Tom Spurgeon’s essay Breaking a 26-Year Weekly Comics Buying Habit  tells the story of a devoted comic book reader who became disillusioned with mainstream comics and walked away. It comes down to three major points:

1. Mainstream comics are a duopoly (Marvel, DC) distributed by a monopoly (Diamond)
2. The duopoly produces superhero stories almost exclusively
3. Superhero stories tend to -
   -retread storytelling devices (like angsty first-person captions)
   -repeat and reboot the same origin stories instead of growing the universe with risky new characters
   -move at a pace that’s too slow to maintain interest

My story might be entitled “Why I Never Started a 26-Year Weekly Comics Buying Habit,” because while these obstacles forced one man to an ultimate conclusion, for me they were a barrier to entry. I know that there are women who read and love superhero comics; I read their essays and their enthusiastic blogs, I listen to their podcasts and I interact with them online. I thank them for keeping us in the conversation. But as a woman who doesn’t read superhero comics, my experience may give some insight as to why the duopoly fails to capture so many female readers at a malleable age.

From the time I was old enough to read, I knew there was a stack of comics in the closet. I didn’t know where they came from and it didn’t occur to me to ask for new ones, so I would read and re-read the stack I already had. It was a hefty assortment that included Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse from Dell Comics, Sugar and Spike, various Archie titles, some Children’s Classics Illustrated  and Harvey comics like Caspar, Richie Rich and Wendy the Good Little Witch. I was a small child in the late 1970s reading comics published in the 1960s, so ads for mail-in toys and other promotions, long since unavailable, were a constant source of disappointment. But the stories were always fresh.

When I turned eight years old I was considered competent enough to walk by myself to a convenience store a little more than a mile away from home (these were simpler times). With a little money of my own, I picked up Bazooka gum, bars of Tangy Taffy and comic book issues from the rotating newsstand. Since I was a girl under ten, I tried out Barbie and determined it “boring” (Barbie had less personality than dry toast), tested Star Comics’ Strawberry Shortcake series  and determined it “weird” (did anyone from Marvel ever watch the show or did they think they were above all constraints of continuity?),  and settled into a semi-regular Archie comics buying habit (missing an issue here or there never had any impact on story). I was one of the few girls who picked up Trina Robbins’ Misty series, and although it’s often named one of the worst products Star ever published, I actually think  that it’s men making that assessment. There was no toy attached with an established following and I expect that accounted for the dismal sales. But the series gave me a brief glimmer of hope that somewhere out there, someone knew how to write for and about women. I didn’t get the same feeling looking at the rest of the rack, and although I did pick up a few issues of Transformers, the glut of superhero offerings left me cold.

When I reached high school I found myself sharing art classes with students, mostly male, who were reading X-Men. I felt out of the loop. All of the comic book series I considered interesting had long ended by 1990s and I was finding Archie comics increasingly repetitive. I wanted to have comics to read, but had no idea where to begin; there was no internet to search through and no comic book shop in town to go to. I went to the local bookstore with my family and hovered over the newsstand for no less than twenty minutes, hesitating over which of the MANY X-Men titles was a good starting point. My father came by and asked me what was taking so long; he listened, thought about it, and said, “You know, that stuff’s really for kids anyway.” I ended up buying an Agatha Christie book.

A few years later I did take a chance and try out one X-Men issue: I bought X-Men #30 – The Ties That Bind (you know, the one where Cyclops and Jean get married). Imagine my reaction to this story as someone with an Archie and Harvey comics background… The pages were covered in awkward, lengthy exposition. The artwork was all over the place, with necks alternating widths, hammy hand fists and other questionable anatomy choices. The women spouted their lengthy exposition while striking spine-breaking poses, and I couldn’t distinguish between Jean Grey and her daughter from the future (daughter from the what?). There were so many references to past events I had no idea what the characters were talking about. The pacing was so slow I might as well have attended a real wedding. The characters seemed to stare off into space as they recited dialogue that could only sound natural coming from someone unfamiliar with the customs of human beings; they didn’t connect with each other and they certainly didn’t connect with me. This was proof my father was right: Comics were for kids.

I didn’t touch another comic book for three years.

Everything changed in 1997 – In my next post, we’ll learn why.

