I ran out of ideas after about two pages. I hated the look of the hands I’d drawn, and the pages didn’t look right, though I couldn’t put my finger on why. Something wasn’t working. I lacked some important, but unknown, capacity and so I stopped.

This was the pattern—hit the wall, get frustrated, put it aside. It is not the most efficient way to progress, and worse, my drawing teacher in the graphic design program I got into in college was one of those “learn by doing” types for most things–which made me loco, because I am not.

I was not actually taught quite a lot of useful things. Easy things. Simple draftsmanship, and I mean simple draftsmanship–how to easily find the centre of a rectangle even when in perspective is a simple matter of drawing diagonals from opposing corners, so that where they cross, you find the centre. Try drawing a building, window, robot, or anything in perspective without knowing this. I couldn’t–my attempt at a perspective projection in class was half erasing, half applying my brainpan to my desk. I did learn things there, between bouts of planning my escape to a life of piracy on the high seas.

I left school. I didn’t pick up a pencil again for a year. When I realized that the hideous experience wasn’t more important to me than making comics, I started drawing again, and reading. I found the information was out there in dribs and drabs, so I finally made real progress, on my own, in little steps.

I have limited advice that’s worth anything–I cannot tell you if art school is or isn’t worth your time. Some people love it and benefit hugely. Some fantasize about piracy on the high seas. I will say that fine art may not serve you as directly for comics the way graphic art/design might, because they have a different focus.

I can tell you that you can start drawing whenever you want. I know people who started up after decades not drawing. You learned to walk and talk, you can learn this. I have tutored an eleven year old boy and a forty year old man. It doesn’t matter.

I can tell you that anybody (mainly well-meaning teachers and peers) who told you in grammar school to stop drawing because you weren’t good enough were wrong (and silly). It’s fine if you pursued other things and aptitudes, but they were wrong. You can start again. You can learn any time.

Because the truth is, most people are average. Some people are that in that rare, fingernail fraction of the pie that is genius, but most aren’t. So what? It’s always been that way. You get better by working at it, like every other skill, just as you’ve always done since walking and talking.

So, if you’re starting out and don’t know where to start at all, I present a list of books and resources I’ve found helpful, and why. These are all texts I have used personally. You can get them from your local library or buy them yourself. I have organized them by category, and the first is on figure drawing.

You cannot make comics about people without understanding how they work. When an artist does not understand anatomy, it shows. You can reference for complex poses or details, but if you don’t understand anatomy, proportion and body language, your figures will look weird and unnatural. They will not convey the emotion you need to get your point across.

This does not mean your figures need to be photorealistic. On the contrary, I find very few people can pull off dynamic action with a photorealistic approach–too much detail, no matter how exquisitely rendered, can suck a lot of energy out of the action.

From my own experience, there are particular areas to pay attention to, and I am generally of the opinion that it is better to learn real anatomy and then simplify and adapt a style out of it. Get a good foundation first–just like with writing, if you study it (and I have), profs like to get you started with a literary foundation first. You can always go bouncing off into genre style later. Trying to learn to draw from comics alone could hinder you–creating an extreme, exaggerated funhouse mirror effect. Just look at the 90s. Ye gods.

So my recommendations will mostly fall along traditional lines, with a few important cautions:

1. Anatomy books are full of naked people, and people who look to have been flayed or taken apart–skulls with eyeballs and brow muscles, backs laid open with the muscles depicted, skeletons in poses, that sort of thing. Just a caution to the squeamish–a friend of mine still learning to draw finds my books unbearably creepy.
2. Most how-to books tend to assume everybody’s white, and usually, a specific 6’4” northern European white dude. Eyelids depicted will not include epicanthic folds, which neatly excludes people from Asia, Inuit and First Nations people, some Africans, many South Pacific peoples, and some Europeans. Proclamations about cheekbone width, nose width, nostril shape and facial slope should be taken with a grain of salt. When depicting distinct ethnic groups, find your reference and sweat the small stuff, just like in portraiture.
3. Most how-to books tend to present hypermasculine and hyperfeminine models. How-to draw comics books are especially bad for this–see above, don’t learn to draw from comics. Men and women’s skulls and skeletons don’t actually reliably conform to the models these books would have you believe–ask an archaeologist or pathologist about determining gender from a skull. Then offer them sympathy. How-to books with a focus on comics also tend not to show you how to depict kids of various ages, and many artists struggle with them (the Choi/Oback team did well in X-23: Target X, however).
4. Do not expect most books to show you useful things like how to depict fat, injury, disease, or other physiological conditions. They do not generally depict sex organs either, if necessary to your work, and many do not show internal organs. You just have to do your own research. Terry Moore (Strangers in Paradise, Echo) knows a thing or two about body types.

