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A Shout Out to Men Supportring Women in Comics

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 By D. Lynn Smith

When I decided to found Kymera Press, I was somewhat hesitant because of all the press about online rape and death threats women in comics were receiving. I was afraid that might happen to me as well. However while some women continue be harassed, I have not been harassed at all. As a matter of fact, I have found men to be very supportive of what Kymera Press is all about.

At conventions I’m constantly talking to men who are looking for comics with strong, women protagonists that are drawn realistically to buy for their daughters. Recently, I got a letter from one of those men:

I am a long-time comic fan and have been enjoying this iconic form of storytelling since I was a little boy. I read the information you provided on your webpage and I find it fantastic that the medium has inspired you to create comics. I’ve recently realized the voice and experiences that people are not getting in the comic world due to the lack of women’s vantage points and style being present.

A woman’s ideas and vantage point are necessary to be able to get a full life’s experience and one of our greatest ways of sharing with one another is with storytelling. My daughters are amazing and I don’t want anyone, or more importantly any idea/culture breeding into their minds that they are supposed to be a certain way or have limits because they are females. I feel comics are a medium that can get positive, supportive, influential concepts, and cultural ideologies out there in our society even though so few people read comics.  I admire and respect very much what you are doing with Kymera Press and the people who are doing it with you and I wanted to just say to keep on keeping on and to make more amazing female characters for women and men to appreciate.

Curtis Shellman

This is just an excerpt of a much longer letter. I can’t tell you how much it means to me to have men sending me letters like this. And I’m not alone.

I attended a panel at the Amazing Las Vegas Comic Con on women in comics. One of the women on the panel was Renae Geerlings, the managing editor of Darby Pop Publishing. When this issue came up on the panel, she also commented that she has received nothing but support from the men she works with and from male fans.

At the Amazing Las Vegas Comic Con, a Marine who was working at a recruiting station stopped by and picked up Gates of Midnight. He came back the next day and told me how much he enjoyed the comic. A marine! This told me I was doing something right with Raven’s character.

There is still a very real problem out there when it comes to women in comics. Just this past month at Gen Con a Women in Comics panel had all men scheduled on it. When women were added, the moderator interrupted and generally treated them with a lack of respect. So the fight for women continues.

However, as with all things, not all men are like this. But as with all news reporting, we only hear about the bad things that happen, and not about all the support many men are giving to the advancement of women in comics. So this blog post is a shout out to all you men who are supporting women in comics and are looking for a strong, women protagonist for your daughters. Thank you for your support, your comments, your reviews, and your letters. They mean the world to all of us.

What Fun Home and Bitch Planet Have in Common

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By D. Lynn Smith

A while back, Fun Home won the Tony for best musical. And guess what? It’s based on a graphic novel written by Alison Bechdel. Here is what Fun Home is all about…

"Funhomecover". Via Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Funhomecover.jpg#/media/File:Funhomecover.jpg
“Funhomecover”. Via Wikipedia – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Funhomecover.jpg#/media/File:Funhomecover.jpg

“In this groundbreaking, bestselling graphic memoir, Alison Bechdel charts her fraught relationship with her late father. In her hands, personal history becomes a work of amazing subtlety and power, written with controlled force and enlivened with humor, rich literary allusion, and heartbreaking detail.

Distant and exacting, Bruce Bechdel was an English teacher and director of the town funeral home, which Alison and her family referred to as the “Fun Home.” It was not until college that Alison, who had recently come out as a lesbian, discovered that her father was also gay. A few weeks after this revelation, he was dead, leaving a legacy of mystery for his daughter to resolve.”

In this world where superheroes dominate the cinema, it is exhilarating to see a graphic novel about a very real woman in a very real relationship garner so much public attention and accolades. It also lends credence to the fact that graphic novels aren’t just for kids, but are great reading for everyone. However, reading a graphic novel is not the same as reading a prose novel.

The other day, a friend of mine who had asked for copies of Gates of Midnight, but was not a comic book reader, told me he had a very difficult time reading the comic until he remembered what I had told him, the story isn’t told by the words, it’s told by the art. Once he remembered that, he went back and was able to enjoy the comic, though it was a lot slower reading than he expected.

Alison Bechdel is quoted as saying, “It’s very important for me that people be able to read the images in the same kind of gradually unfolding way as they’re reading the text. I don’t like pictures that don’t have information in them. I want pictures that you have to read, that you have to decode, that take time, that you can get lost in. Otherwise what’s the point?”

Graphic novels and comics are an art form that takes time to appreciate. It also takes time to learn how to read them in order to catch every nuance, every bit of storytelling on the page. Whenever I hear someone say that they don’t read comics because they don’t have the depth of story as a short story or a novel, I have to think that they simply haven’t taken the time to learn to read the art as well as the words.

"BitchPlanetcover01" by Valentine De Landro - https://imagecomics.com/comics/releases/bitch-planet-1. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:BitchPlanetcover01.png#/media/File:BitchPlanetcover01.png
“BitchPlanetcover01” by Valentine De Landro – https://imagecomics.com/comics/releases/bitch-planet-1. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons – https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:BitchPlanetcover01.png#/media/File:BitchPlanetcover01.png

Kelly Sue DeConnick’s Bitch Planet is a great example of the art telling the story. Bitch Planet is a women-in-prison sci-fi exploitation riff. Any woman who is noncompliant is sentenced to Bitch Planet. It also happens to be the place… “…where inconvenient women are disappeared.” It is unapologetically feminist and great fun to read.