• 93% of the participants were male
• Consumers aged 13-18 were only 2%
• Female readership was down to 7% from 8% 20 years ago

Disappointed comments abounded on the Tumblr blog DC Women Kicking Ass, run by Sue from the 3 Chicks Review Comics podcast. Comments like this one from pluckyredhead: “The really sad thing? They’re going to take this as ‘proof’ that ‘women and kids don’t read comics’ and continue to ignore them as viable demographics.” Sue frequently posts on this topic, as she did last June when she said:

They (DC) are out on their DCnU roadshow and are saying that “new readers” they are targeting are males 18-34. The same readers they have been trying to sell to for the last decade with diminishing success…

Despite the fact that DC doesn’t lift a finger to market to females;

Despite the fact that DC publishes artwork of female characters that regularly crosses the line from cheesecake to embarrassing;

Despite the fact that female characters are often treated like crap in comparison to male characters AND that being treated like crap is still better than some of the other things that have been done to them;

DC still has many, many loyal female customers.

Gail Simone, the current writer for Batgirl and one of the few DC female creators working after the infamous 12% to 1% drop, ran an informal survey of her own from her Twitter feed asking comic book retailers to estimate what percentage of their customers were women. This was a significant change of wording: while DC’s survey only polled purchasers of the new 52, comic book store owners estimated their total number of female customers was much higher than 7%. This suggested that while female comic book fans do buy, they aren’t buying DC. One owner said it best: “My shop is closed now, but when it was open, customers were about 30% female.” Some retailers responded that their female readership bought a higher percentage of Manga and were more likely to buy strictly through a pull-list.

As in, they aren’t finding what they want in stores, so they are pre-ordering. This goes back to that chart I posted last week about the overwhelming presence of superhero comics in store layouts; pull-lists are a common way women combat the scarcity of topics that interest them on the shelves. And “DC Women Kicking Ass” prophetically warns: “By the way, the biggest consumers of digital content, where everyone agrees the future of comics is? Women.”

Meanwhile, the premiere of Kevin Smith’s Comic Book Men series on AMC raised immediate questions about the absence of comic book women on the show. Smith, while interviewed over a lunch by New York Observer, said this:

It’s not like there aren’t chicks in the show…there are chicks. But the reality of the comic book stores is that these are the people who work in them. There’s not a woman among them. When we originally showed the idea to AMC, they said ‘It’s a sausage party,’ so we said all right, let’s bring in a chick. And for the presentation we brought in and shot a chick, and it was wonderful and great, but then AMC, god bless them, said ‘Well, that’s not the reality of the show.’

The woman originally cast on the show was Zoe Gulliksen, who mentions on her blog that she is a long-time frequent customer of the comic book shop featured by the series. According to the Observer:

The Clerks director mentioned that store manager Walt Flanagan “learned a powerful lesson” after claiming that girls didn’t know anything about comics and then meeting Ms. Gulliksen.

Too bad that’s a lesson Comic Book Men never plans on showing us.

Popular female webcomics author Spike Trotman commented on the interview through Twitter:

 Instead of disappointment with Comic Book Men, I feel disgust. It was’t subjected to stereotyping, it grasped it protectively to its bosom. I was gonna give Comic Book Men another chance and watch next week’s ep, but apparently, I’m not real, so never mind.

DC will also conclude that as female readers don’t exist, content offerings don’t need to change. As long as mainstream comics continues to ignore and offend female audiences, the more they will see that audience shrink, leaving plenty of opportunity for independent titles made available digitally to take their place.

One of John Wayne’s well-loved classics, Back to Bataan follows the struggle of the Filipino resistance after the island’s takeover by the Japanese. John Wayne is Colonel Joseph Madden, who recruits a small band of Filipino’s to rescue the grandson of a legendary freedom fighter from a Japanese death march so the rebel movement has someone to rally behind.

There’s no question the Japanese massacred the living crap out of the Philippines, but Back to Bataan makes the curious choice of featuring execution by hanging as the method of choice. In reality, the primary method was machine gun fire and bayonet, although a short sequence in which exhausted war prisoners are bloodlessly bayoneted as they fall to the wayside has the ring of truth behind it. We once again see Anthony Quinn in an Allied uniform as reluctant grandson-of-a-hero Captain Andrés Bonifácio, but the heartstrings are primarily wrapped around little Ducky Louie and his teacher, familiar character actress Beulah Bondi. “Battleaxe Bertha” joins the resistance after her schoolhouse is unluckily chosen as the premiere place to be made an example of by the Japanese, and is so formidable, she might be the one person left standing after an aerial raid. Genuine emotional pain surrounding civilian murder is somewhat marred by the swelling, teary-eyed score, and at least one character death reminded me of Harry Potter weeping over Dobby’s lifeless body. Can anything kill John Wayne?

