Where Are All The Women?
Taking a break from the creator commentaries to go back to a more general topic - one I've touched on before but never with much depth, and that's the shortage of female comic makers on this forum. Prior to writing this, I looked at the personal profile of everyone who had started a topic in the comic forum that had been posted in the last 20 days - of the four pages of topics, only four people claimed to be female. This was actually slightly better than I was expecting - Miraka was the only one I knew of doing comics recently. But it was still a disappointing statistic.
After all this time here, there are only two female comic makers I'm familiar with (I know that there have been way more than that, but there's only two I know of). The first is, of course, my old partner Lady Ervai. She was (and most likely still is, I just haven't had contact with here in a while) a very talented drawer who just brimmed with originality (or "weirdness" as she referred to it). I was very fortunate to have her as a partner in my, err, formative years.
The second is the previously mentioned Miraka of Alternate Reality Inc., a series she started a couple of weeks after she joined BZPower. She is - and I can not emphasize this enough - insanely talented. Every other comic maker I know started off with really childish stuff - I did, Dark709 did, T-E did...silly, goofy, very poorly-drawn stuff. Not Miraka. She started her series with a level of humor and graphical skill I have never seen from a beginner. In the six months since she's started she's earned a well-deserved status in the comic forum.
Now I don't want to come off as sexist; I know you can't determine an entire gender based on two examples. HOWEVER, I can't help but shake the feeling that we're missing out on a lot of great talent and potential when the vast majority of the comic forum is one gender.
This is one of the last comics I did before the finale series, and I still stand by nearly all of what I said. When you have so many male comic makers, female characters seem to fall in one of two categories: they're either 1) the girlfriend of the main character (numerous examples of this - Chilly of Gavla, L'evia in mine) or 2) they fall into the "girly" stereotype of being love-struck teens who say "like whatever" all the time (Zacku of Dark709's comics is probably the best example). There's nothing wrong with using a character who falls into one of these categories of course, it's just that...well, those are the only two categories.
The one part of that comic I'd probably take back is the comment about BZPower being "such a male-driven site". The majority of the site seems to be male, but I can find females playing significant roles in other parts of this site. I've seen plenty of females in the Artwork I forum and we have the likes of GaliGee in the library forums. Why doesn't the comic forum have that?
I'm going to leave the rest to the comments forum. Thoughts? Arguments for/against? Solutions for getting more girls into comics?
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