Right now, fans of mainstream superhero comics seemed to be more engaged than ever in conversations about women in comics, the need for women creators and the need for strong female characters. While that was never a primary consideration for you two, do you think conversations like this one help? Does it actually accomplish anything or are there other things we need to do if we’re serious about involving women in the industry?
Because while mainstream comics, ie. Marvel and DC and perhaps Image are not doing well in being all that diverse in the talent they’re using on their books, at least this lack of diversity is talked about, if not quite acted upon yet. And if we actually did get serious about diversity as a comics community, it would be relatively easy for a Marvel or DC to get more women, more people of colour on their books, just because of the kind of books they publish: assembly line comics with an emphasis on the characters rather than the creators.
Yet what about a publisher like Fantagraphics, the exact opposite of Marvel and DC, a publisher that prides itself on publishing the very best cartoonists publishing in English? If you look at their catalogue and the people they publish it isn’t any more diverse than the socalled Big Two are.
The thing is, it would actually be harder to “fix” Fantagraphics than it would be to fix Marvel justbecause the people being published by Fantagraphics aren’t interchangable cogs. Therefore, if the publishers, Gary Groth and Kim Thompson would want to increase the diversity of their catalogue, they need to do more work: find the sort of cartoonist that would fit in well with Joe Sacco and Daniel Clowes and Chris Ware, but is a woman, or a person of colour. Either that or move away from the Fanta “house style” and find new, interesting areas of “art comics” that unrepresented groups do better at.
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