None of these are insurmountable (except the creepy factor) once you understand the basics, but be aware of these issues.

The best books I’ve got fall on a continuum of how-to technique and reference.

The best written material I have yet found on drawing technique would be the legendary series by Andrew Loomis. All of them are good, good luck finding them–for some reason, the publishers in their wisdom have allowed them to go out of print. I found a used, stained, fairly stinky copy of Andrew Loomis’ Figure Drawing For All It’s Worth for $100. It is my smelly baby and I love it. Some little softcovers are out there, however, and I strongly recommend Drawing the Head and Figures In Action.

Loomis’ books are brilliant, plain English (though dated), with concrete advice and many very good diagrams and examples which you can find via Google Image Search. I’m not suggesting or nothin’, but e-books are out there. Update your antivirus and anti-spyware.

Multiple texts offer the benefit of perspective. Maybe you don’t agree with Loomis. Maybe you want more focus on bones, or photographs. Other useful texts:

Dynamic Figure Drawing and Dynamic Anatomy by Burne Hogarth is better for heroic anatomy and figure practice, lots of examples, big illustrations. Leans a bit heavier on art jargon than others, and can be intimidating because of this. His figures often look somewhat elongated.

Anatomy for the Artist by Sarah Simblett has a lot of big, high quality pictures. Features a brief look at sex organs (unusual!), a section on drawing the skeleton in perspective, vellum overlays of skeleton over photo, and the nice feature of anatomy in masterworks. Glossary of anatomical jargon. Unique in my searching for models who are people of colour. Overall: swank.

Anatomy: A Complete Guide for Artists by Joseph Sheppard — Bones and muscles, bones and muscles, bones and muscles! Other things, of course, but this book is so good with bones that I loaned my copy to my sister so she could study for her archaeology exam. No foolin’ (and she passed). If you want to draw a skeleton army, this one is very good. Lots of drawn examples. A reference.

An Atlas of Anatomy for Artists by Fritz Schider — a reference text, what sets this one apart is the sheer breadth of examples, which is basically all it is. Photographs, details of sculpture, engravings, studies from Da Vinci, and Muybridge’s motion studies to name a few. Notable for the inclusion of children’s development as well. Light on text, but technical (with wee tiny print).

Drawing the Head and Figure by Jack Hamm — Dense with detail does not describe. Wall to wall illustrations. Simple, not too jargony, fairly inexpensive. Broad, like Loomis, but with little text. An overall good book to start with and to refer to.

Go forth to your local library or book store and check these and other titles out to find the best for your needs. A used book store may ferret out some Loomis texts for you, but be prepared to be disappointed, unfortunately, as they are sought after and rare.

My next entry will be on drawing the head, and adapting anatomy rules put forth in these books to particular situations.

What? No, we’ll tell you the fat guy’s name later. Oh, and yeah, that singer in the background and hitman Finnigan’s comment is significant, you’re right, but we don’t have time to explain what it refers to and – look, yes, I know you don’t know why that Indian guy called Kal with a bionic hand is so grumpy but – okay, look, SHOOTING. That’s cool, eh? Lookit the yellow speed lines!

That’s me trying to explain the plot of 2000 AD’s current Sinister Dexter story. That story is tied into other stories going back eight years, none of which are in trade. There is little to explain what’s going on to anyone new (That Reminds Me Of This has ended up completely bored of the strip as a result of not knowing who the drokk anyone is). I’ve been reading 2000 AD since 2003 and even I get lost at times.

This is the curse of the serial comic: trying to tell the story and not get bogged down in exposition, while also trying to fill in anyone new what’s going on. Or rather, it should be trying to fill in anyone new. And there’s the problem: Sinister Dexter doesn’t seem to be assuming anyone new will be picking up 2000 AD.

