Sociology

That's according to a Variety story which suggests that Fangirls are the new golden girls for marketers at Con:

Tim Hanley (he of Gender Crunching) has a great guest post up at DC Women Kicking Ass looking at The Women Behind Wonder Woman. Of course we all know about the men like William Marston and HG Peter, but there were several women involved in the early years as well, including Marston's two wives Elizabeth and Olive (above—yes the three of them lived together and it was a little odd), but also women who worked directly on the series, including the great editor Dorothy Roubicek Woolfolk and even a scripter:

The occasion of ASTONISHING X-MEN's same-sex wedding has also seen several parties and receptions at various comics shops across the nation, including Zeus Comics, which held a bachelor party last week. But Midtown Comics is going all the way by hosting two actual same sex weddings this Wednesday, with a reception taking place at the Eventi Hotel. Two couples—Scott Everhart and Jason Welker, and Khris Wilson and Chris Orme—will be tying the knot. Both events are private but people are being encouraged to take photos outside, as the shop will be opening late due to the nuptials.

As the UK's big three-weekend rolling convention rolls on, Kapow! is the big multimedia/Big Two and Image/mancave convention, with movie premiere stuff, Joe Quesada, Dan DiDio, Eric Stephenson, Jonathan Ross, and even Warren Ellis and Peter Serafinowitz. The show is being held at the fairly intimate London Business Design Centre—total capacity is about 6500 people—and all tickets are already sold out, meaning there will be no walk-up tickets at all—so mastermind Mark Millar's wish to give the UK a mini San Diego has come true.

While THE AVENGERS has been hailed as a feel-good ball of action-comedy that kicks off the summer with smiles and cheers, in one regard it is a bit unsettling. You see, it is yet another in a long, long line of movies that has trashed Manhattan real estate in a willy-nilly fashion. For about a hot minute after 9/11, destroying Manhattan in entertainment was considered crass—who needed fakery, when you had the real thing?—however, it soon came into vogue again as a symbol of the unsettled post 9/11 era.

In case you were sleeping under a tree, it's official: HUNGER GAMES was the third biggest opening ever, with $152.5 million, the best non-sequel opening ever, only behind HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS: PART 2 and THE DARK KNIGHT. Heady company for a girl who hunts squirrels. The success of the movie also puts the lie to Hollywood's beloved trope that an actioner starring a women can't be successful. And as such, it's going to have a lot of repercussions. Because Hollywood is full of copycats and they're going to try to repeat the formula. But what formula will they see in HUNGER GAMES?

Well, here's a cool idea. The WOMANTHOLOGY anthology which garnered a ton of money on Kickstarter and a ton of attention everywhere will be spun off into an ongoing comics series which will feature three-issue themed minis. The first theme is SPACE and contributors include Blair Butler, Fiona Staples, Jessica Hickman, Bonnie Burton, Ming Doyle, Stacie Ponder, and more. The book was announced at the Womanthology panel at WonderCon. Unlike the anthology, which was a benefit, contributors will be paid for their work. So, that's all done and dusted then.

Today is the International Women's Day in Women's History Month. I was working on a big old post on all sorts of recent gender related topics but...it will have to wait. Instead, I'll shore my little Pinterest board I have called "Women in Comics."

This interview with Scott Lobdell from ComicVine was sent to us with the idea that maybe he wasn't up on the news that Static was joining the Teen Titans, which was announced at MegaCon:

Gender switched art seems to be very popular these days, as with the gender-swapped JLA and Avengers. Well, over at Escher Girls, webcomic creator Shobana ‘Bob’ Appavu (Demon of the Underground) served up this gender-swapped Avengelyne/Shi cover.

It was 13 years ago that an "amateur" comics journalist named Gail Simone ran a survey about the phenomenon of "Women in Refrigerators" in comics. That site—currently housed here—used the moment of Kyle Rayner came home and found his girlfriend stuffed in the refrigerator as a lens for the entire phenomenon of female comics characters getting beaten, crippled, stabbed, mutilated, assaulted, and devalued. Luckily, since then, everything has been fixed!

All week DC Women Kicking Ass has been running polls to pick the favorite artists on various DCU heroines, such as Wonder Woman and Batgirl. It's fun to see the great artists who have drawn these characters over the years. It is also fun to observe how community standards have changed with regards to superheroines. Take Black Canary. It's a pretty safe assumption that even when the character was created by Carmine Infantino and Robert Kanigher in 1947, a woman in fishnet tights was assumed to be hot stuff. However, first general prudishness, and later the Comics Code, kept her sort of modest. In recent years, she's been unchained.