Women in Comics ... Lazy Article Time!

Back when I was a wee slip of a lad, there was a trend in music criticism for acting all surprised at the resurgence of 'women in rock.' Every three months or so, a journalist would notice that a woman had made a record and get all excited about the 'different approach' of women. Eventually, someone (Kim Deal from The Breeders, I think) pointed out that women had been in rock for ages.

Looking at the line-up for Comic Con, I think I could reintroduce this trend, through the 'resurgence of women in sequential art' article. Look! There's all these women: Team Girl in Glasgow, Emma Vieceli, Gail Simone, Hannah Bury! I can make idiotic statements claiming that Vieceli's line betrays a feminine fluidity, taking both Kirby's clarity and adding a distinctive charm.

This would, hopefully, be followed by a serious trolling of my blog, in which fans could point out that connecting Kate Charlesworth's Sally Heathcote, Suffragette and Leah Moore's Vampire Diaries by virtue of their gender is akin to linking Peter Milligan's X-Statix  to John Wagner's Judge Dredd.

(For the non-comic fans reading: Heathcote  is a study of the campaign for women's with a personal story included, while Vampire Diaries  is probably less historical: X-Statix is a wry look at celebrity, Dredd is a future dystopian state with added punching and satire.)

Far more interesting is the diversity of styles on show. Even those articles in the 1990s about 'comic grow up' (they seemed to mirror those women in rock rambles) tended to be all about the superheroes. Indeed, the main theme of 'adult comics' was big blokes punching with a melancholic sigh. But when I checked out Vieceli's webpage, she had My Little Pony and Young Avengers on the same  CV. Denise Mina follows her career as a crime writer with Hellblazer and an adaptation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

The traditional division between underground and overground comics so clear in the 1960s (Robert Crumb did not do The Hulk, although I  bet Stan Lee had a crack at doing Keep on Truckin') has been replaced by what Mark Boyle described a minute ago in the office of a strategy of 'womblin' free': no longer bound by genre, the artist can have a crack at The Adventures of Superman before continuing with their own work, Helheim (Joelle Jones).