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• Thursday, February 9, 2006 08:39 AM

  This is already changing

  Anyone who is interested in this topic would probably benefit from checking out the book "From Girls to Grrlz : A History of Women's Comics from Teens to Zines" by Trina Robbins. She talks about changes in female characters, female readers, and female creators in American comics over the decades.

  On a tangent, The American comics industry has recently been blindsided by the huge amounts of American girls buying Japanese and Korean comics, when they had long insisted that girls just weren't as interested in comics as boys were. Now they are struggling to catch up and figure out how to actually market to what has turned out to be a huge demographic right under their noses. In Japan, females buy comics just as much as males, and there are plenty of working female cartoonists. Its sort of a chicken and egg question whether having more female creators brings in more female readers, or more female readers means more girls growing up to be cartoonists. In either case, the publishers in Japan know that there is money in comics for girls and women. Now that publishers here have begun to reawaken to this reality as well, there are going to be a lot of changes that are going to filter into tv and movies down the road. It's all about the money after all, and if the money is there, they are going to be chasing it.

  I think as well that the notion that boys won't watch/read things with girls as the main characters is going to change more and more in the future as the possible roles that female characters take are expanded. You just have to look at the success of the Buffy franchise to see where things are headed.

  —IronOrchid Read IronOrchid's other letters
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