Ladies in Comics: An Annotated Reading List

[nymeth]

I had the idea for this post when Renay told me that a project she has been busy with (on which more in the near future) really drove home the point that women are still hugely underrepresented in the comics industry. In addition to this, just the other day my awesome librarian friend stormfilled was commenting on the huge gender imbalance among the special guests to the London Super Comic Convention (33 guests, one woman. I wish I was joking), and saying how uncomfortable she’d feel giving the fliers to her students, many of whom are girls and big comics and manga enthusiasts.

I’m a big fan of sequential art, but I’m also someone who cares about the gender balance of her reading, and reconciling the two can be a challenge. I love series like The Sandman, Fables and The Unwritten with all my heart, but there’s no way around the fact that they’re very male dominated. Renay brought to my attention the fact that things are even more uneven if you take into account all the contributors to a work of sequential art. For this reason, I decided to limit this list to works where both the writing and the art are by women. Sometimes I can’t be sure about the full credits (including pencillers, inkers, etc), but this is a start.

Also, I decided to include even the most obvious recommendations because “obvious” is relative: I don’t want to take for granted the knowledge I acquired over the past few years, nor alienate readers who don’t share this knowledge. The main selection criterion for this list is, well, my taste. They’re either books I’ve read and enjoyed or books I would like to read.
( Onwards! )

Sidetracks - Episode III

[helloladies]

Sidetracks is a collaborative project featuring various essays, videos, reviews, or other Internet content that we want to share with each other. All past and current links for the Sidetracks project can be found in our Sidetracks tag.

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