Run the Comics World (Girls)

I’ve been keeping track of Comic-Con news all weekend, especially on the DC side of things, to get a better gauge of what we can expect to see from them in September.  During one of their panels, a female fan cosplaying as Batgirl spoke to Jim Lee about gender diversity, complaining that women weren’t getting centrally featured on any of the covers to the Justice League titles.  The exchange got quite scintillating, apparently, ending when Lee asked if the women have to be dead-center on the cover or if off-center is okay.  Over on Comics Alliance, a comment from Angelica Brenner on the matter remarked that Lee’s joke “kinda sours the whole ‘promise of diversity’ deal.”

I am by no means the voicebox of Jim Lee (although that sounds like an ideal job for me), but I don’t think the joke was motivated by chauvinism, nor does it indicate a flippant attitude towards diversity, or women in particular.  I think he was simply poking fun at the issue, which was not only incorrect (Ryan Sook’s cover to Justice League Dark #1 features not one, but three women prominently on the center of the cover), but rather superficial as well.

With team books, the cover’s central figure usually features the team leader or the most recognizable (read: marketable) characters, especially for a debut issue.  Superhero team leaders are usually men because men compose most of the team, and that’s because most superheroes are male.  So yes, it’s true a lot of women aren’t featured centrally on these covers, but by the same token, neither are a lot of men.

So the most important question to ask is: why aren’t there more female heroes?  To offer a theory, let me tell you a bit about myself.  I’m a writer who takes stabs at fiction now and then (none published yet, probably for good reason).  In almost all my stories, my protagonist and a lot of the principal cast are male.  I’m a guy; I’m much more familiar with how guys think or act; I hang out with a lot of guys; so I have more ideas for guy characters.  Considering the very vast majority of comic book writers are dudes, it stands to reason the number of male characters is exponentially larger than that of women.

But there are plenty of male writers enthusiastic about creating and depicting great women in comics.  Some of my favorite titles from DC right now feature women as stars (Bryan Q. Miller’s Batgirl, Gail Simone’s Birds of Prey, Kelly Sue DeConnick’s current run on Supergirl).  I imagine that’ll be the case in the future (imagine nothing—it’s definitely the case with Simone on Batgirl and Batwoman finally coming out).  And as circumstances of the stories change and the female characters get more prominence in the plot, they’ll be central cover features more often (like Donna Troy is all the time on Justice League of America now).

To truly help the cause of women in comics, let me say to you, Batgirl cosplayer and Angelica Brenner, do as Grant Morrison said, and “send your stuff in.”  Write and draw comics featuring women, and make them so good they’re impossible to ignore.  I can personally promise you readers of both genders will come.  Stridently accusing men of underestimating women, and then expecting men to increase their value seems a contradiction of principle to me.  But what do I know?  I’m just a man, after all.  It’s the women who run this muthah–

– Minhquan Nguyen