And it’s not alone in this. I read the Norman Osborn-era Thunderbolts comic, Ellis thru Parker, and during the Dark Reign issues it could get very confusing. The Siege tie-in was especially bizarre: what the hell is going on here? Why is it happening? Why is there a war against Asgard? If it wasn’t for the Internet, I’d have been lost: the Thunderbolts tie-in to Secret Invasion was guilty of assuming I knew about the crossover too, but “shape-shifting aliens are attacking!” is a lot easier to grasp on the go.

You can all think of your own examples. But the alternative is often… well, Comics Alliance did a very funny comic strip summing up the backstory of X-Man Rachel Summers. It’s confusing, messy, and if a comic tried to explain it to you in a story you’d recoil from the damn thing. I read Spider-Man during the Clone Saga and remember issues that opened with millions of captions explaining every damn facet of the past umpteen issues, and that never stopped being far too confusing.

And then there’s that infamous Batgirl two-page spread of the whole Bat Family talking through Cassandra Cain’s last two years of stories in intricate detail. Who doesn’t get a headache just looking at it? Why would it make someone want to read more about Cass?

Too often, comics either assume nobody new will be reading or bombards new readers with too much. Both options are harmful, they turn off new readers (and the latter pisses off the existing ones). We need better options here.

Luckily, we’ve got some. How does Grant Morrison deal with Cyclops being possessed by Apocalypse for a whole story? “He was taken over by one of them ‘evil forces’ we run into from time to time,” sums up Logan, and it’s made Scott a mess: that’s all you have to know, and it tells you what life is like in the X-Men and (later in the scene) what Logan thinks of Scott. How does Garth Ennis get out of the Punisher being turned into a hitman for Heaven and get him back to killing normal criminals? “Tried it. Didn’t like it.”

We need these things to be kept simple, to the point, and tied into the story. Otherwise, we’ll get very, very, very, very confused and/or bored – and why read something that makes you confused or bored?

The immediate reaction, if you’re me (and I see no reason to assume you’re not), is to seek out every possible piece of information, rumour and speculation about this. And basically every aspect of this fills me with joy.

The Legend of Korra starts 70 years after the defeat of Fire Lord Ozai. We have a new Avatar, Korra, the next after Aang – a Southern Water Tribe woman. She’s older than Aang was, a teenage, and has already mastered Water, Earth and Fire. She’s come to Republic City to learn Airbending from Aang’s son Tenzin (Aang is presumed dead, unless they’ve pulled a Buffy*). There’s people of all nations** in Republic City, it’s crime-ridden, and there’s an anti-bender revolt which Korra has to work against while learning to airbend. This will apparently be a slightly more grown-up series.

If you didn’t see Avatar: The Last Airbender and want to know what was so great about it, Shaker Seraph’s series of critical posts does a great job of exploring the show’s highlights and problems from a feminist point of view. For those of us who loved the series, a lot of the good feelings we had – from a series with capable women everywhere, entirely populated by Asian*** characters, with a level of drama and storytelling not neared by your average childrens’ cartoon, that actually used the word “sexist” – were soured by a live-action film with none of these virtues. The good people at Racebending did more than anyone to push back against everything that was wrong with the film. I’d like to think that it’s partly because of them that Nickelodeon commissioned a new series with all the things we loved about the old one. It’s probably just because the movie made some money, but still.

And the lead character’s a woman! But then, why wouldn’t she be?

The new “Avatar” is a woman. What inspired you to change the sex of the protagonist of the series?

Michael DiMartino: It’s not so much about changing because we had Avatar Kyoshi before Aang. We’d established that the Avatar can be male or female and we just thought let’s explore one of those more in depth, because Kyoshi was a popular character with a lot of fans and it seemed like a great opportunity to not retread what we’d done with Aang, who was a great hero, we all loved him, but we really wanted to try something different. And we have so many great female fans out there, who really responded to Katara in the first series, we thought we have the fan base who are really going to enjoy seeing the Avatar be a female.

Konietzko: Mike and I, we love those characters too, and we’ve encountered countless fans who are male who really like those characters too. We just don’t subscribe to the conventional wisdom that you can’t have an action series led by a female character. It’s kinda nonsense to us.

More of this, please.

*In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, when the current Slayer dies a new young woman becomes the Slayer. In the finale of Season One, Buffy’s heart stops in a fight with the Master. Xander revives her, but her “death” was enough to trigger the awakening of a new Slayer, Kendra. You’re welcome!

