Over at TIME.com Andrew Arnold reviews five graphic novels that all happen to be written by women.

Meanwhile, over at SF Weekly, Karen Zuercher outlines the reasons why some women have a hard time getting into comics. Happily, aided by some suggestions from The Beat, she now knows better:

It’s stereotypes like these that have kept me from reading comics and their long-form variation, graphic novels, for years. Most of my old excuses no longer fly. I can’t say I don’t like the art, because there’s so much variety that anyone with eyes can find a style she likes. I can’t say the stories don’t speak to me, because that would be like saying that books don’t speak to me — there’s no uniform story, any more than there’s one type of novel. And now I can’t even say that I don’t know where to start, because I already have: Before I even knew there was a graphic novel “movement” I was reading Maus and Persepolis. Yet there I stalled, put off by the inscrutability of Chris Ware and the violence of S. Clay Wilson among other impediments (Wilson appears tonight at 7 at the Edinburgh Castle).