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§ For when you are feeling down in the dumps, Call Me Maybe – Telephones in Romance Comics!


§ Did you know that actress Geena Davis has an institute? In fact it’s the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media. MENSA member Davis started the organization nearly a decade ago to investigate how the media treats girls, and they just received a $1.2 million grant from Google to further their study. Hopefully they’ll investigate why two girls aren’t allowed to talk to each other in movies and that kind of thing. The GDIGM also produced the rather charming animated video above. Among their recent findings:

Not only is the gender imbalance alive and well in entertainment targeting children under 11 (just 28% of characters in family feature films are female, 38.9% in prime time and 30.8% in kid’s shows), but what the Institute exposed about the glass ceiling of employment in the media is truly disturbing. Men dominate every sector, comprising  96.6% of family film characters employed in the C-Suite, 100% of chief justices, 95.5% of high level politicians, and 78.1% of doctors. Male actors play 100% of the fictional editors-in-chief in family films. STEM careers are just as glaring. Female actors portray just 26 of the 160 speaking roles where characters are employed in STEM fields.


STEM refers to jobs in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Via

§ John Walsh of the webcomic GO HOME PADDY (which was recently funded on Kickstarter) interviews Colleen Doran about her GN GONE TO AMERIKAY.

Colleen Doran: Approval went pretty quickly, but the work took years. Research alone took months. And since I didn’t have a script yet, I spent all this time researching Ireland. When I got the script, it was almost all set in New York during three time periods! That was pretty funny, but I learned a lot anyway! Yes, I enjoyed [the research]. I’m one of those people who can get lost in it, though, and need to be reined in.  Sometimes it’s hard knowing when to quit and get on with it. For example, I recall spending over four hours trying to research a chair that appears on only three pages. Over two weeks trying to get the right color on a uniform that appears in two panels. You forget that old etchings you may use for reference are almost always going to be black and white. Most pages required research for each shot, which is grinding after awhile, because you just want to be able to draw. And so often it was stop and start, even when I thought I’d pinned down a scene weeks before starting the scene. Something always came up. And I hate making mistakes, so I kept out-thinking myself. It’s great having a job where you get to read wonderful books, though!

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