DC Comics: Too dumb to live?

Pardon me, folks, I feel a rant coming on. This one is a grown-up-ish rant, so readers under 13, you might want to go find a happier blog to read today. Readers under 18, feel free to stay, but I don’t want to hear about it from your parents later.

Just us grown-up impersonators now? Good.

Lately there’s been yet another foofaw in the comic-book world about DC Comics’ treatment of female creators and characters. Things sort of exploded back in July, when a female fan in a Batgirl costume stood up at Comic-Con San Diego and asked a DC editor why, in the course of rebooting the company’s whole comic-book universe and launching 52 new #1 issues in September, the company’s creative staffed dropped from 12% female to 2% female. There was a lot of hemming and hawing, and the best explanation offered—that there simply weren’t enough female creators willing and able to work on DC’s relaunch—smelled a bit fishy.

Now the new comics are hitting the stands, and the fish-stink borders on hallucinogenic.

In the first issue of a comic-book series called Red Hood and the Outlaws, a superheroine named Starfire (you might remember her as the bubbly, naïve alien girl in the Teen Titans cartoons) had this conversation:

 

And the entire internet exploded.

A lot of female fans have complained about the way the reboot has treated female characters, pointing to Starfire as the tip of the iceberg. There’s the first issue of Catwoman, too, which ends with Catwoman having sex with Batman on a rooftop and seems to be pretty much all about shots of the main character in red lingerie, with her face conveniently cropped out:

 

Then there’s Voodoo, the first monthly DC title to have a black female as its lead character. Naturally, she’s a stripper, and this is the panel they chose to release as a sneak peek:

 

And I’m done posting panels for now, because this is beyond absurd and all the way out to disgusting.

I could talk about how these portrayals are demeaning to women, especially female fans, and how DC is sending wrong messages to impressionable teenage readers by telling the boys that this is how girls act and telling the girls that this is how heroes act. I could talk about the long, rich history of sexism and misogyny in mainstream comics, but honestly, I don’t think anybody who’s been reading comics for any length of time doubts that this stuff goes on, or that it goes mostly unchallenged. (If you'd like a cogent, well-written summary of the female fan response, however, the best one I've read is here.)

No, what I want to talk about is how incredibly stupid this kind of stuff is. Not because it’s unethical, or because it’s bad art. Let’s cut right to the bottom line here—by making this crap their primary product, DC Comics is leaving piles of money on the table.

DC Comics (and its parent corporation, Warner Bros.) is literally too stupid to take the money and run, too dumb to make hay while the sun shines, too brain-damaged to open its mouth when it’s raining soup. Marvel Comics does this, too, but DC’s the big offender at the moment. Both companies have an opportunity to double their customer base—at a minimum—and they’re chucking it for some soft-core porn.

Don’t believe me? I’ll prove it.

 

First, a few basic facts. Females make up approximately half of all human beings on planet Earth. Women buy and read many more books and magazines than men do, and are more likely to spend their leisure time reading, including (if not especially) in English-speaking countries. This is particularly true of fiction—women make up 80% of the market there. So of the people out there looking for an entertaining story, presented in the form of ink stains on paper, four-fifths are women and girls. Wouldn’t it be nice if they read comic books?

But wait, I hear you saying. Women and girls don’t read comic books. Comic books are for boys—always have been, always will be. Traditional superhero comics, in particular, don’t appeal to girls for some reason; girls who do read comics prefer manga, or cartoon-based comics, or edgy, independent, Vertigo-type stuff.  Why should we make superhero stories for people who don’t like stories about superheroes?

Well, the problem with that argument is that girls do like stories about superheroes. It’s just that most of them aren’t willing to wade through the cesspool to find the good ones. I know, and not just because I'm a female comic fan. I know because I created a female superhero with a life of her own—and both girls and boys read those stories like crazy.

I created Rae Masterson in 1998 after I read an article in the Los Angeles Times that said the comic-book industry was in freefall, and perhaps the best hope of saving it was to draw in female readers. I created a scrappy girl superhero mostly to see if I could, reasoning that if my middle-school classmates could afford to see Titanic four times every weekend, then surely a few of those dollars could easily be diverted to comics, as long as the comics were better than seeing Titanic again.

Inside of a few years, I had a small cult going around the stories, based entirely on word of mouth, and I was getting letters and emails from readers—both male and female—who were just as enthusiastic about Rae and Trevor as I was about Daredevil’s adventures. In high school, when I knew most of my readers at least by first name, I could say with confidence that my readership was solidly 50-50, an even split between male and female readers. Now that the much-improved stories are being serialized on Pocket Coyote, the reader base is closer to 60 to 65% female, according to Facebook stats and blog traffic. I still have all the elements of a good mainstream superhero story—lots of action and twisty plots and stuff blowing up, plus several metric tons of sarcasm—but I’ve also got relationship drama, and I go out of my way to make sure that my male and female characters are all fully developed and have their own unique character arcs. Everybody changes, everybody lives. (And everybody keeps their clothes on, though that wasn’t really a goal—it just sort of happened.)