All-ages publisher Ape Entertainment released their 2011 Pocket God series to comic book stores and received a cold reception. Comic book sales are primarily based on pre-sales made by comic book stores through Diamond; store owners read Diamond’s Previews catalog and determine what to carry on their shelves based on what has sold in the past, what they think will sell in the future, and their own personal preferences. Pocket God, a non-superhero title about adorable island natives, sold so poorly to stores that Ape abandoned the print version. By December they had announced that the series’ ties to the mobile game had led to 500,000 paid downloads of the digital comics.

The success of Pocket God came without any support or influence from purchases made by brick and mortar stores. Perhaps it’s a given that digital sales could make publishing an independent comic more financially possible, but why would this affect what types of comics are being made by the larger publishers? Aren’t superheroes what comic book readers want? Certainly Previews‘ January’s list of top 100 comics would suggest that, dominated as always by titles from DC and Marvel that are almost strictly about superheroes. Print sales would support the idea that the big boys will never have to change anything about their current direction besides adding a new method of delivery.

But January’s list isn’t taking into account what’s selling digitally. More importantly, it doesn’t reflect the potential readers who exist outside of the current distributer-to-comic-store-to-comic-store-visitor sales model. Demographics like children, parents, people who dislike comic book stores, and women who aren’t interested in superheroes.

Let’s put this into perspective graphically. Here is a diagram of the layout of my local comic book store:

Here is how this translates to the eyes of a woman who loves comics but has only a mild interest in superhero books:

By contrast, here is one of many ways to search for a comic on Comixology:

Look at the screenshot above for a moment… Small press and major publishers, side by side, given equal consideration. Shelf space is no longer a factor here, how much of the store a publisher takes up is no longer an influence on purchasing decisions.

Many an old-timer has repeated to me the old lament that comics will fail to reach new, young readers until they are available again at newstands and grocery stores. First, who’s been to a newstand lately? Second, comics are becoming more accessible now than they ever were when they were in grocery stores. iVerse, the development company responsible for the Pocket Gods comic app, say their top-sellers are for kids, a growing number of which are playing with hand-me-down iPhones and iPads. When Ape Entertainment announced an app release for my Strawberry Shortcake series last December, mothers who would never consider walking into a comic book store told me how excited they were to download something they could read to their daughters on their iPads. The days when comic book stores could dictate which comics found an audience ended when credit cards met the internet, even if we didn’t know it back then.

Assuming for a moment that the major publishers really are in business to make money, how long will they be able to ignore potential sales to untapped but potentially interested groups? Children who want to read about cartoon characters? Preteen girls who like high school romance and My Little Ponies? Video game playing young boys who want more video game tie-ins? People who like westerns, pirates, sci-fi, horror, ANYTHING other than stories about yet another superhero?

With a new Kindle Fire in hand, reasons to buy a single issue in print are few for someone like me. The effort it takes to pre-order a title because my local comic book store won’t carry it on the shelves can’t compete with the discounted immediacy of a checkout button. When Rachel Rising finds it’s way to Comixology I will be among the first to download every available issue, and unlike my typical store experience, I will have no trouble acquiring the entire story beginning with issue #1. And eventually, purchases like mine will be too common to ignore.

Last night’s film research was 1943′s Guadacanal Diary. A war correspondent, who apparently leaned toward over-wrought and dramatic philosophic musings, describes to the viewer his experiences traveling with the soldiers of the first Guadalcanal campaign.

The best part of this film was clearly Anthony Quinn; even this early in his career he seems to suck in the atmosphere like a fine vintage, puffing up his chest and delivering most of the meager handful of comedic lines. Like many other characters, he goes down bloodlessly in a sea of invisible bullets, but one thing an older war picture has over recent trends in realism is the use of racist epitaphs. Soldiers probably did tell their commanders they shot a few “squinties,” but  hearing that in a modern film is more taboo than seeing a few limbs shatter under a grenade. This is information to note, but uncomfortable to hear.

It’s the script that hurts this movie the most, with dialogue so stiff and awkward it’s a relief to get to the next battle scene. It labors under a heavy-handed narrator, and frequently lags, but it does offer scenes not usually included in war movies, like the lazy days of waiting in the hot sun for some action to start. As I did, for most of the film.

After Scooter and Ferret ended I wasn’t sure when I might end up doing another webcomic, but this time is a little different. For one thing, I’m doing the writing and the art, so if updates fail to occur I have no one to blame but myself. I’ve been published in print, having written four 16 page stories for Ape Comics (and I hope there will be more in the future). And this isn’t an ongoing humor strip, this story has a beginning, a middle and an ending that I’ve been plotting for eight years.

There is never enough free time to write something like this. I’ve been waiting for just the right time to start and that time never comes, so here I am, starting now.