Women in Comics

Phi Kappa Phi Forum, Summer 2004 by Braddock, Paige

If asked to write a piece about women in comics, the first issue you have to address is, why aren't there more comic strips by women? Is it that women just aren't funny? Is it a result of women's roles in our current culture?

Maybe more men are doing comics simply because they have a help-mate at home who makes sure that the kids are fed and the laundry gets done. That is assuming of course that despite the demands of a career in comics, all those guys whose strips appear on the comics page do in fact have families and lives outside of their cartooning.

I knew that I wanted to be a cartoonist by age seven. It seemed like a simple dream. The Sunday comics were full of others who had charted the same career course. But if I had been paying attention to the Sunday comics, I would have noticed that hardly any female creator names appeared next to the titles.

In fact, Dale Messick, who created Brenda Starr, used an androgynous name so that readers would assume she was male. At least that is the story that I heard. Dale's career started a long time ago, before Catby, when there were even fewer female creator names on the comics pages.

Even as a dumb kid, I must have had some sense of the gender rules at play in the comics. All the characters I created up until high school were male. Uncoordinated superheroes and cowboys tromped through my sketch-books. It wasn't until I met a professional cartoonist, Dave Graue, who worked on Alley Oop for more than forty years, during my junior year in high school that I ever really stopped to think about why I chose only male leads for my comic creations. Dave asked me why I didn't use a woman as my main character, and I answered that I just figured a male character would have more options.

I had made that decision intuitively, not understanding why. After that realization I started to look at comics in a different way. I started to notice the cultural subtexts and the gender politics of the comics page.

Basically, it goes something like this: Male cartoon characters can be goofy, funny, slapstick, or humorously deformed. They can be doctors, lawyers or even barbarians. Female characters, on the other hand, have to be cute - preferably with sex appeal, Barbie figures, and great hair. Their entire world must revolve around their male costars.

Think for a minute about Blondie. Now think about Beetle Bailey. Miss Buxley? Okay, so maybe the chicks in B.C. don't have great hair, but they have boobs for days. You could even say the same for Hagar the Horrible.

My friend Dave told me at that first meeting that the understood law of comics is that male characters can be drawn humorously, with embellishments such as huge feet and big noses, and that female characters should always have small feet, hands, and waists. The female characters should always be attractive, he said.

You might think that he was overstating this rule, but when I started to pay attention, I had to admit that he was right. The one exception was Cathy, but I think that it is an anomaly. Cathy was meant for "women readers" because all she ever talks about are dieting and dating, buying swimsuits, and conflicts with her mother. I mean, what else is there if you are a woman?

I am looking over my own shoulder as I write, and I am thinking that I sound pretty negative, but I'm really not. As a matter of fact, I am one of those annoying folks who is terminally optimistic, but even the optimistic must face facts.

While it is hard to be a woman in comic strips, it is even harder to be a female comic-book character. Comic books are a whole different ball game, but some of the same rules apply.

Nowadays if you are a female comic-book character, you have to look like Lara Croft and be a black belt. Am I the only one who has noticed that the trend in comic books (and movies) is toward women who act like men, but come in a package that is every single teenage boy's fantasy?

I am not saying that I don't like it. I loved both Lara Croft (Tomb Raider) movies and the revamped, updated Charlie's Angels. What's not to love?

So here's the deal. I don't know how this trend will ever turn unless more women start drawing comics. Cathy, while she's had a good run and broken down some doors in the "old boys' club," can not possible speak for all of us.

Personally, I do a comic called Jane's World. In the first collection of the strip into book form, I wrote in the introduction that Jane was goofy, self-absorbed, and basically just another "B" cup gal trying to figure life out.

I actually showed Jane's World to a newspaper editor once, and he told me that he would not run it because it was not gender-specific enough. Okay, I'm a woman, drawing a comic about a woman. How much more gender-specific can you get? But see, what he was saying was what I had intuitively figured out at age seven. Female characters in newspapers have to worry about dishes, dating, and dieting, because that is what male newspaper editors think women worry about.

Until there are more of us out there telling a different side to the story, the comics pages will continue to be dominated by the old boys' club.