Saturday, November 19, 2016

The Female Comics Fan


Early on in my professional artistic life I was friends with a group of fans in the Boston area who published somewhat "scholarly" and well-written fanzines about comics and comic book people. I would draw them cartoons for a few pennies and work on humorous illustrations for the text. This one comes from an entire magazine issue devoted to the question of girls and women as comic book fans. Why weren't violent super-hero or spy or war or horror comics appealing to females? Why were female super-heroes unpopular, and even written out of stories if they became too powerful? Why were females in comics depicted with grossly exaggerated bodies? No surprise, these are still questions that are relevant in the comics world though great progress has been made. The comic creator community is much more gender-diverse than it used to be but there is still an overload of males in the business. There have been attempts all along to make comics that appeal to girls and women, with varying success, as I've drawn here with "Ms. Meteor." But I've always been a comics fan no matter what the theme is, and the fangirl you see at left is (except for the bushy hairdo) a self-portrait of what I looked like in my high school days.

Black ink on illustration board, 6" x 7 1/2", mid to late 1980. That's 36 years, folks. 

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