women in comics

Have you ever met someone and felt like your world was changing around you? The sun shone brighter; birds suddenly started chirping; spring flowers sprung from the ground, even though it was only February? That’s what Alone feels like.

EmCarroll.com is an oft-updated website collecting the various comics of horror storyteller Emily Carroll. Some are quick illustrations, as nasty as a bad dream, and others are longer works designed to crawl under your skin and live there, and fester. All of them will haunt you for days.

When there are four launch titles as bold, inventive and unique as Young Animal's line-up, it's hard to pick a stand-out, but Cecil Castellucci, Marley Zarcone and Kelly Fitzpatrick's Shade, The Changing Girl has established itself as a weird mix of deeply personal and super sci-fi high-concept, with one of the strongest collaborative voices in mainstream comics today This week, DC and Young Animal release the climax of Shade's first story, as Megan Boyer returns and wants her body back from the weird alien bird that stole it. ComicsAlliance caught up with Castellucci and Zarcone to talk about high school anxiety, Pinterest collaboration, and Shade's future in the larger DC Universe.

This year's Angouleme was the subject of controversy when the list of creators in contention for the Grand Prix was unveiled, and all 30 nominees were men. The longlist was eventually thrown out in favor of an open vote, which coalesced around three names; Hermann Huppen, Alan Moore, and Claire Wendling. Huppen, known professionally as Hermann, is rumored to have won, despite having said he would decline the award. The controversy prompted some debate about which women should have been in consideration, with the sort of career and longevity that a lifetime achievement award is meant to recognize. Some people have argued that few eligible women exist, but the reality is that women are undervalued, and the extent of their contributions have been overlooked. We've compiled a list of 12 women who deserve recognition for their lifetime of work in comics, but this is just scratching the surface.

The Angoulême Grand Prix is a prestigious lifetime achievement award for comic book creators; this week, the Festival d’ Angoulême announced the 30 nominees for 2016, the Grand Prix’s 43rd year, and already several have withdrawn their names from consideration. The reason? Of the thirty nominees, not one was a woman.

The comics world is full of questions, from, “Who would win in a fight?” to, “Who came up with that weird idea?” Here at ComicsAlliance, we spend a lot of time thinking about all of it, from the big questions that matter a lot to the small ones that probably don’t matter at all but are still kinda fascinating. With The Question, we’re going to give our writers the opportunity to answer some of these brain-ticklers, because if we’re thinking about these things, you might be thinking about them too. This time we asked our writers; what's your favorite comic by women about women? This year's Ignatz and Eisner wins suggest that women in comics are beginning to get the recognition they deserve, both as creators and as an audience. But there have always been great comics by women and great comics about women, and some comics that are both, and they exist across genres, borders, and cultures.

Today, The Mary Sue reported that GenCon would be hosting a panel titled "Writing Comics: Writing Women Friendly Comics" that featured only male comics writers. While GenCon has since stated that they will be including women on the panel, this isn't the first time this has happened at a convention. Men are also usually the majority of convention guests. One group of women hopes to make it the last time it happens.

Earlier this week, we told you about the Women in Comics panel at Denver ComicCon that had no women on the panel. As the convention concluded, more information about that panel came to light, and it's emerged that guests of the convention rallied to put on a more relevant Women in Comics panel. A group of creators and experts, including Trina Robbins, Crystal Skillman, Marguerite Bennett, Joelle Jones, and Amanda Conner, led what was apparently a thoughtful roundtable discussion about women in comics.

Hire This Woman is a recurring feature on ComicsAlliance that shines a spotlight on female comics creators, whether they're relative newcomers or experienced pros who are ready to break out. In an overwhelmingly male business, we want to draw your attention to these creators --- and to raise their profile with editors and industry gatekeepers. Busy cartoonist Natalie Nourigat has worked on Deadpool, Bee & PuppyCat, It Girl & the Atomics, and many of her own projects including the webcomic Home Is Where The Internet Is. She's also worked as a storyboard and commercial artist. She's currently working on a graphic novel for Oni Press called Over the Surface.

This weekend's Denver ComicCon came under fire when attendees discovered that a Women in Comics panel had only male panelists. While a representative of DCC has defended the panel as "not about current women creators or anything to do with industry bias," it seems odd that a convention with Trina Robbins, the eminent historian of women as creators and characters, as a guest would not invite her to join in on a discussion of the history of women in comics. While the misstep here is primarily on the panel organizers, it also raises a question of what obligation conventions have to moderate and comment on panels that are accepted.