Women at the Jewish Museum

Other topics touched on in the too-brief discussion portion were bizarre breasts, how male artistic preferences tend to be more confrontational, whether the panelists have a specific audience gender in mind when they work, and where the mainstream comics are for girls. That last question was posed by audience member Barbara Slate, who used to write Barbie for Marvel when Trina drew it (and fellow audience member Hildy Mesnick edited it). I didn’t get a chance to mention Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane, one of my favorite aimed-at-girls Marvel comics, but I was pretty content to soak up the atmosphere. The discussion ended with Leela Corman pleading with the museum world for this to be among the last “Women Comic Artists” panels – if curators actually took a little effort to gender-integrate their exhibitions, there wouldn’t, and shouldn’t, be a need for continued marginalization of women in this day and age.