Caped Crusaders in Imaginary Fight

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February 21, 2015 by JImbo

11 Year Old Girl Asks for More Women In Comic Books

Ok first, not to be mean but… wow… Rowan? That’s a boy’s name. Not like “Shannon” or “Shawn” where it can go both ways. More like “Rowan Atkinson” aka “Mr. Bean”

I guess young kids who didn’t grow up watching British TV shows on PBS won’t know the difference. Still… wow, way to screw up your kid folks.

Second… “Grrl Power?” REALLY? Isn’t that sexist in itself? Why not just “Power?” Why “Girl power?” Superman doesn’t run around yelling “BOY POWER!”

Stop using trendy misspelled words and you’ll get more respect, ladies.

Third… browse through an ample comic collection and you’ll find roughly 1/3 are female. Sometimes more. Depends on how you define “Super Hero” of course. Do you need super powers to count? Well, then Bat Man is out. And oddly Aquaman is in, even though his “super power” is talking to fish. Not exceedingly useful in most places people are since fish and people don’t tend to congregate together much with the whole air/water breathing problem.

So, there are plenty of female superheroines. In fact, a lot more than there are women reading comic books!

This leads to the fourth thing… she is not the target audience. 11 year old girls are VERY rare. Check out this recent comics poll of readers:

ICv2 reports that 70 percent of the survey’s 5,336 respondents were already fans, with only 5 percent completely new to buying comics, and 93% were male. What’s more, only an estimated 2 percent were younger than 18 years old.

Granted, this is an “adult” series in that it isn’t a Spongebob Squarepants comic book. It’s about guys in tights beating each other up. However, this girl said she doesn’t want that. She wants more superheroines in this exact genre. She is reading books like this, not cartoon-based comics.

This girl is the .14% the market that is made up of girls under 18 that read comic books. As a comic book maker, do you orient your market to make products that 99.86% of your customers probably won’t buy?

I’m sure a few kids sneak into R movies too, but that doesn’t mean we need to make R movies especially for them.

Besides, there ARE books that are geared towards young kids and girls.

Some are based on TV shows.

Some are based on Movies.

Some are based on spinoffs.

 

Some are whole groups of superheroines.

Frankly if this little girl can’t find comics with superheroines in them to read she is CLEARLY NOT LOOKING. They are everywhere. Like I said, 1/3 of the characters in the genre are women.

You can argue that they are often very well endowed or unrealistic body types for young girl. (Refer to point four above… men over 18 buy most comic books, especially the ones this girl is reading.) Also, can you really say MEN are realistically represented?

How many guys are built like Superman?

Wolverine?

Even Batman is pretty buff.

I know it’s a “feel good” story and I against the odds (amazingly, wonderfully) know quite a few women who got into comic books at an early age. However, that isn’t the norm. It’s actually very ABNORMAL.

Like girls with a name like Rowan.

It’s not a bad thing. But it’s not normal. Stop trying to make this into some sort of feminist crusade.

Instead, show this girl some AWESOME comic books! That’s what I’d do if I were DC Comics. Send her a box of sweet comics to read and show her she just hasn’t seen the right ones yet!

But I guess that doesn’t get ratings and trust me… NBC News needs all the ratings they can get!