I didn’t start buying floppies until I was 22, just before I finished my first year of graduate school. It wasn’t because I didn’t enjoy reading comics, I did, it was that as a kid my parents encouraged the use of the library. Also we were middle class and at the rate that I read manga buying them really made no sense.
Anyways, soon after I started collecting I became interested in the diversity of the comics industry. While not something I had actively cared about before I started collecting, the more I learned about it the more I realized that lack of diversity had kept me from pursuing my interest in American comics as a child. As a 9-year-old girl of mixed-race (Filipino-Polish if that matters to you) it was much easier to pick up manga like Sailor Moon, Card Captor Sakura, or Inu-Yasha and relate to those characters than it was to start reading Batman where 1) there was no clear place to begin 2) it was hard to imagine myself as a stupidly wealthy middle aged white man.
So this got me thinking and after a year of collecting and going religiously to my local shop and grabbing up whatever sounded cool I realized I was adding too many books to my list and I needed a way to pare down the possibilities. (Not that you necessarily should, I just didn’t have the income to support my growing habit). And after some thought I came up with one rule:
No diversity within the comic or its creation, no way its getting my money as a full-priced floppy.
What does this mean?
It means that I don’t buy comics for full price that are made by white males about white males.
What doesn’t this mean?
-It doesn’t mean that those stories are bad.
-It doesn’t mean that the stories I’m left with are good.
-It doesn’t mean I would buy any story that met that criteria.
-It doesn’t mean I won’t ever read those stories.
-It doesn’t mean that I won’t eventually purchase those stories.
It was a way to merge my passions and meet my economic need. I could promote diversity in comics by putting my money where my mouth was and pre-ordering books with main characters who were women and/or people of color and/or stories that women and/or people of color made. To boot, it’s a pretty easy rule to remember and follow.
After I started filtering books by this rule, I realized how many new titles, creator owned and those promoted by the big two, didn’t meet my qualifications. It was a comics Bechdel test and there were months that would go by where no new titles followed my rule AND sounded interesting enough to purchase. Also like the Bechdel test, I knew it isn’t/wasn’t a perfect rule. Furthering the parallel though, it made me think seriously about all those stories that didn’t have women or people of color as main characters or as key creators.
Most of us know that what keeps women and people of color from entering the industry is an intersectional problem that involves the conception and a perpetuation of the idea that those industries “are” middle-class and white and male. This is a problem in almost all nerdy industries. More striking to me was the lack of women and people of color as main characters. What was it about a story that involved a “young boy discovering his destiny as X” that required him to be a) a boy (or male or gendered at all) b) illustrated as Caucasian. Was there some sort of special penis requirement for this destiny that also required the palest of complexions with European features? No, there wasn’t. Instead, these stories revealed a level of contentedness with “industry” standards and a lack of questioning of the ideology of the “typical” comic-book character. The industry assumed a white male audience and so they continued to give that audience stories that they could easily identify with. It wasn’t that white-male audiences couldn’t identify with diversity, we all know they can, it’s just that the industry didn’t think to make them try.
Thankfully, this is changing and every week more titles are coming out from DC and Marvel and Image that mimic the reality of comic book reading audiences. Where the characters and creators are increasingly diverse in age, gender, sex, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and class background. But I keep my rule anyways. Partially because my comics are piling up in another state and I’m not adding any books at the moment but also because it’s still a good rule to have. If a comic can’t find a woman and/or a person of color to be a part of its creation, in any capacity, and they don’t have them incorporated into the story in a significant way is it an artistic choice or just laziness?
