A Comic Shop down in Orlando is starting, a girls-only comics club — PR below:
A Comic Shop is starting a brand new comic book and graphic novel appreciation club with one very important rule: No boys allowed. That’s right; this group (Fangirls: Comic Club) is only for the female comic connoisseur and will focus on issues to reflect that fan base. Their first meeting is going to be January, 15 2011 from 1 PM to 2 PM and will be taking a look at the unique post apocalyptic series Y: The Last Man (specifically volume 1).
The shop will also have Y: The Last Man artist Pia Guerra visiting the shop to do a signing on February 25, 2011. While the event is open to the public, it will give the girls a chance to discuss their observations and insights with one of the women who worked on the series.
The group was created with the idea to help include more women in on the amazing world that comics offer. The female comic fan is not all together unheard of, it seems to be a rare commodity these days, and A Comic Shop hopes to change that. Really the shop just wants to give girls a save place to let their geek flags fly. While, the groups will be lead by a man for the first meeting, the focus of the group is the female’s perspective of modern and classic comics in today’s society and subsequent meetings will only be open to the ladies.
What’s even better is that A Comic Shop is offering special discounts to members of the Fangirls: Comic Club on the graphic novels and comics they will be reading for that month. Girls who are interested in the group can join the facebook page to get up to the minutes news and information on special events, discounts and meeting agendas. Or they can simply stop by the store, located at 114 S. Semoran Blvd in Winter Park, FL, which has been voted “Best Comic Shop in Orlando” by the Orlando Weekly for the past four years in a row, as well as by WESH, A-List in 2007 and 2008.
You know, the way men are marginalized and discriminated against in this industry is really appalling.
The discount idea sounds good. It’s a Girls Girls World… anyway, maybe this will encourage more Florida women to read comics and push for the specific types of comics they like.
Hey, the discount is common among bookstore reading groups. Glad to see an actual comics shop using that marketing tool! Although… they should make it available to everyone in the shop, even if the reading group is limited.
(And congrats to Heidi, who midwifed Y at Vertigo!)
Butt-hurt fanboy backlash in 3…2…1…
I wonder if at some point they’ll discuss Ai Yazawa’s Nana.
Can I be a booth babe?
No but seriously this is several kinds of awesome.
While I’m all for nurturing female comics fandom, I don’t think a “no boys allowed” mentality is ever healthy.
But then again, I’m not from Florida. I think the female fandom is pretty strong in New York.
Gotta grow the industry into underserved markets, right? But seriously enough there are tons of girls getting more into comics as comics get more interesting.
Our local store (Million Year Picnic) sells a ton of indie and local books including a bunch that you’d have to say are targeted to girls in the same way that the muscloids with guns comics are targeted to boys. (Plus they’re selling a couple of my original comic/paintings so I give them extra props.)
So my point is that there are a lot of good ways to involve the ladies (and guys… having comicshops that both genders feel welcome can improve our odds if you get my drift.)
I know that I probably shouldn’t say this — gotta cue the knee-jerk reactions in 3..2..1.. — but is there really a comic book store where women are made to feel unwelcome? Or a store where the fanboys idolize girl-comic fans and fall all over themselves?
Maybe my area, Princeton NJ, is a little more cosmopolitan, but I see female readers (often not occompanied by a male comic fan boyfriends) shopping at COMIC RELIEF on Route 1. Granted, a female customer in this LCS is not as common as a female customer in the local Barnes & Noble, but I don’t believe it’s ever caused a row.
Does the comic-store dungeon, where girls are considered icky and not part of the club, still exist? Or is this just a hold-over stereotype from the LCS of 1979?
I think this is a good idea. Women have their own book clubs for novels, why not one for comics too? It isn’t about excluding us men in revenge for the way they excluded women, it’s about getting together and shooting the shit with the girls.
I have been made to feel very uncomfortable at lots of comic shops. (It’s partly why I was so geeked that regular bookstores started selling comics, and why many comic shops around here died.) I think it’s nice to have one hour a week where girls don’t have to worry about it. It takes a while to mesh any two groups together, and the people in the minority tend to benefit from having their own space for a little while. I think it’s a great way for more girls to get into comics and get their feet wet.