Weekly Reports

July 18 2018 Pull List Gender Imbalance Report

Jemal’s Pull List Gender Imbalance report! 24 books by just men, 14 with at least 1 non-cis-man! 147 men to 20 non-cis-men! Dammit. 63.16% of books this week had nothing but cis dudes. 88.02% of creators were cis dudes. That’s pathetic. We have to do better.

The average is beginning to seem pretty stable: 37.61% of books have at least one non-cis-man, 13.57% of creators are non-cis-men. After the huge jumps last week, I got my hopes up that the rise in gender diversity would continue, but it didn’t. Back to baseline.

That is really bad for comics. Comics is a mass medium limited only by time and creativity. Explosions cost the same as a still life. Wanna blow up a planet? Stage a fight scene with 100 zombies and 100 ninjas? In comics they pay artists by the page, not the figure. If the same handful of dusty, crusty white dudes dominate the industry, we get the same shit year after year. Are you sick of it? I am!

Sick of DC rebooting to the status quo to whatever was going on when the new EIC was 14? Sick of stories about Krypton exploding? (Ahem.) Sick of dumb events? Sick of two characters that have been friends for decades having a contrived conflict that makes zero sense? The only way to change that is diversity. Diversity of experience, diversity of background, diversity of opinions. Diversity of genders.

Seriously: hire more women. Hire more queer women. Hire more black women. Hire more butch women that scare the shit out of you.

Who’s doing it wrong this week? DC’s weird side (Vertigo, Young Animal, Wild Storm & the Hanna Barbera book) had nothing but men.

“Let’s be experimental! Let’s try something new! Let’s hire whatever men are already working for us!” Cool, cool. Get it together!

Three different @StarWars books came out from @Marvel with nothing but cis men. Living up to the spirit of the original trilogy I guess?

@ImageComics, bastion of independence, sold me 10 books with male creative teams, 1 with 50% women and 1 book with 2 women assistants. Maybe it’s great that they’re giving 2 women a shot by having them assist on inks and colors for “Kick-Ass” but they could do better.

On the plus side: the new @MagsVisaggs book “Oh S#!t It’s Kim&Kim” came out with 3 women creators (1 token man), and it looks great!

Marvel had women on 50% of their books, but even better they put @S_Marguerite on Life of Captain Marvel and Imortal Hulk. YES PLEASE.

The new Runaways book by @rainbowrowell is great! And that’s in part because @kristaferanka is so exceptionally good at character work. I don’t like giving a man a shout-out any more than you do, but his knack for fashion, expression and body language is amazing.

Both DC bat-books had women! @EvilMarguerite is continuing her great run on Batwoman and the amazing @bettieb is now coloring Batman!

In the MOSTLY positive realm: the comics industry is bringing in great new creators from Europe, Asia, and Latin America! …but it’s most men. I want that kind of diversity too, but it’s harder for me to track, and there are ladies out there too! Hire them!

Caveats: my spotty research (sorry); gender binary sucks; no covers/no backups; only writers, pencillers, inkers, colorists, letterers. 

[Old posts are just recaps of my tweets.]

This Week's Books

• By Night #2 - (2+2) 👍
• Euthanauts #1 - (1+2) 👍

Titles in bold are new #1s and a 👍 indicates a book with a least one non-cis-male creator. Numbers in parentheses are the total non-cis-male and total cis-male creators.

* This week contains archive data which does not catalog individual books.

This Week's Stats

* This week contains archive data, so these charts are incomplete.

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