: I buy trades, but since they offer me no option of buying single comics day-of (their digital service is not available overseas), then yeah, I'm going to pirate. If I had to be a month or two behind everyone on the Internet, It would kill my interest in comics and then they'd be getting no money from me.
Herpaderp, you don't let me buy them then of course i'm going to pirate them.
Since it's not available digital download outside of the US, my comic store will be weeks late with the reboots and I'm going to end up pirating it regardless. ._.
Shoulda had it internationally available, DC. O well.
No, they're not. While the dying superhero genre might be more male dominated, the idea that guys are somehow better at writing and drawing stories is just flat out idiotic. Alternative comics tend to be heavy on the women at the moment, and there are a huge amount of female webcomic creators. Not to mention there are more comics aimed at girls and women when you leave the US.
@Mrfuzzynutz: But they're NOT bringing in the best bucks right now, though, so clearly their current strategy is not working. Their numbers keep slipping across the board, both Marvel and DC, and maybe part of that is because the world is changing and they are not.
Part of the reason stuff like the new Spider-Man can often feel gimmick-y, is because their creators do not necessarily understand these characters or relate to them, and thus cannot write them well. So they read as 'token' like, or fake. That's part of the reason people have these totally bogus assumptions about female/minority characters, and dismiss the books as soon as they come out. I mean, sure, some of it is just misogyny and racism, but I think (hope) a great deal of it is because we can personally pick up on the fake-ness of the whole affair.
If they genuinely diversified their team, I think we could avoid some of this.
Alternative comics are pretty diverse at the moment, and female-heavy - but they're told their art doesn't match the 'in-house' style or they don't write 'the way our company does'. But their strategy is failing, so it's time to branch a tiny bit away from the in-house styles, aka, the same-old dwindling typical affair.
@DEGRAAF: She's not exactly one or two inches shorter than Bruce there, and it bites. She was supposed to be an Amazon. Now she looks like she might weigh 120 soaking wet.
The way I see it is, more diversity in creators leads to more diversity in characters and storytelling, and a nice genuineness that is difficult to reproduce artificially.
While it'd be straight up bull to claim that a guy can't write a girl well, or a white guy couldn't write a hispanic guy - it'd also be an outright lie to claim that it doesn't lead to a certain sort of authenticity when people are writing what they know. Sure, none of us know what it's like to be Batman (unless some of you are holding out on me), but someone from a marginalized group might understand the problems of mutants in Marvels a little better. Again, let me make it clear, that doesn't mean it can't be done well by someone who is by all accounts incredibly priviliged - but it takes a little more work, effort, and awareness on their part that they don't really feel like putting the effort in for research/development. People write and live in the world differently based on their own experiences, and as a result, diversity in your team leads to different ways of expressing experiences and different writing techniques. It's great for creativity.
And while there are plenty of guys who do a good job writing female characters, there's something I can't put my finger on that they just don't capture as well as females tend to. And with the female market for comics potentially growing at a huge rate (if the Internet is any indication), it's not a matter of hitting quotas so much as hiring people for a diversified audience. It's not like comics are doing so phenomenally well that they can afford to stick to the same old same old.
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