In issue #2, artist Valentine de Landro draws three women running and talking. One woman falls behind. The action in the foreground revolves around the two women as they keep running; this is where the dialog happens. But in the background a guard is attacking the third woman. As each panel progresses, there are more guards and more inmates joining the fray. While we get important information from the women in the foreground, a full-blown prison riot erupts in the background.

So if you’re only reading the words, you’ll completely miss the prison riot, which adds loads of layers to the story, and is important in showing just how brutal Bitch Planet really is.

I’m still working on my ability to write layered stories like this. But when I read something like Fun Home or Bitch Planet, I’m inspired to keep working on my craft in order to bring a richer reading experience to Gates of Midnight.

On a side note, I highly recommend Bitch Planet not just for the awesome, in-your-face, no-holds-barred story, but also for the excellent essays included in each issue.

What does Cinderella teach little girls?

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By D. Lynn Smith

 

When I was 8 years old my family moved in with my grandparents so my mother could help take care of my ailing grandmother. My 6-year-old sister Renee and I shared a bedroom upstairs. On this one special night, my dad carried our huge console TV up the stairs and into our bedroom so that we could watch Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella. It took a little bit of adjustment with the rabbit-ear antennas, but soon we were held in thrall for the duration of the production, and beyond. As a matter of fact, Renee and I both count this as one of our favorite memories of our childhood.

Fast forward to 2015. Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella is back on the stage and playing at the Smith Center in Las Vegas. I was so full of anticipation that for six months I kept looking at the tickets to make sure Paul and I wouldn’t forget the date, as we sometimes do.

Finally the day arrived. Paul and I dressed in our Sunday best and drove to the Smith Center. We found our seats; the theatre was packed. The lights went down, the stage came to life, and Cinderella began. Except … it’s different. Yes, there are the same songs I know and love, but the storyline is different. I don’t remember a giant praying mantis. I don’t remember a prince with an identity crisis. What was happening?

At intermission I scour the program and read that when Robyn Goodman was asked if she wanted to produce a new version of Cinderella, she said yes, but only if Cinderella “can save the Prince as much as he saves her. She has to be a more active character.”

In this new production, Cinderella makes the prince realize that his people are being mistreated and helps him realize the changes needed to make a more equitable government. She brings kindness to a court overwhelmed with ridicule and sarcasm. But this storyline felt tacked on instead of intrinsic to the narrative. It felt like an unsuccessful mashup between R & H’s Cinderella, and Drew Barrymore’s Ever After: A Cinderella Story (which I also enjoyed).

There has been a lot of flak over the Disney princesses and how they are always rescued by the men, and I agree with the criticism. Luckily, this trend has been changing with movies like Frozen, where there really wasn’t a villain, just a young woman trying to hide who she really was because her parents can’t accept her. The true love that saves the day in this film is between sisters, not a man and a woman.

Then there’s Maleficent, whose heart is broken and turned dark by betrayal. She watches over the princess she has cursed, and comes to love her as a mother does her daughter. So when it comes time for true love’s kiss, it comes from this mother/daughter relationship. The mother heals the daughter, and then the daughter helps to heal the mother physically (releasing her wings) and emotionally, teaching her to love again so she can become whole.

I love these two movies. And I appreciate what Robyn Goodman was trying to do. There’s a great need for stronger women protagonists. But for me, this new Cinderella lost the magic of the original.

Remember that I was only 8 and my sister only 6 when we saw this movie. We didn’t get the message that Cinderella was rescued by the prince. On the contrary, we felt Cinderella created the magic and rescued herself.

"Stuart Damon Lesley Ann Warren Cinderella" by CBS Television
“Stuart Damon and Lesley Ann Warren in Cinderella” by CBS Television

If you ask us who played Cinderella, we‘d both answer, Leslie Ann Warren. Ask who played the Fairy Godmother, we’d answer Celeste Holmes. (Imagine my thrill when I got to work with Celeste Holms on the TV Show, Promised Land. She was as wonderful and elegant as a fairy godmother should be!) Now ask us, “Who played the prince?” Uhm. I wouldn’t be able to tell you. My sister Renee might answer Alan Quartermaine, because years later the “prince” was in her favorite soap General Hospital. But I digress.

Renee’s and my two favorite songs from the movie are In My Own Little Corner, a song about dreams and about being anything you want to be, and It’s Possible, a song that tells us it’s possible to make dreams come true. We started singing these two songs immediately after seeing Cinderella, and continue to do so to this day.  While the other songs are wonderful and magical as well, it’s these two songs that made an impression on our young minds. They told us we could be anything we wanted to be, do anything we wanted to do. They told us it’s okay to dream and dream big. And we did. And we both went out and made our dreams come true and continue to do so.

So the moral of the story is, not all princess stories have to be changed to make the protagonist a strong, female character. As a matter of fact, I think the most important lesson women and girls must embrace is that strong, powerful women believe in themselves and their dreams. The original Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella taught two little girls that lesson so long ago in 1965. And it continues to resonate with us today.

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