sexism

I've been really overwhelmed by the positive response and support I've received from the comics community (and beyond) about my op-ed on female sexuality in the DC relaunch during the last week, and how heartened it made me feel about the possibility for change...

Yesterday, two new comic books from the "New 52" relaunch of DC Comics provoked some online controversy: Catwoman and Red Hood and the Outlaws. They were controversial in particular because of the way they depicted women, notably with the aggressively fanfictiony on-panel sex between Batman and Catwoman, and Starfire's transformation into a promiscuous tabula rasa who can't even remembe

Today, ComicsAlliance welcomes guest writer Rachel Edidin, who works as an editor at Dark Horse Comics. Lately, between Womanthology and DC's All-New-Almost-All-Male 52, the popular lens has turned -- as it is wont to do every year or so -- to the Problem of Women in Comics, namely, whether there are enough of them, and if not, what, if anything, should be done to fix that...

Supergods and Action Comics writer Grant Morrison has long been known for his frank, revealing interviews, and his latest Q&A at Rolling Stone is no exception, full of blisteringly (and admirably) straight talk on a wide range of topics: sexism in superhero comics; the disturbing use of rape in Identity Crisis and Alan Moore's work; why he no longer hangs out with Mark Millar; and perhaps most

A few days ago, I wrote an editorial about DC Comics Co-Publisher Dan DiDio's response to fan concerns about the extremely low numbers of female creators involved in the DC Comics relaunch this September -- and, to be fair, mainstream comics more generally -- and the impact that such a disproportionate gender split has both on a company's culture and creatively, particularly if it is trying to rea

Last Thursday at Comic-Con International, during the first of four New 52 panels held by DC Comics to discuss their line-wide relaunch of superhero titles this September, a fan walked up to the microphone and posed a question to Co-Publisher Dan DiDio about the demographics of the New 52 creators: "Why did you go from 12% in women to 1% on your creative teams...

Ah, Dilbert. For so long, you have lingered there on the comics page, always ready to barrel-shoot the inanity of office culture with your humorously-coiffed characters and beleaguered engineers, locked forever in a corporate development hell that your humor at first mocked, and then later resembled...

Brace yourself, readers, because this may be tough to believe! The Daily Cartoonist reports on a paper presented to the American Sociological Association that discusses the role of female characters in newspaper comics. The paper examined a full year's worth of strips from "Beetle Bailey," "Blondie," "Dilbert," "Family Circus," "Garfield," and &quo

As perhaps the most prominent female writer in superhero comics today, Gail Simone might not be the first person in the industry that you'd expect to get called out for sexism and misogyny. And yet, a male reader (and self-proclaimed gender studies student) -- who also patronized Simone with comments like, "You don't understand feminism, dear" -- did just that yesterday, sparking both a

Our water-is-wet obvious fact of the day: Mainstream comic books love their cheesecake. As anyone with eyes knows, hyper-sexualized images of women are practically a pillar of the superhero comics institution, which NPR calls "a genre in which the terms unexpected and unmarketable are, alas, all too often virtual synonyms...