** “All nations” is what this press release says. Does that mean the Air Nomads are back somehow? Perhaps some escaped the genocide!

*** At least, they’re as Asian as the characters of Lord of the Rings are white.

Endnote: we thought we’d pass on this announcement from Threadless, as some of our readers might be interested. We at GW are unaffiliated with Threadless and have no involvement with this promotion:

Threadless has recently launched their newest “loves” competition entitled “Threadless Loves Comics”. Threadless is SUPER excited for this one, because the chosen design will actually be worn by a character in an upcoming issue of New York Times Bestseller, Chew! (which is now becoming a TV series)! And that’s not even the half of it! $2,000 in cash, a $500 Threadless Gift Certificate, Original art, an iPad, and a collection of graphic novels are up for grabs, too! All you need to do to enter is create a design that is inspired by comics. Entries are being accepted until August 12th.

On a personal level, the show is always overwhelming. I work at my companies booth, so I don’t really get to enjoy it from a fan level. I don’t get to go to panels unless I’m on them, the parties are places to see people and discuss projects, and most meals are sporadic or business/catching up/con related. You kind of live off of stress, sugar, and caffeine for 5 days. Sleep deprivation makes you loopy, the walking and standing make your feet angry, and you get really sick of hearing your own voice. Usually right before you lose it and start to croak.

Sharing a space with something like 200K people is pretty much the definition of sensory overload. Getting from one end of the convention center to the other is a lot like fighting a mob sometimes, only they don’t have pitchforks, they have light saber replicas, giant bags with CHUCK or FRINGE or SUPERMAN on them, and poster tubes full of lead. You have to avoid stepping on little kids who look dazed and awed by the spectacle, and avoid getting shoulder checked by a Predator or a Klingon who doesn’t have any peripheral vision due to carefully applied prosthetics. Groups of steampunkers, carefully coiffed, will float by on amusingly anachronistic running sneakers, as zombies playfully gnaw on smiling attendees, and superheroes pose for glamour shots.

If I could describe SDCC in one made up word it would be: intensely-uber-pop-culture-whoa.

Every year I hear similar complaints about the con, usually about the size, the lines, the various fans, and the way comics are supposedly being squeezed out. From my perspective, as someone who works for an independent publisher, I really can’t say that I share the view of the latter. We were insanely busy all weekend. Every fan I talked to was a comic book reader, of all kinds of books, and were just happy to be there and share the experience and love of the medium with other fans and creators.

There’s no denying the influence of Hollywood, nor the way many panels and events sometimes have only the most tenuous connection to comics. Sometimes as little as the cast on such and such show has someone on it who likes a comic a book. But that’s pop culture. It’s grown into this enormous megalith that encompasses so many genres and mediums, there’s no real way to contain it. And maybe we shouldn’t. Maybe what we should be doing is looking for ways to connect it, just like we connect with each other, over the shared geekiness of the collective experience. SDCC is not the be all, end all of comics, and the fact that it has such a hodge podge of celebrity and creativity and fandom coming together seems like an opportunity to really celebrate all of it. How inclusive the love of stories, which I think is what’s at the root of all of this, really is.

But maybe I’m just being really optimistic because I met Brian and Wendy Froud and fulfilled a childhood dream to thank them for Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal and being amazing artists. I geek out over art I love in a big way. About the only thing that could have made the show better is if I could have met Brian Henson and thanked him for Farscape, or somehow found a time machine and thanked Tolkien for writing about Middle Earth and Jim Henson for muppets.

This year was a lot of fun for me, both professionally and personally. I feel very encouraged about our industry and what I took away from it is that there’s room for everyone here. Comics aren’t being ignored, they’re being embraced. All kinds of comics from all kinds of creators and publishers. There’s a lot of great stuff out there and people are taking notice. And as a story lover, that’s incredibly gratifying and exciting to see.

Still, I’ll be really happy when I can finally take a nap.

But there’s one big problem with the Boom! Kids line: there’s not a single female protagonist in the bunch.

Boom is currently publishing 12 ongoing titles for kids, plus a string of four-issue Muppet parodies of famous stories (Muppet Robin Hood, Muppet Snow White, etc.), and a couple of completed Pixar minis (Monsters Inc. and Finding Nemo). Of the 13, The Incredibles probably does the best on the female character front, with the kickass and competent Helen (Mrs. Incredible) starring in an upcoming arc (check out this gorgeous cover featuring her and Mirage! I am so getting this), and just generally being a prominent character in the series, as is her daughter Violet.

