Girls, Webcomics, and Grandpa Marvel
In my many internet travels, I come across a great many interesting articles, but I recently caught wind that Marvel has announced a series of events (i.e. gimmicks) centered around the women of Marvel. The first of which is a three-issue series of stories called, get this and I swear this will blow your mind: GIRL COMICS. That is, comics created solely by women. The article describes this event as :
"...A three-issue anthology miniseries much in the spirit of STRANGE TALES, featuring comics created exclusively BY women. And that means writing, lettering, drawing - everything."
Wowzers! An entire comic done by girls?? Gee, golly, gosh, that's so amazing. A woman making comics, why, I have a name for this sort of thing too. It's called every other weeknight of my life.
Yeah.
There are plenty of women creating comics on the web and have been doing so for the better part of a decade (myself included). In fact, some of the most successful comics on the web are created by women. Gina Biggs' Red String racks up 40,000 unique visitors a day and is already into its sixth volume of material. Sarah Ellerton's Inverloch and The Phoenix Requiem are among the most critically acclaimed and highest traffic webcomics in existence today. Jenny Romanchuk's The Zombie Hunters is another highly trafficked piece with a print run soon under way. The Dreamer by Lora Innes drums up a huge amount of traffic and already has a publishing deal with IDW. Feminine success and the web are no strangers to one another.
The reason for the success of female creators is simply that they make content readers want to read and nobody's stopping them from publishing it. Pure and simple. Does this mean male creators don't make content worth reading? Of course not. I'm just saying there's no dinosaur editor telling female web creators their work won't be put out because it won't have the same market reach as XYZ superhero piece. We just tra-la-la along putting out our work and if readers gravitate towards it, we keep going. That's it.
Creator gender doesn't make a difference to readers on the web. Such is the beauty of an open source, user-created system. Creators are judged on their work far ahead of their gender because that's the first thing any reader sees. So the work speaks for itself and unless the creator has a huge web presence (particularly a negative one), readers will continue reading a piece they like regardless who puts it out. This gives creators the freedom to shrug off the gender divide that only women can create a certain kind of story or men can't create another certain kind of story. A female creator can create a comic targeted at female or male 
audiences. Male creators, too, can create whatever they want and target whatever audience they please. The readers vote with their visits and their wallets.
I'm having a hard time figuring out why Marvel will do this now. The answer could be one of only three things. First, Marvel actually cares about female creators and wants to genuinely give them their own forum to create their stoSries their way. Guffaw, I couldn't even type that with a straight face. There's no way that's true since there's no such thing as altruism in business, especially in this economy. Marvel isn't going to bank on anything that could drive readers away just because they're "doing the right thing." The next more plausible answer is that Marvel wants to reach the much coveted female market with female-created material. This could be it, but I believe the third most likely answer is that this is some kind of gimmick, like every other "event" they've put out in recent memory. "Girl Comics" is probably Marvel's best attempt at grabbing attention, especially of feminist types as if to say saying "See? Girls can make comics too! And we support that. Please buyourstuffohgodpleasebuyourstuff."
And of course girls can make comics. They've BEEN making comics. When I go home tonight, I'm making some comics, as I usually do about 5-6 nights a week. In the world of webcomics, this is not an "event" or a special occurrence. It's what's called 
meeting your damn update schedule. Like any of the guys. Marvel wants to show fans diversity? That people of any gender can create any kind of story? That's lovely, except that's already happening on the web. Don't believe me? Let's play a game. I'm going to list the plots to several webcomics that jump back and forth between the creator/topic gender divide and we'll see if you can identify whether it's created by a man or a woman.
Plot 1: After a heart-wrenching break up, a man writes a graphic novel about the relationship to help him get over it.
Plot 2: In a world of violence, secrets and death, a rag-tag team of zombie killers fight to survive in a world infested with zombies and to protect a society that shuns them.
Plot 3: A young woman gets taken across the cosmos to an alien world where she makes friends, enemies, and startling discoveries all in the struggle to find her way home.
Plot 4: An ensemble piece about high schoolers dealing with love, sex, and adolescent hijinx. Friendships, relationships, and first kisses come together in a maelstrom of hilarity and heartbreak.
Plot 5: The crew of an experimental hyperspace-traveling vessel find themselves light years from home after the first test of their spacecraft goes awry.
Plot 6: A young girl finds out at the tender age of 15 her family has arranged for her to marry. She wants to choose her own path, but things get complicated when she actually likes her husband-to-be.
Plot 7: Corporate mercenaries and gangsters engage in a violent face off for a mysterious briefcase.
Tally up your scores. Go ahead. I'll wait. Got your answers now? Good. Now, according to traditional assumptions that women write romance stories and men write action pieces, the answers would look like:
Plot 1: Female
Plot 2: Male
Plot 3: Female
Plot 4: Female
Plot 5: Male
Plot 6: Female
Plot 7: Male
Now for the real results:
Plot 1: Over written and drawn by Tyler James (male)
Plot 2: The Zombie Hunters, written and drawn by Jenny Romanchuk (female)
Plot 3: Astray3, written and drawn by Eldon Cowgur (male)
Plot 4: Penny and Aggie, written by T. Campbell, drawn by Gisele Lagace and Jason Waltrip (male, female, male)
Plot 5: Galaxion, written and drawn by Tara Tallan (female)
Plot 6: Red String, written and drawn by Gina Biggs (female)
Plot 7: Marsh Rocket, written and drawn by Jules Rivera (female)
Hopefully, that was a nice little backhand to your expectations. The point of this little guessing game is to prove that any kind of content can come from any kind of creator, male or female. Such is the nature of webcomics. Creators are judged on their work rather than the content of their pants. This is why webcomics don't need any stupid gimmicks to show how diverse creators versus stories are.
While this little gimmick of Marvel's is cute and maybe even well-intentioned, they are horribly out of date and as painful to watch as my grandma trying to fiddle with a cell phone. There are women out there who already do the writing, inking, coloring, lettering and then some. I'm one of them. And people like me don't need Marvel's patronizing pat on the back just because we've got boobs. This is not to take anything away from the female creators involved in this project. They are all talented and have put out stellar work over the years, but it's sort of insulting that the only reason they're giving them this kind of fanfare is because they're "girl creators". Marvel, you're horribly stagnant and not paying attention to the simple truth that creators of all kinds are out there kicking ass with or without you, and unless you change, you're going to die, or worse, get eaten up by the likes of Disney.
Oh, wait.
I may be a comics creator and I may be a woman, but I don't want to be known as a "girl comicker." I just want to be known as a "good comicker" and if the industry only pays attention to me because I'm a female creator, then there's something I'm not doing right.
- Jules Rivera
Check out Jules Rivera's Series
www.marsh-rocket.com
Marsh Rocket is an action/black comedy web comic that takes place several centuries into the future. Marsh, a corporate hitman, must retrieve a mysterious briefcase for a sleazy loan shark at the risk of betraying his own people. With warring factions after Marsh, the briefcase, and each other, the blood, knives, and even breakfast foods are bound to fly.
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