T Campbell's Blog

Girl Genius? Colleen Doorhan?

It's a good article, but he's missing stuff like always.

And no, I didn't write a word. I don't know what it is, it's like I need an audience or at least one in my head when I write...

Wow, I just felt like I had a light bulb actually pop on above my head.

Where are you planing on going with this anyhow? The book I mean. Printed, some kind of e-book, just for the fun of it?
 

The book is coming out early next year from Antarctic Press. It's supposed to help me eat for a while.

I don't think the existence of a few girl-oriented comics really disproves anything. In fact, Girl Genius just got OUT of the direct market because of low sales of individual issues. I don't know Colleen Doran's sales figures, but they can't be all that. How many issues does she put out a year?

And then, of course, there's PENNY AND AGGIE, which has gotten some nice reviews (I loved it when the Digital Strips guys said they'd mistake me for a woman if they didn't know better)-- is steadily building an online audience-- and is selling abysmally in the DM.

The real point is that the high rollers in the American field-- DC, Marvel, the biggest retailers, the biggest critics-- don't have clue one what makes shoujo work, and as long as they don't, those of us trying to sell or buy shoujo-like stuff in the American market are spitting into the wind.
 

And so comes the moment to give them all the one fingered salute and carry on. Oh and HSK is ok, he's caring for some family members for now.

And I was serious about the title. How about _Graffiti on the underpass of the Information Super Highway: A history of webcomics_ ?

and at the least I have pagemaker 6.5 I can pour your text into and print you up a dummy to see how it looks.
 

Word. Absolute, word.

The biggest problem in mainstream comics today is we don't want any hens in the rooster house. Say what I just typed outloud and think about fucking stupid it sounds.

I love Superhero comics, and I've made superhero comics, but I'll be the first to say the companies that publish them aren't marketing a single book toward women, not even the few books written by female authors. I think the costume designs for female characters that would make a street-corner-prostitute blush say that in volumes.

But the issue American comic readers and publishers have with manga isn't that it's attracting a female comics reading audience, because they obviously don't WANT a female reading audience. It's that it's telling them their rigid pre-conception of what makes a comic book sell is WRONG. Marvel and DC are like the Amish of the print industry- they're not going to change their ways, and when they even try to, it's in such a half-hearted way you can tell they didn't want to attempt it in the first place. Marvel Mangaverse, anyone?(The only decent thing about that short lived imprint was Ben Dunn's character designs)
 

Dead on.

One point I think he's missing (well, not so much "missing" as deliberately leaving out for the sake of story flow), of course, is that girls aren't the only ones who like manga, even shoujo manga. But it's minor, and it's not that important.

I think copies of this editorial need to be plastered to the faces of the editors at both houses, and fast.
 

I agree with a lot of what this article talks about, although I do think they miss a few points.

(One minor kvetch -- my understanding is that the Super-Deformed gimmick developed in anime first and was then picked up by manga artists as a sight gag, not the other way around, but who knows, maybe I got it wrong.)

The biggest example of Marvel and DC "not getting it" is, in my opinion, the "teen romance" comic titled TROUBLE, written by Mark Millar. It was intended to be a springboard for the revitalized (heh) Epic imprint, and was supposed to be a girl-friendly romance comic.

I remember when the cover image was released: a picture of two girls wearing bikinis, looking at the camera over their sunglasses. The Marvel fandom exploded with indignant outrage that I still don't understand: that the girls looked like prostitutes (the less said about THAT, the better), that it was bordering on child porn (???), and so on. My take on it was that they were trying to market this book to teen girls, so put teen girls on the cover -- seems rational, right?

Marvel's answer to this "controversy" was to release an alternate cover, drawn by Frank Cho, who is most famous for drawing pretty girls with large breasts for male readers to ogle over. Indeed, his new cover was an image of the two main characters fixing their hair and doing makeup in front of a mirror, and one of the girls was bent ninety degrees at the waist and wearing nothing more than a tiny bra, the better for fanboys to see her nearly-naked breasts.

Add to the boiling pot a ludicrous press release by Marvel that implied that this story would tie into Spider-Man continuity somehow (supposedly that this was the story of a Hot Teen Aunt May, and how she got preggers, and that she might, gasp, be Peter Parker's real mom), and the book's dismail failure was pretty much sealed from the beginning, even if the content of the book had been on par with Shakespeare -- which it wasn't.

Marvel Didn't Get It, when it came to female readers. It was never more obvious.

- Isaac
 

And Kaja Foglio adds her two cents.

http://www.livejournal.com/users/kajafoglio/24949.html?thread=416117#t416117

oh let's see....elfquest

*DFG watches with fear and trepidation for the results of mentioning Colleen Dorhan and elfquest in the same place.*
 

Yes, DFG, but when's the last time you've seen a comic store promote ElfQuest?
 

I've seen it in our library, waaaaay before they started getting any of the other graphic novels that they have.
 

The comic publishers don't get it, not at all. But, to be fair, as he mentioned, neither do the retailers. Very few of the comic shops I've been to have been set up to be inviting to women, girls, or children of any stripe. Or parents, especially. Dirty, or unorganized, or not bothering to stock anything, or poorly lit, or just not caring if people come in... It's like some shops try to drive anybody but their core base away. Which is their right, I suppose, but it hurts everybody else.

But yeah, Marvel and DC Don't Get It, and neither do a lot of their fans. Which is sad, because if they tried it, they might not find out it's so bad. And makemore money. And more women in comics, both as readers and writers would be a good thing on many levels. And it might get a few more geeks off the net once in a while. Heh.

And about ElfQuest, it was one of the first comics I read in a collection, which I got from, yes, my local library. I also discovered Thieves and Kings the same way. Yay for smart librarians with good taste.
 

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