To truly begin our discussion of minority voices in modern comics, it seems only fitting to begin with the group that represents the largest segment of alienated potential readers and creators. Despite valiant efforts put forth by governments all over the world to curtail their numbers from undue swelling, women still represent roughly 51% of the human population and, as such, qualify as our first landmark for discussion.

Women have the unique privilege of being the only minority voice which once did share a sizeable portion of the audience, but which has been all but excluded from what the modern comics reader would consider the mainstream with all the benefits that an audience and its collective wealth can afford. This is not to say that there are not women working in comics today, as subsequent columns will endeavour to illustrate in greater detail.

It is difficult, though, to look at the many million of dollars generated by Japanese shoujo manga artists every year (a genre that will be grossly oversimplified to mean comics by women for women for the sake of this discussion) and not feel that Western women, as creators and audience alike, have somehow been robbed of an important birthright.

'In the 1950s, women's involvement both as readers and creators began to dissipate.' Women have a long tradition in cartooning, as a broader medium that also includes illustration, gag comics, and comic strips, that stretches back to the beginnings of the 20th Century. In her book THE GREAT WOMEN CARTOONISTS, comics scholar Trina Robbins delineates an impressive timeline of women contributing to 'the ninth art' prior to World War II.

Beginning with pioneers like Rose O'Neill (creator of the Kewpie, and, thus, the Kewpie doll) and later with innovators like Nell Brinkley and Dale Messick (BRENDA STARR), women were an important part of the vanguard of illustrators that drove the circulation numbers of papers all over the United States and abroad ever upward during the early part of the last century.

When the comic book form was born in the middle 1930s, first as cheap collections of the strips themselves and then featuring all-new material, women were at first present in roughly equivalent numbers to their strip compatriots from a generation before. The first American audience for comic books was a remarkably diverse one, filling quickly with the onset of World War II with lonely war wives (many of whom were working full-time and raising children in their husband's absence) and soldiers abroad looking for light reading to fill up the long periods of waiting between duties.

Commensurate to the audience comics suddenly found itself with, superhero themes, which dominated sales during the early years of the war, slowly diminished in importance leading into the 1950s. Comics had found a host of other genres with which to entertain its audience, including adventure, crime, westerns, science-fiction, adaptations of classic literature, and, for the ladies, humour, teen-themed, and romance comics, often drawn by women themselves.

Despite this diversity, comics' audiences continued to dwindle as the economy (and some would say the society) stagnated during the 1950s. The introduction of the television diminished the appeal for both radio (which was free) and comic books (which were not) as a medium for delivering light, serial fiction.

It was during this period that women's involvement with comics, both as readers and creators, began to dissipate. There are no simple explanations as to why this happened, as it was precipitated by a number of factors that are not causally related. Robbins posits that, "Some women ... left the industry for the traditional role of wife and mother ... As with any industry slump, many artists and writers were let go, and as with any industry, the first fired were women." (THE GREAT WOMEN CARTOONISTS pp101-102)

'There was animosity in both publishing and distribution channels towards women.' The bad news regarding comics sales was made doubly worse by noted-only-by-comics-scholars psychologist Dr Fredric Wertham's crusade against comics as the root cause of juvenile delinquency. Wertham's accusations resulted in the book SEDUCTION OF THE INNOCENT, a series of Senate hearings on the matter, and the establishment of the self-imposed Comics Code, which stripped the remaining vitality out of an industry already hobbled by poor sales.

This turbulent period in comics past represents a ring-pass-not for women in the comics mainstream, with the exception of comic strips, where women have maintained a consistent presence over the years. The tightening of the market in the middle to late 1950s killed off many publishers that had been straggling along since the initial boom in the 1940s, and as a result eliminated most of the hard won diversity as publishers consolidated their lines to cut their losses.

It is also my perception that there was no small degree of animosity held in both publishing and distribution channels towards women in general as being more responsible than Wertham himself for the troubles that they had got into with the United States Congress, culminating in the Kefauver Hearings of 1954.

In his otherwise reasonable treatise, COMIX: A HISTORY OF COMIC BOOKS IN AMERICA (1971), comics historian Les Daniels looks back across seventeen years and sees that, "[t]he potent force of outraged womanhood was the purse-string power behind the threat of newsdealer boycott that strangled complex distribution lines and finally started the castration of comic books. Doctors might point the finger of suspicion, and vultures might wait in the wings, but only a militant power bloc could stem the rising tide of printer's ink." (p84)

While there were still children's and teen comics being published going into the 1960s that could be considered of interest to girls and women, very few of them were still being produced by women. This period is considered the beginning of the Silver Age of comics as a superhero resurgence started by DC in the late 1950s and continued into what would later be known as the Marvel Revolution starting in 1961, redefined comics for the mainstream as a product specifically for young adolescent boys, to the exclusion of the rest of comics' former audience.

In the following quote, taken again from the Robbins' book, Ramona Fradon talks about her experiences drawing comics like AQUAMAN and METAMORPHO.

'The sudden increase in demand for manga left jobs for women to fill.' "I always felt rather strange, like a fish out of water or something. Here I was in a totally male-dominated field. I had a lot of trouble with the subject matter as well. I was not really interested in drawing super heroes - male fantasies, you know? People hitting each other or scheming to take over the world." (p105).

Fradon and Marvel penciller Marie Severin represent the sum total of women working in mainstream comics as artists during this period.

The rapid dwindling of women in the comics field had much to do with economics. The field was young enough that nearly everyone in comics in 1956 could remember the vast wealth accumulated just a decade before, even as circulation numbers off the newsstand continued to decline. Though the domination of Marvel Comics during the 1960s saw gains over the figures in the late 1950s, they were still small beans compared to the vast audience during and just after WWII. In just fifteen years, the whole newsstand distribution network would prove unprofitable enough for most of the major comics companies to abandon it in favour of our current Direct Market model.

In comparison, the Japanese manga market, which, as I mentioned, developed a vibrant market for girls and women's comics created by women during this same period, was suffering from many of the same problems as the US Market during the 1950s, down to the family-values groups bemoaning the end of the Japanese culture due to the influence of "evil" manga.

Further Reading:

COMIX: A HISTORY OF COMIC BOOKS IN AMERICA
Les Daniels, Bonanza Books.
Their industry response, however, was 180 degrees opposite that of their American cousins. Because Japan did not have the television penetration of the US in the 1950s, people were more reliant on manga to tell them stories and distract them from the woes of daily life, which were many. When sales started to dip, the manga industry remarkably responded by quadrupling their output and lowering the prices, beginning the weekly anthology market that continues to this day.

While women had been competing with their male counterparts for jobs writing and drawing manga for girls (as it was still primarily intended for children), the sudden increase in the demand for manga left the lesser-paying jobs at the girls magazines open for the women to fill. In time, with this freedom, they would create a very defined aesthetic for girl's and women's comics that would be hungrily consumed by several generations of Japanese women unto the present.

In contrast, women would be excluded from American comics until the early 1970s, when pioneers like Robbins, Roberta Gregory, and others would overcome the widespread misogyny of the underground movement, which apparently was not as virulent as the widespread misogyny in mainstream comics, and create comics of their own. This disenfranchisement would silently change the public's perception of comics over the decade from it being a children's medium (which was false) to a boy's medium (which was even more false), and create a rift in mainstream comics that has yet to be fully repaired even today.

Rob Vollmar is the Eisner-nominated writer of THE CASTAWAYS and the recently released BLUESMAN: BOOK ONE.

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