Let The Girls Take The Lead with Comics

[CBR News]

Veteran comic writer Barbara Slate explains why the best solution for reaching the growing female comic readership is to re-visit the idea of a girl's line of comics.


Full article here.

[harpier]

While I can appreciate Slate's goals, I find this approach in many ways regressive and counterproductive. I'm a lady comic book reader, though admittedly I came to comics as a young adult rather than a kid. But one of my personal gripes about kid-centric marketing is the egregious gendering of EVERYTHING! To give an example from my own childhood, the only difference between the "boy's" Big Wheel and a "girl's" is the color. It's pathetic. And I would prefer not to reinforce this gender disparity. I would also hazard that, against Slate's declaration, Barbie, Belle, and Ariel—at least in their toy and movie incarnations—are for various reasons unsatisfying role models for young girls, though each has several admirable qualities, and this includes their physiques.

Instead of exacerbating the mostly artificial readership divide along gender lines, I would rather see a wider representation of female creators and characters in all comics. Most, perhaps too many, characters are gendered in their nomenclature: BatMAN, BatWOMAN, SuperGIRL, Spider-MAN, etc. I appreciate the flexibility that, for instance, Matt Fraction has capitalized on in Hawkeye with Clint Barton and Kate Bishop. Great characters are great characters, and they shouldn't all be men by default nor should they be defined, almost essentially, by their genders.

In the end, when it comes to bodies, big boobs are usually unrealistic (and often gravity-defying), but so is Bruce Wayne's chest. Comic book bodies, as in most visual media, are eroticized, and while female bodies (especially in their posture) are historically more so than male bodies, I actually do think this divide is shrinking...Teen Titans aside. And, I believe, the bodies are becoming more diverse, especially in independent titles.