 

Think about what those numbers could mean to DC Comics. If they stopped actively discouraging women from reading their books—stopped telling them over and over again that the only way to be accepted in this exciting fictional world was to fly around in lingerie and have sex on rooftops—they could more than double their fanbase. A particularly popular monthly comic book may sell 100,000 copies per issue; a writer who consistently wrote nuanced female characters with their clothes on could, with some intelligence and support from marketing, raise those numbers to something in the neighborhood of 200,000 to 250,000. That’s what it would look like if a mainstream comic could suddenly sprout Masks audience demographics. That’s 150,000 new fans—people who otherwise wouldn’t be reading your comics. New customers. That’s what DC Comics, and to a lesser extent Marvel, is leaving on the table.

Now, I hear you saying that Masks has a paltry circulation compared with, say, anything with Batman on the cover. My sample size is small enough that it might not scale up to something the size of the X-Men empire. My argument might be more valid if only there were an example of a mainstream comic-book property with fully developed (and fully clothed) female characters that made its producers a lot of money!

Oh, wait. There is.

I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of comic-book writers I know who go out of their way to write female characters with personalities and character arcs—but they’re all bestsellers, and most are winners of one or more Eisner awards (comicdom’s equivalent of the Oscar), usually for the work featuring those characters. Two of them saw their work represented in big-budget superhero movies this summer, and both of those movies blew out the doors of multiplexes worldwide. Thor drew heavily from J. Michael Straczynski’s run on the comic, which was notable in part for the complexity it brought to female characters like Jane Foster, Sif, and Loki (who was running around as a female for a while—long story). The movie, which prominently features Jane and gives Sif a chance to shine too, is closing in on $450 million in gross receipts worldwide, $181 million of that made in the United States.

Then there’s Captain America: The First Avenger, which is indebted to Ed Brubaker’s multi-Eisner-winning run on the character (in fact, Brubaker is credited in the film’s acknowledgments, along with creators Joe Simon and Jack Kirby). The movie features Hayley Atwell as kickass British secret agent Peggy Carter, who combines elements of several female characters from Brubaker’s run and who holds her own quite effectively with the movie’s male leads. That flick is still in theaters, but it’s made around $175 million domestically as of this writing, and $360 million globally.

I saw both movies in theaters—Thor once and Captain America three times (long story). I saw Thor in a suburban multiplex, with an audience that was maybe 40% female. Captain America demographics varied a bit according to the time of day, but at least one showing was half-and-half. And while some of those girls and women were obviously there with the boys—accompanying their husbands, boyfriends, fathers and brothers—quite a few were alone, like I was, or were there with other women. They went to a superhero movie, voluntarily, and paid money to see it. All while mainstream comics are turning superheroines into blow-up dolls, in part because "chicks don't read comics anyway". And they're hemorrhaging money.

I’ve got news for you, comic-book industry: women are out there, and a bunch of them like stories about superheroes. You could be selling something they want to buy, and instead you’re selling Starfire’s breasts and Catwoman's butt. You’re hanging out a big “No Girls Allowed” sign on your clubhouse while the club is going bankrupt. I was smarter than this when I was fourteen years old. Don’t try to tell me a fourteen-year-old girl can crank out better stories than an entire industry full of people who’ve spent decades honing their storytelling skills. I know you guys can do better than this. You’re just choosing not to. 

Now, I’m perfectly happy to take your money and run. If you don’t want to go after this big, hungry market, I’ll merrily pursue it in your place, and reap the rewards. I expect to spend some time building up word of mouth on Masks, because I don’t have a big media conglomerate’s marketing department on my side, but it’s not rocket science. I know I can make money at this, and have fun doing it, even while giving away chapters for free and relying on the sales of trade collections to recoup my investment. I will gladly take advantage of the stupidity of the Big Two, and nip off with my little sliver of the pie. I can do wonderful things with even a sliver.

But wouldn’t it be better if someone in New York thought about making that pie twice as big?

No boys allowed?

I don’t know how the actual numbers shake out, but in my hazy memory of my childhood, there were not a lot of interesting books with female main characters. At least, not the kind I wanted to read. I found lots of coming-of-age stories and historical fiction and giggly romances and spunky but dull-witted girl detectives, but not a whole lot of the sword-swinging, spaceship-flying, world-saving stuff I’d come to love as I grew up in the shadow of two brothers. As I’ve said in earlier entries, my favorite memories of childhood reading involved mental cross-dressing because Tarzan, Frodo, Sherlock Holmes, Zorro, and the rest were just more interesting than their female guest stars.

So it really creeps the hell out of me that there’s apparently next to nothing out there now for boys to read.

For most of the twentieth century, teachers found girls more interested in reading than boys were, but the publishing industry tended to skew male. Male writers, editors, and publishers in the most popular genres chose books with male protagonists having manly adventures. Women got the romance section; girls got Nancy Drew; that was about it. Women would read books about men, but few men would read books about women, or so the conventional wisdom went.

