i think you were right with sliver (any small, narrow piece or portion, e.g: a sliver of sky was visible)

THERE’S AN ALTERNATE ENDING?

If females are misrepresented or underrepresented in mainstream comics, why is that so?

When Marvel comics writer, Gerry Conway, and comic illustrator, Gil Kane, sent Spider-man’s gorgeous, blonde girlfriend plummeting to her death off the George Washington Bridge at the hands of the Green Goblin, and had Spider-man himself believe he had saved her only to realize that he had actually snapped her neck and killed her, I highly doubt they were looking to make a political, misogynistic statement at female readers. (The Amazing Spider-Man #121, Conway)  I don’t think that they meant for female readers to turn away from the Spider-man series forever spurned that one of the most explored female characters at that time (1975) had been killed by her love interest essentially to forward his story arc and give him something new and angsty to fight about with, wait for it, other men. But up until then, main characters, or almost-main-characters if they were female, were hardly ever killed in comics, let alone so suddenly. Heroes had never failed so hugely before, as Peter Parker failed Gwen Stacy in that issue. Since this issue, many lady characters have met similar ends, for seemingly similar reasons. But are there unintentional misogynistic statements being made here? Is there a tendency within these mainstream comics and “geek” culture to discard female characters and female consumers? If we look at mainstream comics, which from here on out I am going to define as pretty specifically the two primary companies in the industry, Marvel Comics and DC Comics, while it’s not 1975 anymore, there still seems to be a pretty sizable disconnect between what female consumers of these companies are looking to buy and what they are interested in, versus what is actually being produced for them to purchase. Most of what’s being produced for purchase are male narratives, written by males, illustrated by males, supported by male-centric movie universes, and novelty merchandise products (i.e. Batman underwear, endless boy oriented toy production, etc) designed to sell to young boys, or men.  As a female comic reader, I love Spider-man. He’s a great character and has the ability to be adapted into deep, thrilling stories about a snarky teen ager into photograhy and saving citizens in a good natured, somewhat vigilante style. It’s good. But when the majority of the female characters of a series are either sexualized spin-offs (see: Spider-girl) or girlfriends (Gwen Stacy or MJ) I can’t help but be a little curious as to what’s going on. Researching some of the problems or experiences I’ve had with the mainstream comic culture gives me an opportunity to learn about the culture and maybe why it is the way that it is, or why I’ve had some of these experiences. As a consumer in any industry, I think I have the right (and so do you)  to be critical of the things that I consume and whether or not those things are sending me harmful messages. Big entertainment companies that I give my money to disregarding my consumer demographic as unimportant, seems like an issue I might want to know more about.

In our American  society, comic books are fairly commonplace, we’ve all seen some Batman movie or dressed up as a hero (or heroine) for Halloween. Comic books made their way from a relatively small artistic medium to literally being on the big screen. People who navigate the “geek” community usually have staggered amounts of experience within the community. Some people get monthly issues of regular comics, some people simply see the movies and only know the movie-verses. A few times a year around the country gatherings are held, like Comic-Con, for superhero fans to dress up like their favorite characters to discuss comics and upcoming releases, and of course purchase new materials and sometimes even meet some of the people who are involved with producing their favorite comics. Slowly but surely more and more female comic book enthusiasts are making their way to these gatherings, and more female writers are making their way there as well. American history with hero comics go back to around the Great Depression, and with the frequency of superhero movie releases seemingly increasing every year, we can assume they aren’t going anywhere. As this continues to be a medium more explored, we must also explore the representations that this medium presents, specifically gendered representations. Simply put, are mainstream comics misrepresentative or under-representative of women, and if so, why might this be?

