Women in Sequential Art and the Women who Love Them

Now, I had no idea that there was a thriving underground of lesbian comics. Maybe they're called "Grrrl Comix" or something cheesy like that, but whatever they are, it's not like I didn't know that women did comics. The first time I met Dave Sim, he was dating that girl, Zoroaster (or whatever her name is), who did her own comics. There was also a frequent guest to one of our cons who had a whole series of short graphic novels involving a female warrior who was something of a cross between Red Sonja and Tarzan, so I'm not completely out of the loop on the idea of female fantasy and sequential artists.

But I also never read The Comics Journal (TCJ) much growing up, mainly because I was into superheroes and it cost too much. Having now received my second issue, I can safely say I had no need to read it as a child because I was right: it has nothing of interest to me.

Now, I like lesbians - in theory. I like lesbian acts in porn, but nowhere near as much as I did when I was a kid. Let's face it: you've seen one, you've seen them all, and I just can't really relate to them, anyway. But I'm obviously being facetious. In all honesty, I'm torn on this whole underground lesbian comics culture.

For one thing, I honestly think it's absolutely great that anyone - especially anyone who feels disenfranchised or ostracized, oppressed or put-upon - would turn to comic books to find what they are looking for. Whether they create them or simply enjoy them, I think that's one of the keystones of the medium. With superhero comics, they provide icons for projection - in the sense that they empower the disenfranchised to believe they are capable of more than what "real life" consigns them to - they give them heroes and fictional "friends" in whose lives they can become involved. It's escapism in a therapeutic way. For others, well, like Frank Miller always says, "There's something 'outlaw' about the medium."

So, when it comes to the absolute proliferation of girl-on-girl autobio comics, I find it really cool that this sub-sect of society has turned, with such fervor, to this great medium as an outlet for their frustrations, the stories of their lives, and etc. I support their efforts 100%.

That being said, I don't support them financially and I'll tell you why:

Most of them suck. I mean they're real shit. They all have the same, basic story and any child could best the artwork involved. Speaking from the sequential art standpoint, the only thing that makes them "comics" is that the story follows a linear path in panels. Aside from the subject matter, absolutely nothing sets these works apart from any other (in a good way); in fact, the only thing that sets them apart - aside from the subject matter - in any way is that they are really, really bad.

Let's face it: half the artwork on half the refrigerators across America are better than 90% of all the art in any of these comics.

And that, as an artist and comics creator, offends me.

Everyone has a story - everyone. The only difference is that some people actually spend the time and effort to set theirs down. Further, you should never even bother to write until you're 30; you have nothing to say and your story is the same story a zillion others have told before you. That's because a zillion others have lived your story because you haven't lived far enough into life to know shit - like, "Hrm, I know lots of people who have a story much like mine, so there must have been lots of others throughout time who have stories similar to ours, and if even ¹/₁₀^th of them have written it, this story's been told approximately 1,000,000,000^{1,000,000,00th} times already."

The way I see it, if you're going to do something - anything - you should want to to do it well. And while I think part of the reason these young women turn to comics to tell their story is because they know we're an accepting community, I think that's also the reason they figure they can just scrawl any old crap across the page and we'll accept it.

And, of course, if we don't, we're obviously a bunch of elitists who are trampling all over their right to express themselves and we can go screw.

Just being a homosexual doesn't qualify you as a sequential artist anymore than just being black makes you an expert on race relations.

Of course, what would I know? I'm just a white man.