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135 CHAPTER EIGHT Questions of “Contemporary Women’s Comics” —PAUL WILLIAMS In the graphic novel The Sandman: A Game of You (published as an edited collection in 1993), a young female character—provocatively named Barbie—ventures into a comic book store, where the adolescent male inhabitants stop to stare at her. When Barbie brings her purchase to the till she recounts, “There was a big greasy guy behind the counter who seemed really amused that I was like, female, and asking for this comic. He said it wasn’t very collectable. Then he said they didn’t normally see breasts as small as mine in his store, and all these guys laughed.” To start to appreciate the full meaning of this fictional incident depends upon understanding two related stereotypes surrounding comic texts and readership: first, that comics are dominated by the superhero genre, and women in this genre usually come with unfeasibly distorted anatomical features ; second, as a “real” woman and not a fantastically large-breasted character , this female reader is out of place in the masculine realm of the comics store, whose “natural” denizens are the socially inept male readers of superhero comics. The writer of this scene, Neil Gaiman, understands there is dark humor in this unpleasant exchange; unfortunately, much of it is the rueful smirk of recognition. The popular The Sandman series was read by demographic groups askew to the adolescent male readership assumed in A Game of You, but this scene depends upon the assumption that comics, superheroes , and male readers are firmly interlinked for its humor (and its depiction of exclusion pivoting around gender) to work (Sabin 1996, 168). In showing how women’s comics form part of the field of contemporary North American comics, this chapter challenges such assumptions, and 136 PAUL WILLIAMS equally important, it illustrates that women’s comics are not a radical innovation : they exist on a historical continuum of women’s comics going back to the 1930s. However, this compels greater critical attention rather than finalizing “once and for all” the place of women’s comics in the industry’s history. The three questions structuring this chapter pick at the term “contemporary women’s comics” and indicate the complexity of approaching comics creators and readers with the framework of gender: how “contemporary” are “contemporary women’s comics”? Who are the “women” in “contemporary women’s comics”? What are the material forms of these “contemporary women’s comics” and how do different material forms imply certain reading communities? The importance of these questions is as follows: they are not only relevant to contemporary women’s comics but they encapsulate tensions in the field of North American comics more generally. This demonstrates the centrality of women’s comics within contemporary comics culture, not as a peripheral presence to be “bolted on” to an understanding of the medium in a fallaciously inclusive gesture. In defining the terms of that centrality we begin to reevaluate our (invisibly male-centered) paradigm for comics history and the constitution of “women’s comics” within that history (see related discussions in art history in Pollock 1988, 8–9). The icons and themes of women’s comics in the early to mid-twentieth century have often been revisited since the 1980s, and a genealogy of comics articulating feminist political positions is outlined in the first section of this chapter. In the 1970s, the political project of the women’s movement could be discerned in the academic study of other forms of visual culture. John Berger’s theorization of the gendering of spectatorship in Ways of Seeing (1972) was an early move in bringing the insights of feminism into the field of art history , a conjunction that percolated through the decade (Pollock 1988, 1–17). In film studies, Laura Mulvey’s article, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema ” (1975), became a foundational text in the critical interrogation of classical narrative cinema as offering a masculine heterosexual gaze that frames women as objects of pleasure and spectacle for the voyeur peeping into the diegesis. Unsurprisingly, the women’s comics of the 1970s were inspired by the same questions of gender, politics, and visual representation—unsurprising because feminism already “regarded ideas, language and images as crucial in shaping women’s (and men’s) lives” (Kuhn 1985, 2). Annette Kuhn cites the demonstrations staged against the Miss America contest in 1968, which feminists protested “on grounds that it promoted an impossible image of ideal womanhood, and was complicit in the widespread...

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