Should Women Give Up On Comics?

It’s worth it to keep nudging even as I totally understand the reasons why it might make more sense, strategically and emotionally, to walk away… [However,] it’s much better to have folks around explaining why it doesn’t work… so there will be clear, articulated reasons why people saw the relaunch as a failure to produce something genuinely different. And second, even if the industry doesn’t change, there should be voices in the background when folks read these books pointing out their problems. The key is getting folks who really just want to see, say, Catwoman bang Batman and nothing else to hear those critiques and to find a way to engage with them constructively, which is really, profoundly difficult. But I’d rather live in a world where people who don’t want to hear the works they like criticized have to work to shut them out, rather than leaving them to relax into the blissful sounds of silence. — Alyssa Rosenberg

Actually, Ms. Rosenberg is addressing the question “Should feminists give up on comics,” a question distinctly rooted in the context of events that happened over the last week in mainstream American superhero comics. But her answer applies to many parts of our culture in which women are but minority and it is either assumed that it is not worth pursuing the reasons why, or that the hypothetical reasons why are insurmountable.

(Read Rosenberg’s whole post here.)

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Susana Polo

Susana Polo thought she'd get her Creative Writing degree from Oberlin, work a crap job, and fake it until she made it into comics. Instead she stumbled into a great job: founding and running this very website (she's Editor at Large now, very fancy). She's spoken at events like Geek Girl Con, New York Comic Con, and Comic Book City Con, wants to get a Batwoman tattoo and write a graphic novel, and one of her canine teeth is in backwards.

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