I’m one of the lucky ones. The first time someone said to me “I didn’t know girls liked comics,” I was well into adulthood and could laugh off his comment as incredibly naive. At that point, I’d been reading comics for over a decade, had spent the past three years running a comic shop’s online store, and had recently completed my thesis for my MFA, an original superhero screenplay. So to me, this comment was an outlier, a joke to toss out in conversation later on.
Other women I know weren’t quite as lucky. Their first experience in a comic shop was with a retailer who wanted to exclude new fans rather than embrace new readers. Or choosing to express their opinions about comics or other areas of pop culture made them a target for harassment. Or someone thought their cosplay at a convention was an invitation to be touched or mocked or tested to see if they actually knew the character. There are far too many stories like this. Stories that show me just how lucky I’ve been to feel consistently welcomed both as a professional and as a fan.
It was women fighting for their place in the comics industry that gave me my first big break. I’d been dabbling in comics for a while, creating webcomics and pitching my first anthology. A friend shared a tweet by a female comic artist who was looking to put together an anthology for charity with other female comic creators. Though I didn’t have a lot of experience yet, I thought I’d throw my hat in the ring. I sent the artist, Renae De Liz, an e-mail saying I’d love to participate. I was one of over a hundred women who did so that first day.
That anthology became known as Womanthology, which in 2011 set the record for funding of a comic-book project on Kickstarter. The campaign hit its funding goal in nineteen hours and ended up receiving over $100,000 in pledges, more than four times the initial goal. Big comic and pop-culture names, such as Jim Lee and Kevin Smith, contributed pledge incentives and promoted the Kickstarter. What was initially going to be a small press collection became a massive, 400-page hardcover put out by mainstream publisher IDW.
Again, I was lucky. I tried my hand at comics right as people were asking where the industry’s female writers and artists were. I signed on to a project that hit the zeitgeist in just the right way, attracting press and readers that no one expected. One of the artists I worked with on the book, Fiona Staples, blew up right after we collaborated thanks to her work on Image Comics’s Saga, the first issue of which came out the same day as Womanthology.
But the thing about luck is that so much of it can reach us because of the women who worked hard to pave the way before us. We’re lucky to have people like Trina Robbins, who worked to preserve the history of women in comics. Women have been a part of the industry since the Golden Age of comics, which saw the birth of the superheroes that today grace our movie screens. Girls have been reading comics since the beginning. (Of course, everyone read comics back in the day.) If the road seems smooth, it’s because of the work put in by those who came before us. And because we’re lucky enough to avoid the potholes that are still scattered about.
There’s still a lot of work to do. Comics is a niche industry these days, and new, diverse voices are the only way to ensure it stays relevant. Much as we see in other areas of media, books written by and/or catered toward women are still seen as “other” or “lesser.” Or that dreaded word pandering.
But women are louder and more visible in comics than they’ve ever been. A female retailer group, the Valkyries, is influencing what stores carry and thus what readers purchase. A female creator group, Comic Book Women, allows women to network with others in the industry and helps conventions find guests and panelists. Where once a small handful of female creators were familiar names, I’m now part of a crowd.
I’m lucky to be here, forging a career in an industry where the occasional person may not think I belong. Girls really like comics, both consuming and creating them. And I hope to make the path even smoother for the next girls who come along to tell their stories.