27. Representation of Women in Comics

Last weekend (Feb 6-8th) I attended New York’s Comic Con, the largest Comic Book Convention on the east coast. There were various panel discussions throughout the weekend addressing various topics and ideas related to comics. I attended one titled “Representation of Women in Comics”. Five graphic artists (one was male, four were female, three were Asian, one was a senior citizen) sat at a panel and answered diverse questions about historical and contemporary representation of women in comic books.

All five of them touched on the idea that women have graduated from a role of damsel-in-distress into one who can keep up with (and even overpower) men. In the Wonder Woman movie that premiered this year, Wonder Woman is more powerful and more intelligent than Steve Trevor, even though they’re in a pseudo-relationship, which is counter to previous representations of both women and men.

The pannel addressed how women are dressed in comics, explaining how women who are more clothed seem to be more powerful whereas women with fewer clothes (an increasingly popular trend) are more pin-ups than actual superheroes and can’t be taken seriously:

I feel like what we see in comics is a social response (or commentary) to feminist movements and how men react to them. In the second wave of feminism there were power feminists who tried to get away from the idea of “women as victims” and so woman victimization has become an unpopular (almost degrading?) representation in comics. The 80′s and 90′s gave rise to power-women who could balance both a career and a home, which is what most comic women heroes have to do in order to be seen as powerful as men heroes.

The panel discussed how, soon, female heroes and male heroes in comics will have the same levels of power and be able to compete in the same arenas against the same villains. As compelling as this is, it worries me; there are some attributes that are definitively male and some that are definitively female, biologically and culturally. With the meld of men and women having the same attributes in the comic world, I worry that men and women will soon meld into an androgynous identity in the real world. That’s what will happen if women have all the same attributes as men, right?