But somewhere along the line, especially in children’s publishing, someone figured out that if girls read more, and more often voluntarily, than boys … well, then, girls were a better market, weren’t they? Add to that a sea change in the population of the publishing industry—including an influx of female editors—and the rise of chick lit and other female-centric trends in grown-up publishing, and you get what we see in bookstores today: an ocean of books with pink and foil covers, cute vampire boys, vicious gossip plots, and very little your average teen guy can be seen reading in public. Not helping at all is the fact that the rise of gay and lesbian YA fiction has accounted for a fair portion of the boy books still being published. Yes, I know, this segment of the population is long overdue for literary notice, but if the human population tends to assay out to no more than 12% gay on average (and I’ve seen no reliable higher numbers), that leaves 88% of teenage boys staring at bookstore shelves with the uncomfortable sensation that they’ve come to the wrong window.

I don’t blame the publishing industry for this—after all, if boys aren’t buying books, it makes little economic sense to be in the business of selling books for boys. But if they don’t buy books, and therefore nobody writes books for them, and therefore there’s nothing for them to buy, and therefore they don’t buy books and therefore nobody writes books for them … you see where I’m going with this? This trend has been a long time in coming, but it is now officially an ouroboros.

Even the boy books I loved as a kid aren’t doing as well as they might. Let’s face it, Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan novels, brilliant and exciting as they may be, are also flagrantly racist, their grasp of things like animal biology and behavior is appallingly bad, and all that makes teachers and librarians wary. I was a precocious kid, so the vocabulary in the Sherlock Holmes stories was no barrier to my eleven-year-old joy in discovering them—but now I teach high-school kids who can’t parse the great detective’s statements. Ditto Tolkien’s masterful language—too many syllables, and too many concepts that were easy and familiar to his original readers, but now almost require footnotes for young readers half a century and an ocean away.

There are some bright spots. Rick Riordan’s recent Percy Jackson and the Olympians series has drawn in several reluctant male readers of my acquaintance. There’s always the Harry Potter juggernaut. Heck, some guys read Twilight. And comic books and manga have moved out of the ghetto and into the libraries. But as anyone who’s raised or grown up with boys knows, there are boys who will hunt for things to read … and then there are boys who will stare at the shelf for a moment or two and then go play Grand Theft Auto. Category one will take care of itself, bookwise. Category two is rapidly coming to represent the average male voter. Do we really want our male citizens to give up voluntary reading by age ten?

As much as I enjoy writing Rae Masterson as a brave, intelligent, vulnerable heroine like I wished I had when I was roaming the children’s library, I also believe that my cherished ideas must periodically be tested if I’m going to keep them. I believe that there should be entertaining, well-written stories out there for both sexes, including girls who have real, live adventures. But if this is true and I believe that adventure fiction needs strong, interesting girls, then I must also remember that it needs strong, interesting boys. Preferably in the same book. This is a big part of why Masks is told from two points of view—one male, one female: because literary ghettoes do no one any favors. That’s why Rae and Trevor travel very different arcs, but each story has a heaping helping of both action and emotion. Both narratives see stuff blow up, and blood spilled, and at least one metaphorical pie in the face, and both characters laugh, mourn, and grow dramatically, albeit in dramatically different ways. And the two lives weave together in such a way that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Mind you, I didn’t set out to do this. I didn’t sit down one day and say, “Hmm, I want to write a story that’s as much for guys as it is for girls, and as much for girls as it is for guys.” Rae and Trevor were the two strongest characters in Masks when it was a serial, and they worked best when they shared a stage, and that was that. I followed the story where it led, and wrote down all the parts I personally liked, whether those parts were powerful explosions or tearful confessions. It wasn’t until months and years later, when I began finding out more about how books are marketed, that I realized I had written one book for two very different audiences. But I grew up reading everybody’s books, and soon pulled my female friends into boy books and my male friends into girl books, and they all read Masks. The distinction is not as sharp as we’d like to think. My last census of readers of the Masks serial showed a nearly even split between male and female, from a spunky junior-high-school girl who cornered me in a parking lot to an 80-year-old retired professor who sent me an email out of the blue and said he was interested in my concept.

I like my world that way. A culture where the two sexes never read the same books is almost as bad as one where only one sex reads. And I’ve found that putting strong male characters and strong female characters in the same story—egads—makes that story more interesting! It’s almost like we’re members of the same species or something!

Now I’d like to hear from the guys who lurk around this blog. I know you’re out there—40% of my Facebook fanbase identifies itself as male. What do you want to see in a book? What pulled you in when you were younger, and what keeps you coming back now? What do you want your brothers and sons to know is out there?

The early comic strip Little Lulu featured a precocious little girl who was constantly trying to get past the “No Girls Allowed” sign on the boys’ clubhouse. It would be a terrible shame for Lulu to finally make it in only to find herself alone.