Beyond that, female characters tend to consist of The Girlfriend (Minnie Mouse, Daisy Duck) or That One Girl in the Cast (Miss Piggy, Jessie from Toy Story). Sometimes The Villain. Or The Daughter.

Never The Star.

This isn’t really surprising, given the franchises Boom is working with, all of which are boys’ clubs. Pixar has already taken heat for this; in 11 movies they haven’t had a single female protagonist, so how can a comic based on a Pixar movie provide one? The Duck and Mouse books are working from the 1950s tradition of Disney comics, where women exist only as girlfriends who will hector you into adventures and then require saving.

And the Muppets basically have Miss Piggy, who is a glorious character, but can’t represent the gender all on her lonesome. It seemed Boom! was balancing the gender ratio slightly when they introduced an adult Skeeter, Scooter’s twin sister from Muppet Babies, but she was written out again a few issues later. Meanwhile, the Muppet minis go through agonized contortions, trying to find enough female characters to make their parodies work, and settling for B-listers like Janice and Camilla the Chicken (or appalling new character “Spamela Hamderson,” who plays Snow White to Piggy’s Evil Queen in the currently-running Muppet Snow White).

It doesn’t have to be this way. Jessie was marketed as if she was the third protagonist in Toy Story 3, when in fact she wound up being a damsel in distress who existed only to engineer conflict for Buzz. Why not rectify that by giving her an arc in the comic?

Or, hey, Minnie Mouse has been around for 82 years. I think she can carry her own comic book by now, especially considering the vast network of friends and relatives she has in the comic book universe. I’m awfully tired of seeing her as Mickey’s wilting flower. And while we’re at it, can we see less of Daisy the vain, selfish nag, and more of Daisy the plucky career woman from the otherwise-awful 90s cartoon Quack Pack? Mickey and Donald have always contained multitudes, to allow them to play whatever role necessary for the story; Minnie and Daisy can too.

But if none of those work, well, it’s not like Disney doesn’t have a wealth of properties designed with little girls in mind. There are the princesses, of course, and the Tinkerbell line; ordinary little girls like Alice and Lilo; live action properties like Wizards of Waverly Place and Hannah Montana. It’s a little past its prime, but Kim Possible would’ve made a wonderful comic book. Disney is not exactly starved for female protagonists, if you catch my drift.

Because here’s the thing: there are exactly as many little girls out there as there are little boys. Statistically, they read more, and they spend more (or their parents do). And they want to see themselves as main characters, too. So it’s not just right to include female protagonists, but it opens up a whole new potential stream of revenue. Sure, not a lot of little girls read comic books now. I bet a lot more would if they started seeing girls on the cover. (And hey, maybe a boy might read a comic about a girl! Just like girls read comics about boys all the damn time.)

I’ll say it again: Boom! Kids is great. I’ve enjoyed every single comic I’ve picked up from them. But I’d enjoy them a whole lot more if I knew Boom! was telling stories about both halves of the population.

It’s just comics. They’re not real.

You’ve probably seen or heard that particular argument before, and also about film, cartoons, RPGs, whatever medium you’re into. Issues of representation just don’t matter and that fiction we pay money to experience, why that just has no effect on us. The way we think about women and what they can do, or about racial minorities, the stories we tell about them (or about the lack of them) will never really effect how we think about them in real life.

Except.

Except in Volume VI of Titan’s Charley’s War trades, writer Pat Mills recounts meeting an ex-squaddie who joined the army because he grew up reading war comics. He also recounts meeting two men from “traditional military families – [who] didn’t enlist” because they grew up reading Charley’s War and its brutal depictions of warfare. Grown men picked their careers because those silly comics made it look cool or made it look horrific.

Except that Dr Mae Jemison, the first African-American woman in space, has cited Uhura on Star Trek as a reason she wanted to become an astronaut. And NASA hired Uhura actress Nichelle Nichols to recruit women and ethnic minorities, capitalising on her influence from Trek.

