This is a (very) long post, and I hope that it will generate an equally large amount of discussion. Everyone here is of course free to express their own opinions, and while I do not expect that everyone will agree with everything that I have written, I hope that you all will continue to observe the customary standards of decorum that have become a hallmark of CIDU.
Over the past few months the Daily Cartoonist has reported extensively about the way that Gannett has “restructured” the comics for all of their newspapers. A more recent TDC report theorized that one motivation for Gannett’s microscopic menu was misogynistic chauvinism, and Georgia Dunn adapted this hypothesis into Breaking Cat News:
It is undeniably true that newspaper comics have been a male-dominated business for over a century, but I think it both misses the point (and weakens the argument) to ascribe Gannett’s motivation exclusively to chauvinism. Gannett has simply selected old, reliable, and non-controversial mainstays. The average age of the strips on their “approved” list is approximately half a century, and back then virtually every single comic author was male. Gannett is not discriminating directly against “women”, the company is discriminating against all new authors, no matter whether they are women, men, or transgender.
As I already commented at TDC, “Gannett has selected a tired collection of dull, ancient (mostly zombie) strips, and has presumably negotiated a massive volume discount from the syndicate, because they are in a position to impose this lame collection onto dozens of defenseless editorial offices, in complete disregard of what readers would actually prefer. This is just window dressing for the sake of being able to claim that the Gannett papers still offer a comic section; the corporate leadership doesn’t care one iota whether anyone would bother to keep a subscription to read any of those features, and Gannett would probably prefer if all of their papers dropped the comics entirely.“
In addition, I also do not think that it is fair to assume that only a woman can create a convincing female character. Although female authors have always been in short supply, there are nevertheless a number of strong, positive girls in the comics, each of which goes a long way to dismantle the antiquated stereotypes set by “Blondie“, “Momma“, and “Nancy“, or (even worse) in “Andy Capp” and “The Lockhorns“.
Here’s a selection of some of my favorites. Most are written by men, but there is one woman and one trans author in this collection:
First and foremost, there are both Amelia and Rose in Will Henry’s “Wallace the Brave“:
Then we have Henrietta (Enriqueta) in “Macanudo” (by Liniers, not to mention whoever does those brilliant English translations; his only translator’s name that I was able to discover was – not surprisingly – a woman: Mara Faye Lethem):
Cynthia in “Barney & Clyde“:
Danae (and her sister) in Wiley’s “Non-Sequitur“:
The last BCN panel shown above refers to “Phoebe (and her Unicorn)”. Personally, I preferred Dana Simpson’s original title (“Heavenly Nostrils“), but I guess it just wasn’t marketable:
Making an exception for a re-run, there’s Alice in Richard Thompson’s “Cul de Sac“:
Making another exception for a zombie, especially because it was inherited by a woman, there’s “Heart (of the City)“:
P.S. The bottom line is that the only thing that publishing companies care about are their own bottom lines. If we are ever going to get an inclusive (multi-gendered) set of new authors in newspaper comics, it will be necessary for the readership to change their fossilized habits and to start petitioning for papers to drop all the reruns that are currently cluttering (even choking) those comic sections. That doesn’t just mean “Cul de Sac“, it also means letting “Peanuts“, “Calvin & Hobbes“, and a number of other popular “zombie” strips go. I regret to say that for obvious reasons, I don’t think this is going to happen any time in the near future.
Comics I Don't Understand 