Comics Page Census 2009

Webcomics I read regularly that are:

• Made by a man or team of men: 40
• Made by a woman or team of women: 19
• Made by a team including men and women: 4

Last year's numbers were 30, 19, 3. I didn't keep my working tally, so I can't tell what fell off my roster (or even whether I'm forgetting something obvious); the only thing I can remember falling off the female side was DTWOF (which reminds me, I need to scrape up the cash for that omnibus collection), but I know I've found some new women creators during the year, so I must have dropped something else as well. More to the point, I'm clearly finding male artists at a faster rate, and that may indicate a problem. Will be monitoring. (And of course, this is ignoring print entirely, which leaves some of my favorite comickers out in the cold. C'est la vie though, because quick and dirty is the name of this counting game.)

And now, for something completely different uncomfortable!

Webcomics I read regularly that are:

• Made by people I'm almost positive are white: 43
• Made by people I'm about 70% sure are white: 15
• Made by people of color or people whose public identity includes being of mixed race: 5

Okay, uh, THAT right there is proooooobably a problem.

The Wherefore

Since the wire I'm licking might well have live current in it, I want to specify that this is neither a "where are the women in comics" post nor a "where are the black people in comics" post nor any other species of that genus. That would be silly. (I'm not a woman, a person of color, or even particularly "in" comics, and I still retch whenever I find one of those.)

It's just, you need to pay attention to where your attention goes, you know? And the count implies that mine tends not to stray too far out of certain obvious comfort zones, and that's not necessarily who I want to be as a reader. As rachelmanija said in a recent post:* "Basically, especially if you're white, if you don't make the distinction, you will end up primarily or entirely reading books by white authors. In that case, the distinction you don't make gets made for you by the way that society works."

Anyway, these yearly census posts are just a personal reality check, where I take a second to see which way those distinctions actually broke lately, and ask myself whether I'm really the one making them.

Well, that was fun. Let's see what the dial says next year.

* About 50books_poc, which is a project I myself intend to saddle up for once I've made a bit more of a dent in this to-read shelf.