Tim Hanley runs Straitened Circumstances, a blog that we link frequently here because of his year-long mission to document the strict numbers of gender representation on the creator side of Marvel and DC Comics, the two biggest manufacturers of superhero stories in the US Comics market. Though the New 52 relaunch officially began last week with Justice League #1, for many it didn’t really start in earnest until yesterday, when DC released thirteen more of the 52. And so, Hanley began his analysis of these thirteen titles featuring 105 creators, eight of them women.
Hanley takes into account eight different roles for each title: cover artist, writer, penciller, inker, colorist, letterer, editor, and assistant editor. He explains the distribution of labor fell out among this week’s eight women:
Gail Simone had Batgirl #1 this week, so there’s your lady writer. And then nothing until editorial. I wasn’t expecting any pencillers or inkers, but I thought we’d maybe get a colourist or two, or maybe even just one on a cover. But no. Plus in editorial, only 2 of the female credits were for full editors, while the other 5 were for assistant editors. Assistant editors are of course super important, but it’s nice to spread things around some and not have all the ladies in the category with “assistant” in the title. Also interesting is that this week belonged to the Bat-books… Janelle Asselin and Katie Kubert assistant edited Detective Comics #1 while Gail Simone wrote, Bobbie Chase edited, and the very busy Katie Kubert again assistant edited Batgirl #1. That’s 5 of the 8 female credits in only two books. What we have here is an epic lack of distribution all around.
7.6% female (as seen in the graph above), by the way, is “nearly two percent less” than DC’s average percentage of women working behind the scenes on a title. Hanley admits that while he might normally give some sort of analysis as to how a given week’s low or high is likely to change in the next, in this case he has very little to go on. The relaunch is just starting, and it’s anyone’s guess (at least anyone outside of DC) as to how it’s all going to play out.
Read his whole post, with even more stats and observations here.
