Here’s a snippet from my blog post looking at the number of women creators on the forthcoming DC relaunch:
What’s shocking is the lack of women creators on the titles. Bleeding Cool has done the gendercrunching on the numbers. There are 160 credited creators on the 52 titles, of which 157 are male and 3 are female.
The three is actually two. Gail Simone is the writer on two projects (she’s co-writing one of them) and Jenny Frison is doing one of the covers. No female artists are being employed for interior art. There might yet be women colourists and letterers, but usually those names are not featured on the covers of comic books.
Last night Gail Simone tweeted: “DC, we need more female creators, stat. Really. Let’s make this happen.” (Bleeding Cool has put her tweeted conversation online).
It’s good for Gail to go to bat for women in comics – especially as she’s working for DC. I found it interesting that some people took umbrage at her remark. As if her statement was a call for an easy ride for women. Women are not absent in the industry, but they are incredibly scarce in DC (and Marvel doesn’t fare much better most of the time).
The statistics are frankly embarrassing for any industry in the 21st century.