Except that Weird Fantasy #18’s Judgement Day!, taking on contemporary segregation through metaphor and then ending with a clear symbol of real-life segregation ending, was universally praised by readers as something that hit them hard. A school principal asked for copies for his school. Only one critical letter arrived, decrying EC Comics because “the North and South are like they are, so why not leave well enough alone!”… while other southerners praised it for what it had done.

Except that the group Racebending has done surveys to see what drew fans to Avatar: The Last Airbender, a cartoon where everyone is Asian or Inuit, and comments from non-white fans cite things like “It was fantastic being able to spot things from my own ethnic background on the show, which is something that I hardly ever get to see”. In response to the film, which cast Caucasian actors to play the three leads, one fan notes “I lost that self esteem”. One states that growing up, “I thought there was something wrong with me and wished to be Caucasian myself” because that was all she saw on telly.

Except when reviewing MTV’s old cartoon Daria, Jezebel’s Margaret Hartmann recalls growing up with Daria as the only TV character she could truly relate to, a smart female character that was having experiences that she could recognise from her own life. And that the show “provided me with the sort of social guidance that allowed me to stay true to myself”, leading to her sticking with her best friend in the face of “social suicide”.

This is a list that could go on and on and on. What we see, read, listen to, and generally absorb from the media around us has an impact on how we think. At a young age, that’s even more important. Kids and teenagers come out thinking “I can do that”, “this is the right thing to do and it can be done”, “this stuff is possible“. Or, in the case of young white boys, come out looking at things in a way they hadn’t before, or even just thinking “hey, that character’s badass!” when looking at a character who isn’t a white male.

But of course, fiction isn’t real so none of it matters.

Except when the blog Crimitism took issue with Warhammer 40,000 retconning a black Space Marine platoon into white people who had been mutated into “daemonic” looking dark skinned mutants, another blog went out of its way to decry Crimitism as talking “crackpot conspiracy theory kind of bullshit”. It went out of its way to bring up half-understand pseudo-facts about skin colour mutations and England’s racial demographics to try and prove the blog wrong. And then it ended with saying it’s just a game, “don’t take it too seriously”.

Except fans on the Internet have crawled out to complain about a prominent Muslim woman character in Captain Britain and MI:13, or there being too many black characters in Dwayne McDuffie’s JLA run (two of them).

Except Bill Willingham allegedly wanted to “gun down those girls” who asked for a dead superheroine to get a memorial case like a male hero had received.

This is another list that goes on and on and on. Why is all this “PC stuff” such a big deal to you, guys?

Then he apparently said:

I wanted to gun down those girls who kept asking about the memorial case.

Which was a direct response to the campaign encouraged by Girl-Wonder.org’s Project Girl Wonder.

(You can read a full account of the panel in Nevermore999’s post on her general Heroes Con experience, or more succinctly in this summary of that particular section, with some discussion, in this Scans_Daily post.)

Let’s look at that again.

I wanted to gun down those girls who kept asking about the memorial case.

Feminist comic book fans are often accused of disproportionate response to things they find offensive. The reasoning goes that they’re making a huge fuss over something completely insignificant. Sure, okay, the art is boobtacular, female characters get killed off to further male characters’ story arcs, and the easiest shorthand for a traumatic character backstory is rape, but come on. It’s only comic books, right? In the grand scheme of things, how much do they matter?

Apparently, they matter enough to create violent fantasies towards feminists who want change.

Talk about disproportionate response.

While I was writing Girls Read Comics, I occasionally received threats to my physical person. Not a great many, but any number more than zero is unacceptable. Because I was, apparently, writing about unimportant things in comics that didn’t really matter, some people told me they wanted to cause me physical harm.

I thought it very unlikely that any of those people could and would actually hurt me, but the fact that they expressed a desire to was in and of itself harmful. Threats of violence support a culture of violence that negatively affects less privileged people – in this case, women.

I am likewise reasonably sure that Willingham is not really going to systemically slaughter every girl who stood up and asked about a memorial case for Stephanie Brown.

But I do think that in voicing a desire to shoot “those girls”, however insincere it actually was, he contributed to a culture that regularly uses the threat of violence against women to keep them in line. He enabled anti-feminists who don’t have his creative clout to make public their own creepy thoughts regarding righteous violence against feminist voices. He certainly engendered fear, because I read what he’d said, and was afraid, and sick, and angry.

