The Beat

Image Expo, the "Apple announcements" of comics is returning for a fourth outing in January on January 8th, once again at the Yerba Buena the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. The creator line-up includes Brian K. Vaughan (SAGA, Y: The Last Man), Todd McFarlane (SPAWN), Scott Snyder (WYTCHES, Batman), Emi Lenox (EMITOWN), Jeff Lemire (Green Arrow, Trillium), and Marjorie Liu(Astonishing X-Men) but SPECIAL GUESTS are promised. It would not be a stretch to guess that the above named creators will be announcing new projects from Image.

Jill Lepore, author of The Secret History of Wonder Woman, talks about how the Amazons origins are tied up with the history of suffrage and birth control and nicely sums up the history of women in comics in a couple of paragraphs:

We've linked to a few of Jed McGowan's wordless comics before—including Hawaii, a best in show among geological comics, and Voyager, a wordless comic about a space probe. Despite the dry-sounding material, Xeris-winner McGowan (Lone Pines) presents them in a visually arresting way. This time out, he's got a story to tell, and it's a strange and eerie one entitled Control Room. What happens when that space probe lands on Mars with several sisters aboard? Hit the link to find out.

Independent Sources is a local to NYC show that spotlights ethnic and local news. Hosted by Zyphus Lebrun, it's put together by CUNY (City University of New York ) and runs on their cable station. Last week's episode, covers various aspects of diversity in comics, with thoughtful interviews with Marvel's Sana Amanat, Image's David Brothers, Morgan Dubin from Abrams Comic Arts, Jonathan Gray, Assistant Professor of English, John Jay College, artist Dexter Vines and yours truly. Aside from my having to terrifyingly reënect walking into a comic shop, it's a sprightly look at the basic issues of diversity and the widening audience for comics. There's also a nice segment on a cosplayer who designed a Rita Repulsa costume and others for curvier women.

I totally stole this from artist/producer Denys Cowan's FB page, but it's an interesting little sidenote, Back in the 90s people still read magazines, and liquor companies would purchase full page advertisements in these magazines. Man, history is SO WEIRD, right? Anyway, Dewars scotch ran a series of profiles of debonair achievers attempting to convince you that if you drank their scotch you would also be a debonair achiever. Cowan, then well known for his Batman and Question comics and about to co-found Milestone Media, was a fitting choice but it did seem like a win for comics at the time. This predated the Rob Liefeld Levis commercial, but both are a reminder that cartoonists as media figures is far from a recent phenomenon.

In all the current hoo hah about video games, diversity and propaganda, it's worth remembering that women make up nearly 50% of most kinds of gamers. There are some exceptions, of course. Unlike the comic industry, the video gaming industry has the money to study this sort of thing, and the Entertainment Software Association has put together many statistics on the age and gender of gamers. The most recent study shows that 48% of all gamers are women. I was spit balling with Brett Schenker the other day, he of the groundbreaking Facebook study on comic demographics, and I wondered what his methodology would day about female games.