SupermanHawaii.com

by Napua Ahina

A few months ago Calvin Reid, news editor for Publishers Weekly said, "for years it's been women and girls driving the sales of (traditional) books, and for years the comics world has that formula turned on its head. Boys were buying 70 or 80 percent of the comics. So when a girl buys a comicbook or a graphic novel, that's a whole new category of consumer that didn't exist before." I have to wonder, are girls who love comics really as rare as we've been made to think? At Comic Con I was happily surprised to see so many women in attendance (as a real fan herself and not merely as a fanboy's girlfriend). And is the comic book industry really as mysogoynistic as we'd like to believe? Sales prove that X-Men is still the all-time "girl property" in Marvel comics. And in the past year there have been more female fans of Spider-Man than any other title. Heck, if even a hardcore feminist like Gloria Steinem can be a fan of Wonder Woman, there must be more fangirls out there than one would think.

Truthfully, the comic industry has been trying to get more female readers for years. From non-threatening heroines like Brenda Starr in the 30's, to romance comics of the 50's, to stripping Wonder Woman of her powers in the 70's... comicbook publishes have tried various ploys to win the interest of the all-elusive female comic book reader. The most current attempts were inspired by the success of manga. Manga continues to be the fastest growing category in comics with a very strong female readership (equally split between males & females). Tokyopop was the first to successfully obtain this "holy grail" of new readers...specifically the 13 year old female.

Marvel was quick to jump on the manga bandwagon in 2000 with their Mangaverse. This later evolved into the Tsunami imprint which failed in 2003, and was most recently retooled into Marvel Age. Bill Jemas had said that Marvel believed "part of the essence of what makes manga interesting to boy and girl kids is the human elements behind the story. Sometimes it's the relationship between a boyfriend and a girlfriend." This lead to girl-friendly titles like Mystique, Runaways, and Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane.

Late to follow is DC who just released their manga imprint, Minx, a few months ago. Titles include Kimmie66, Confessions of a Blabbermouth, and The P.L.A.I.N Janes. Karen Berger said, "as seen with young adult fiction and Manga, all the books (by Minx) deal with relationships, friendships and romance in one way or another. Those are themes that girls are attracted to much more than boys, so the books aren’t particularly action-oriented or testosterone-driven fantasies. So thematically, they are much more in the relationship/romance area." She also said that "it’s time for teenage girls to be reading DC comics and also to be reading comics that are published by an American publisher because there’s nobody in the States who is doing anything in full force... In the next two years, you're going to see an awful lot of new comics product coming to the bookstore market. Manga will only get more popular."

But it isn't just manga that's converting girls into fangirls... Marvel has been hiring female authors (who write best-selling books for teenage girls) to spearhead a girl-friendly comic campaign. Tamora Pierce is writing White Tiger, and Laurell K. Hamilton's Anita Blake novels were adapted to comics. Both ventures have topped the sales charts and, more importantly, attracted new female readers. And later this month Dark Horse is releasing The Umbrella Academy which is written by the lead singer for My Chemical Romance. Scott Allie says that "girls are expressing a lot of interest" in that title along with their existing titles, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Emily the Strange.

Personally, I think it's naive to characterize male and female readers as interested in only particular subject matters. And I have to wonder if these "girly gimmicks" really work... or is it intriguing characters and well-told stories that really hook a reader?

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