Women Dynamite readers?

[ralphuniverse]

G'day,

Wonder whats happening with Dynamite:

http://www.themarysue.com/image-comi...e-demographic/

ta

Ralph

[pulphero]

G'day,

Wonder whats happening with Dynamite:

http://www.themarysue.com/image-comi...e-demographic/

ta

Ralph

They've got women writing Red Sonja and Vampirella. Does that count for anything? I read Fables and Love & Rockets, have zero interest in Rachel Rising and Saga (couldn't make it through the first issue). All those books are written by men. Frankly, I'm not sure I can pick out what makes a comic book accessible or attractive to women. Possibly something like the Luna Brothers' Alex + Ada, which is fantastic and has absolutely no people in tight clothing punching each other.

[ralphuniverse]

G'day,

Well it seems some writers don't believe comics are for women anyway.

http://observationdeck.io9.com/mark-...t-f-1095912572


Ralph

[pulphero]

If I'm being purely honest, I know where the old-school fanboys are coming from: in my secret little-boy heart-of-hearts I want comics to remain a secret insular club only for the cognoscenti, sort of a "He-Man Wimmen-Haters No-Girls-Allowed" treehouse with passwords and secret codes, because it appeals to that part of me that wants everything to be 'underground', 'cult', and 'cool'. Even though my adult brain knows that's courting the death of comics, I can identify.

There is sort of a chicken-or-the-egg conundrum there, in the circular logic of "girls don't read comics because there aren't any interesting ones to them", and when girl-oriented comics or heroes are tried they fail to sell as if to prove the point. There's no doubt that there's a societal gender bias against girls reading comics historically, despite decades worth of romance comics, Disney, Archie and Little Lulu. It does almost seem now as if the rallying cry of "diversity" in the industry is sort of a last-gasp of desperation in the decline of sales, and it may be too little, too late. Yet again, even if reader demographics were evenly split between the sexes, sales statistics today are a drop in the bucket (even if they were doubled) compared to sales of comics at their peak of popularity (which probably has nothing to do with sexism, and everything to do with competition from other media, and the general decline in reading demographics across the board).

Consider, for example, the inherent irony of this critical article (the modern equivalent of many such articles written in the late 1980s focusing on comics like The Dark Knight Returns, Watchmen, and V for Vendetta) on the New Republic website focusing on Mark Millar's comics. The article is peppered with ad links for League of Angels, "2014's HOTTEST MMORPG", featuring images of scantily-clad babes with abundant cleavage, which tends to put the article in an entirely different light than it otherwise might.