Weekly Reports

June 13 2018 Pull List Gender Imbalance Report

This week’s pull list gender report: 24 men-only comics, 15 with at least one woman. 141 total men, a mere 26 total women. Pathetic!

Most woman creators on a comic this week: Nancy Drew #1! Thanks @79semifinalist for leading the way! (Ghostbusters:ATC was great!)

The books I can usually rely on for lots of women creators: Lumberjanes, Moonstruck, Redlands and [sniff] Jem. What else am I missing?

Trends I’m noticing:

1. older more, established women are more likely to work with all men than younger women who lift other women up.
2. Letterers doing work for hire are almost all men but a lot of the lonely women on an all-male book are colorists (Bellaire/Rosenberg). People break into the industry from all over! Lettering isn’t just drawing lines with an AMES or picking typefaces! It’s an art form!
3. A lotta big name comics pros are still helming sausage parties: Bendis, Mignola, Ennis, Wagner, Miller - you could do better, dudes!

Notes: I’d love to count editors! I know how much impact folks like Sana Amanat have, but hard to gauge from month to month/book to book!

Kick-Ass credits women for “Digital Ink Assistant” and “Colors Assistant” - I counted those, but one sounds like flatting? Uncertain! (Before you get on me for buying bro-y Millar books, you probably didn’t read Empress, Huck or Reborn, all of which were great.)

Not sure what I can do to change a) the industry or b) my buying habits. I need my stories, but I want them from more diverse creators. To that point: I read a lot of books because I like a) information and b) novelty. You don’t get novelty from 150 mostly white dudes.

Should I drop books from all-male teams? Mister Miracle, Thor, Man of Steel, and even Squirrel Girl would be on the chopping block! With people coming on and off books, it’s hard to drop an ongoing book that might have women next month or next week! (It could happen!

Also: I’ve thought about tracking other kinds of diversity, but a) that’s even harder to research, and b) it’s much more depressing. But shout-out to @saladinahmed @gregpak @therodneybarnes @davidwalker1201 (among others) for often gracing my pull list!

Why am I doing this? To: make myself more aware of my choices; call attention to inequality, become more aware of women’s art!

Caveats: my spotty research (sorry); gender binary sucks; no covers/no backups; only writers, pencillers, inkers, colorists, letterers. Research method: I look for pronouns in bios, then interviews, then just go by how people present in photos. Put pronouns in your bio!

Help me think of a hashtag to make it easier to track and encourage others to do likewise! We can’t see how far to go without measuring! (Plus my comics-hating pals could mute all of this easier, and I love those jerks.)

[Old posts are just recaps of my tweets.]

This Week's Books

• By Night #1 - (2+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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