The phrasing, “I wanted to gun down those girls” is not neutral dismissal of irritating fan persistence over something a creator considers insignificant. However innocuously it was meant, it is a statement of gendered violent fantasy.

Unfortunately, outside of comics, women are not mind-readers. We can’t use our psychic abilities to tell who’s just exaggerating out of pique, and who really wants to hurt us. And the world tells us over and over again, via the media, via rape culture, via our actual experience, that people, that men with guns, sometimes really do act upon a desire to hurt women.

As they did in the Ecole Polytechnic massacre of 1989, the Amish school shooting of 2006, and the Winnenden school and Collier Township shootings of 2009.

But of course when someone says they did want to gun us down, we ought to use our non-existent psychic powers to know they were only kidding. Check out the comments on that Scans_Daily post. While a number of commentators are appalled, some are dismissive. After all, though he probably shouldn’t have said it, Willingham didn’t really mean it. Hyperbole is a common tool of frustration, and those silly girls really riled him up.

A verbal contribution to a culture of violence against women doesn’t really matter.

This post contains the opinions and viewpoints of Karen Healey, and is not an official Girl-Wonder.org statement.

In line with Girl-Wonder.org’s aims of fostering discussion in a safer space, comments on this post can be made at this thread in our forums.

Like lots of fans, I’ve been enjoying the new BATMAN: THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD animated series. It’s campy and fun without being overly knowing or self-referential, accessible to everyone while still being clever. One problem keeps hitting me, though: the lack of female superheroes*.

If you’ve never seen it, there are two notable features of the show’s set-up. First, the few minutes before the title sequence are usually used for a mini-adventure unrelated to the main episode (although they are sometimes used to set up the episode’s backstory, or to further the overarching plot of the season). Second, and most fundamentally, the theme of the show is team-ups. Batman is never alone, always coming together with at least one fellow hero to beat up baddies.

Which makes it quite striking that no female hero has had the full BatB team-up treatment, a one-on-one team-up with Bats in the main episode. Only once has a woman – Black Canary – been in such a team-up, and that was in a pre-title sequence. Every other super-heroine appearance has been alongside other male supers. So far** only five female superheroes have put in an appearance in their professional capacity, and only three have appeared more than once. Let’s go through them – spoilers abound past this point.

Katana has made three appearances as one-third of the Outsiders (with Black Lightning and Metamorpho). Katana is, as you’d expect, Japanese, and carries a lot of stereotypes – she wears a schoolgirl uniform, her powers are skills with katana and shuriken (she has a magic sword in the comics, but it’s not put in an appearance yet in the cartoon), and in her first episode, “Enter the Outsiders!”, she’s silent, speaking only to tell her fellow Outsiders how to perform a sort of super-CPR on an incapacitated Wildcat. Her silence means the other two get more limelight, and she remains quiet during a pre-title sequence with the Outsiders being trained by Batman. This is somewhat made up for by “Inside the Outsiders!”, in which Psycho Pirate has trapped the three in nightmares, and Batman has to save them. Each of the Outsiders gets some meaty psychological stuff, but only Katana gets backstory – the death of her sensei in her native Japan. She speaks a lot during her dream sequence (in a strong Japanese accent which she didn’t have in her first appearance) and we learn that her silence is in honour of her master, so at least it’s a stereotype they’ve taken the trouble to justify. In the end, most of Katana’s character is defined by her ethnicity, and she can be crowded out by the other Outsiders quite easily, but she’s still good to watch and they do seem intent on doing something interesting with her team.

Which is more, really, than can be said for Huntress, probably this show’s greatest disappointment for me as I’m a big fan of hers. Huntress gets two main-episode appearances, one as part of a big ensemble in “Death Race to Oblivion!” where she’s rather overshadowed by Green Arrow, Guy Gardner and Plastic Man, and one alongside Blue Beetle in “Night of the Huntress!”***. Huntress’s whole thing in this episode is “sexpot” – her tooling-up sequence mostly consists of her letting her hair down and applying lipstick, and the main thrust of this episode is Jaime’s crush on sexy Helena. She flirts constantly, with lots of double-entendres. The writers just don’t seem to see much of her character beyond her sexiness (she’s also somewhat more violent, although Batman doesn’t seem to be bothered by this).