In the death of Gwen Stacy I see one of the chronologically first tangible wrongs that mainstream comic culture has committed against female characters and readers. Of course, the intangible being that I can’t complain about the treatment of female characters whose stories were literally never written in the first place. The earliest comic books featured men as heroes, and women were simple damsels, one dimensional girlfriends, mothers, career-girls, or a gripping combination of the four. The first widely recognized female superhero appeared in the 1940’s; Wonder Woman. According to the Fall 2001 issue of the Boston University alumni magazine, the original creator of this phenomenal, breakaway, female narrative, William Marston, was inspired to write this character by his wife Elizabeth, and also at times based Wonder Woman off of her. However, this strong female icon came of course with her fair share of faults. Though she was the only mainstream female face at the time, and arguably still is the only really recognizable female super-heroine that lead comic companies like DC and Marvel have allowed to be recognizable, the “Wonder Woman” in the comics came with a lot of mixed messages towards her growing female fanbase. In Enter the Superheroes, the author Alex Romagnoli says, “What Wonder Woman’s appearance does do is establish her as the premiere female super hero. However, her origins are a bit more scandalous than many readers realize.” Visually, bondage imagery knew no bounds in these issues; since Wonder Woman’s powers had a lot to with her Amazon bracelets, villains would frequently chain these bracelets and her wrists together to limit her power.  Setting Wonder Woman up as a strong, independent female character but then also serving her up as a meal for male eyes, literally chained up, defenseless in some comics, seems kind of conflicting. No one’s saying Wonder Woman can’t have weaknesses or even a sexuality, but creating her in the image of female power by the Goddess Aphrodite, and then visually depicting her in compromising ways for male gaze; I’m skeptical at my most accepting. Secondly, issues where Wonder Woman’s bracelets are broken, tell a narrative where female power without restraint leads to self destruction.("The Unbound Amazon", Sensation Comics #19)  Even in a comic universe where Wonder Woman is president or a Sun God, female power is still given the message that it has to be restrained.   Even in it’s earliest stages, we can see there are some significant gripes with the way females are represented in mainstream comics.

A frequent argument that tries to shirk egalitarian responsibility away from comic writers, producers, and culture, is that females aren’t interested enough in, even female oriented, comics to make them a major market concern for these big companies. The people who argue these points like to cite some previous industry failures; a favorite talking point from this angle being the Elektra movie (2005), which in box office sales totalled at nearly $56 million dollars; a low for Marvel. But when people argue that female films don’t do well because not enough female consumers exist, they are ignoring several other factors of this specific movie’s failure.  Elektra also received terrible reviews from nearly all major critic sources. Marvel spent about $43 million dollars on producing the movie, which is less than half of the $100 million they spent in the same year, on a Fantastic Four movie, featuring three male leads. It may also be worth commenting that the only female lead portrayed in this movie’s power is to literally turn invisible. How’s that for subtle statements about female roles in comics and comic industry? Suzanne Scott’s “Fangirls in Refrigerators” that we’ll explore further later, raises this point. Before the first Fantastic Four was even released, Marvel was already promising a movie sequel. Spider-man 2 released in 2004, had a budget of $200 million, roughly five times the amount of millions of dollars than was spent on making Elektra  a good movie.  (Budget and box office numbers taken from IMDb.com) Aside from the sheer number of fans that a comic published for nearly forty years would have over a relatively new character, who had been featured in a solo series for a very short amount of time and publications, the disparity of money that Marvel pumped into the two storylines could have set Elektra up to fail by comparison. The bad critic ratings that it received weren’t  because it was a “boring, bad, lady story movie!” but because it was a bad movie altogether.  Blaming female fans for not throwing their money at a bad film, or citing this failure as a reason to not make good female-centric cinema extensions of their comics, frankly doesn’t take advantage of the female (and male) fans willing to throw their money at a Black Widow solo film or a Wonder Woman solo film. Not to mention that recently Marvel stated that one of it’s newer series Ms. Marvel, became the most purchased and downloaded electronic comic. Ms. Marvel revolves around a relatively non -sexualized, Muslim teenage girl. Maybe the problem isn’t that female fans don’t want to monetarily support their beloved characters, but maybe the spaces these big companies set up to allow us to do so, aren’t very female friendly to begin with. Drawing from personal experience here, being made to feel uncomfortable in comic book stores because of gender is a common practice. Maybe some of this further research sheds light on why that could be.

