Ok first got to say the Macy’s balloon reference made me spit out my coffee. Second I want to thank you for writing all that up. But I grew up reading comics like Spiderman and always thought here is a guy taking care of just his hood. Then as a black female I got excited when they introduced Miles Morales. But I get your point about females in comics… Never got into wonder woman because it reminded my of the myth of multiple gods and everything and the tales that I had to read in school
I did like Spiderman the best, I will admit. It felt a lot more relatable and real.
But then the Gwen-Stacy-as-a-plot-device-and-not-a-person nonsense started, and I was just like… oh, here we go. Again.
At least the manga I read never treated women as fridge stuffing, even if they were regulated to background characters.
I think the thing that grinds my gears the most about Rob Liefeld isn’t that he’s a terrible artist; it was that he’s a terrible artist who was kept on the payroll and allowed to keep making terrible comics. They could have fired him and hired someone else, anyone else.
Hell, at the time there were lots of successful women doing manga in Japan, and I doubt they had the only women in the world who could draw comics. It really feels like he was mostly keeping his job because he was white and male.
Even today Marvel and DC all but body-check women comic artists out the door. Thank goodness for the internet, so they can put their art out anyways, and on their own terms.
Edit to add: I recommend reading Magic Knight Rayearth if you have the time. (Maybe don’t watch the anime. Trying to simplify Clamp’s highly detailed art… didn’t work that well. Although the OAV wasn’t too bad.)
It’s an oldie, but it’s one of the comics that first got me into manga back in high school. It’s by an all-woman team, it’s beautiful (really, pretty much all of CLAMP’s art is, and I recommend checking it out), and not only did it have teenage women as the protagonists, but it was the first story I read where there was no actual villain or hero, and the story was actually compelling!
Ok first got to say the Macy’s balloon reference made me spit out my coffee. Second I want to thank you for writing all that up. But I grew up reading comics like Spiderman and always thought here is a guy taking care of just his hood. Then as a black female I got excited when they introduced Miles Morales. But I get your point about females in comics… Never got into wonder woman because it reminded my of the myth of multiple gods and everything and the tales that I had to read in school
I did like Spiderman the best, I will admit. It felt a lot more relatable and real.
But then the Gwen-Stacy-as-a-plot-device-and-not-a-person nonsense started, and I was just like… oh, here we go. Again.
At least the manga I read never treated women as fridge stuffing, even if they were regulated to background characters.
I think the thing that grinds my gears the most about Rob Liefeld isn’t that he’s a terrible artist; it was that he’s a terrible artist who was kept on the payroll and allowed to keep making terrible comics. They could have fired him and hired someone else, anyone else.
Hell, at the time there were lots of successful women doing manga in Japan, and I doubt they had the only women in the world who could draw comics. It really feels like he was mostly keeping his job because he was white and male.
Even today Marvel and DC all but body-check women comic artists out the door. Thank goodness for the internet, so they can put their art out anyways, and on their own terms.
Edit to add: I recommend reading Magic Knight Rayearth if you have the time. (Maybe don’t watch the anime. Trying to simplify Clamp’s highly detailed art… didn’t work that well. Although the OAV wasn’t too bad.)
It’s an oldie, but it’s one of the comics that first got me into manga back in high school. It’s by an all-woman team, it’s beautiful (really, pretty much all of CLAMP’s art is, and I recommend checking it out), and not only did it have teenage women as the protagonists, but it was the first story I read where there was no actual villain or hero, and the story was actually compelling!