish life! Emma and Scott start having a telepathic affair! Jean finds out! Jean and Emma have a big fight! Jean dies! Scott and Emma officially become a couple, causing half the female X-fans to go “Yay!” while the other half shriek in anguish! And that brings us, basically, to the present day: Jean is dead, Scott is with Emma, and open war is raging in the margins.
Now, there are a lot of “religious wars” in the comic book world. Marvel vs. DC. Spider-Man vs. Iron Man. The Fantastic Four vs. the X-Men... and yes, I am aware that two of my three schisms are within Marvel Comics. I’m a Marvel girl, and have been since I was eight years old, when the owner of my local comic book store [2] started slipping old issues of Alpha Flight into the twenty-five cent comic box. From there, I quickly found my way to the X-Men, the super team that would hold my loyalty for the rest of my life. (Please note that when I say “the X-Men,” I mean any and all teams belonging to the extended mutant family. X-Force, X-Factor, the New Mutants, the Exiles, X-Statix, Generation X... I love them all.)
Here were these people who had absolutely no say in whether they became superheroes – they didn’t become scientists (the fastest way to get superhuman abilities, at least in the Marvel Universe), or worse, date scientists; they didn’t develop strange medical conditions that could only be cured with experimental treatments; they didn’t pick up mysterious canes and utter mystic phrases. They were just born, and because they were born different, they could never fit in with the world. So they became heroes, protecting a world that hated and feared them. As a weird little girl who really empathized with the plight of the Midwich Cuckoos, this was enormously appealing to me.
The problem, for me, was Jean Grey. She was too perfect. I couldn’t find a way to make a connection with her, or to see her as anything other than this impossible ideal I could n
ever live up to. There’s a certain degree of “too perfect” that goes on with all comic book characters – how many women that thin do you know? And how many of them live on pizza and popcorn, practically the only things comic book women are ever drawn eating? – but Jean had it worse than most. She always had the best hair, the cutest clothes, the sweetest smile. Even when she destroyed a planet (yes, a planet), all the boys were willing to stand up for her. I’m sure it was supposed to look like teamwork, but I started asking whether she was using her telepathy to make everyone love her when I was nine. (Seriously. I asked the guys at my comic book store.)
Enter Emma, stage left. Emma Frost was – and is – a genuinely conflicted character, someone motivated more by doing what’s right for herself, and for the kids in her care, than by doing what seems like the “heroic” thing to do. After her first group of students, the Hellions, was killed, she became even more committed to keeping the children in her care alive. She’s got the perfect face and flawless body of any mutant... but freely admits to using plastic surgery and hair dye to keep herself in that condition. She’s shown her willingness, repeatedly, to put herself in danger when her students require it, and the rest of the time, she demonstrates a pragmatism that is appealing because it’s so unusual. Save the world? Only after she saves herself, darling, only after she saves herself.
Comparisons between Jean and Emma were, and are, inevitable. Emma may as well have been created as the anti-Jean, at least at first. Jean was modest and innocent; Emma was half-naked and wanton. Jean was heroic; Emma was villainous. The trouble was, when you’re starting from Jean’s position, there’s nowhere to really go. There’s a reason most perfect fairy tale princesses disappear after the Happily Ever After. Developing Jean’s character beyond “the girl, the one everyone loves, you know, the one you wish you could be” would actually have damaged her character, taking away the very core that supposedly made her so appealing.
Chicks Dig Comics: A Celebration of Comic Books by the Women Who Love Them Page 2