Last year on the Television Critics Association press tour, in an all male panel of legendary comic writers, including Gerry Conway (mentioned above) and Todd McFarlane, creator of Spawn, when the discussion came to sexism or misrepresentation of women in comics, Conway said “the comics follow society. They don’t lead society.”   In this conversation, these writers own up to the unrealistic standards their female characters’ bodies are held to, and the amount of skin they show in their faulty-at-best combat costumes. They also talk about the “barrier for new talent” among the top two comic companies, acknowledging a staff somewhat lacking in diversity of sex and race. To explore this point further, Marjorie Liu, a female comic writer for Marvel, said in an interview about women in comics, “ I mean if you look at the numbers of women actually writing and drawing at the Big Two, we're lucky if out of 52 books at DC we get maybe three women. The numbers are slightly better at Marvel but that's still not many women participating in creating them. I don't think the numbers lie, I think there is an imbalance.” From a writing perspective, the stories being written and illustrated “the Big Two” are primarily being written and drawn by men.

Essentially, the male panel of legendary comic book writers, talked about the problems of comics, all while saying they aren’t really the problems of comics at all. They push the issues aside and basically classify the comic book industry as an outlet for male power fantasy, with McFarlane saying comics may not “be the right platform” to tell stories of emboldened women. While these views may not be frequently articulated, throughout comic culture, these seem to be fairly run-of-the-mill opinions. There aren’t too many people refuting that females are misrepresented and even underrepresented in comics, the true discrepancy that I should have maybe asked seems to be over whether or not that’s actually a problem. For me, a female comic consumer, it is. For the other 24 million potential female consumers that were found in a social marketing study by Brett Schenker of graphicspolicy.com, it is. For women hoping to be in the mainstream hero comic industry some day, or the few women who are in it now, this is a significant problem. To say that comics are a symptom of a bigger, widespread sexism is probably somewhat true. But presented as an argument to say that comic culture doesn’t have a problem with the way it sells to or portrays women, seems like a kind of circular logic coming from the people who are creating these comics that are poorly portraying women. If the legendary men in this field have no qualms about admitting that the industry is based in male power fantasies, then what hope should females have in the advancement of such a culture?

In Suzanne Scott’s "Fangirls In Refrigerators: The Politics Of (In)Visibility In Comic Book Culture,” she discusses the role that female characters are usually given in mainstream comics, even to date.  The phrase “women in refrigerators” is used to describe this phenomena where female characters are often brutalized, victimized, maimed, or killed to add emotional content, tragic backstory or just general spice to a male narrative. We talked a little about this when mentioning Gwen Stacy’s death. Scott says its not uncommon for female characters to be brutally killed as plot points for some of their male counterparts' stories. We have already had male writers establish that a fair amount of comics is centered around male fantasy. Combining these two sources’ pieces together a grim statement that no one seems to be capable of flat out stating. Already being in a culture that subconsciously tells me every single day that most of my existence rotates around male agenda and male desire, I also essentially have male writers telling me that their male power fantasy outlet, comics, largely rotates around the suppression of female power, and often the brutal death or victimization of female characters. As a female comic reader, that’s pretty alarming. Those are the messages that I’m being made to consume, and those are the messages that other fans are consuming. So when I’m in a space with a majority of male comic series fans, like for example a comic book store, I know the message that most of these dudes are receiving when they open comic books. Even female super heroes with super human strength, speed, intelligence, etc, can be dominated and made into subservient plotlines to their male counterparts. What does that say about the average, ordinary human female superhero fan to some readers? When we allow this representation of the female narrative and character, there are definite statements being made to female, as well as male, consumers.

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