Black Canary is another favourite of mine, and the best woman in the series. She’s the only female hero to get a straight team-up in a pre-title beatdown on Solomon Grundy. There are still wrong notes in her portrayal, though – her unrequited love for Batman feels a bit forced and uninteresting. In one of her episodes, the musical “Mayhem of the Music Meister!”, she’s largely passive, apparently under the Music Meister’s mind-control for most of the episode, and though her Canary Cry saves the day Batman has to goad her into using it. Her best episode is “The Golden Age of Justice!”, in which she and Batman are still being treated like sidekicks by an ageing Justice League (of the Flash, Doctor Mid-Nite, Wildcat, Hawkman and Hourman). It’s another ensemble episode, but most of the spotlight is on Canary and she swings the climactic fight. Best of all, nothing is made of her Bat-crush.

Two other heroines have minor appearances – Fire cameos in a Plastic Man pre-title adventure, and one of the Metal Men, Platinum, is really a Metal Woman – but that’s it for woman as heroes in BatB. And over thirty-four episodes, that’s not great.

Part of the underlying problem is revealed by looking at the treatment of women as wives. In the pre-title sequence to “Last Bat on Earth!”, Batman and Mister Miracle escape a death-trap for charity, following which Big Barda hectors Miracle for not cleaning out the garage – Batman chuckles and tells him, “That’s one trap you can’t get out of”. In “Aquaman’s Outrageous Adventure!”, Aquaman’s wife insists that he take her and their son on a vacation rather than fight evildoers. In “Long Arm of the Law!”, Plastic Man’s wife Ramona insists on him watching the baby rather than going out and fighting crime. It’s a time-honoured position for the wives of male superheroes, from Mystery Men to The Incredibles – a dogmatic insistence that their husband give up that silly crimefighting and concentrate on his family. It’s all part of the general stereotype that men put their time and effort into Big Important Projects, whereas women are concerned above all else with their homes and children.

It’s also a genre problem. BatB is trying to recapture an element of light-hearted, old-fashioned fun. Like a cargo cult, they do it by replicating elements from the original purveyors of that fun. And when you do that without some discretion, you replicate the flaws of what you’re making an homage to. With luck, they’ll learn to take what they need from the past and leave behind the unnecessary baggage.

*Which is not to say that this is BatB’s only problem; it’s just the problem I’m talking about here.

**I’m up to episode 34, “Sidekicks Assemble!” – but from the episode list, I don’t think there’s been an uptick in female representation in the episodes I haven’t seen yet. There is apparently a Birds of Prey episode coming up, which should be fun.

***My least favourite episode so far, I think. Not only is it ill-treatment of Huntress, there’s also the awful Mrs. Man-face as a villain.

• Myriad Issues: Jiro Kuwata! The Secret Author of Bat-Manga in America! – Round up of reaction to Bat-Manga's author credits: "It’s not even clear whether they contacted the Japanese publisher! … I don’t think “hey, check out these craaaazy comics I found on eBay” is a good idea for a book — not when the artist and publisher are still around and accessible. When you think about the care and dignity with which Tomine and D&Q have treated Tatsumi… it’s not a flattering comparison." Via bookslut
• Comic Art Indigène – Via Racialicious, this exhibit is on display in New Mexico until January.
• The Women of Parkour – Link to a NYT video feature. It's far too short, so after you watch it, you can go rent District 13.
• Advanced Style – Their blog says, "Proof from the wizened and silver-haired set that personal style advances with age," but the best part of this chronicle of elder-fashion is its warmth towards its subjects. via BoingBoing

• O. Henry Anthology of comic adaptions – I'm not sure why people find themselves compelled to adapt O. Henry in so many forms. Via Bookslut
• I don't think you're supposed to blog about your secret identity, though. – Via Reappropriate, I learn about the blog for the forthcoming book "SECRET IDENTITIES[, which] uses the conventions of the superhero comic book to expose the real face of the Asian American experience, usually hidden behind the mask of misperception and stereotype."
• Our gendered environment – "Most of the things in our built environment are designed on a male model," says Wendy Davis, director of the WDS, before noting, "There are differences between men and women in terms of ergonomics. Women are generally smaller, they have less reach, they are less strong." But designs that are hostile – or useless – to women still make it through.
• hair hats – All the Japanese I know comes from an ill-starred and brief romance with anime in grade school, but I believe these are an art exhibit, and not a fashion statement, as they appear.