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Thursday, November 17, 2022 

Male domination of what genre was broken?

The UK Guardian did a sugarcoated interview with Gail Simone, the far-left ideologue of a writer who turned out to not be as talented as some might've once thought she was, during attendance of the Thought Bubble convention in Yorkshire:
Fast forward two decades, Simone is now the critically acclaimed writer of titles for DC comics and others, including the fan favourite Batgirl, Birds of Prey and Red Sonja. She also became the longest-running female writer on Wonder Woman. She is one of a rapidly growing number of women comic and graphic novel authors who are now at the top of what was once an almost entirely male industry.

Which is a far cry from when Simone started out both as a reader and eventually as a writer. “I won’t lie, it was a bit lonely for a while,” says Simone. “I have endless photos of convention panels with 10 guys and me, it was almost comical.”
I think she and the paper are sure exaggerating the situation quite a bit, for the sake of turning this into a ridiculously feminist issue. This discussion isn't built on entertainment value or talent in the finished products, but rather, on a lot of grandstanding.
She adds: “I was definitely aware [as a child] that all the names in the credits were boys’ names, I remember that I would cling to any comic that had a woman listed in any capacity. There were some tremendous talents, people like Colleen Doran and Louise Simonson, but they could be hard to find in my small town.”
Seriously, this sounds like more of somebody acting like it's such a big deal to have women working on any particular title, based on that alone. But it's not like I make such a big deal whether a Jewish writer/artist/editor's working on any title, because what if the book in question lacks creative merit? Something that doesn't factor into this discussion.
Simone is in the UK this weekend for the annual Thought Bubble comic convention held in Harrogate, North Yorkshire, where she is one of the many comics creators who will be mingling with fans. Of the 69 guest creators listed on the Thought Bubble website, 30 are women. And there are hundreds more female exhibitors over three halls selling their wares. [...]

The queues to meet favourite artists “would suddenly be half full of young women, it was like a sea change. It was lovely to see. And best of all, those women took their talents and started making comics, too. Now some of the most acclaimed voices in the industry are female and non-binary and trans.” [...]

Thought Bubble’s success, says founder Lisa Wood, is partly due to its commitment to diversity among the guests it attracts. She says: “There was a massive disparity, not many females in the industry at all when I set up Thought Bubble. That was one of the things I wanted to actively fight against and because of that we’ve always been about diversity, about making a more inclusive show, to highlight female artists and it needs to progress more, to non-binary and trans people and everyone who needs to be included.”
Wait a minute. I thought this was about women, and they're making this out to be about transsexuality, or no sexuality at all? I'm afraid this is exactly how they're undermining their whole platform. As J.K. Rowling's made clear, this kind of ideology is hurtful to women, so the Thought Bubble convention's undermining their whole goal for the sake of ideological pandering. But no emphasis on Paraguayans, Peruvians, Armenians, Koreans, or Danish, nor what comprises their cultures, huh? They really are that creatively bankrupt.
Wood isn’t just the originator of Thought Bubble. Last year she took a step back from the direct organising of the convention to concentrate on her main job, that of comic artist. Under the pen-name Tula Lotay she is one of the premier artists working in the industry, her latest work being on the Roaring Twenties adventure Barnstormers and the just-announced folk horror comic Oubliette, coming from the new comic publishing arm of AMC, the TV company behind The Walking Dead. Wood believes the comic industry began to break the male stranglehold with the rise of social media. She says: “Probably about 2010 I started posting my art on social media. I just drew for myself, as a hobby really, but then people started getting in touch and I was getting validation from my peers and people in the industry, and suddenly work started coming in and I haven’t looked back.”
All social media's done is lead to a lot of division and propaganda in the past decade, and all their talk of a male "stranglehold" is laughable. DC once had a publisher named Jeanette Khan up to the turn of the century. Predictably, that's all obscured for the sake of a PC vision.
Sabba Khan will be at Thought Bubble this weekend for the second year running, with her debut graphic novel The Roles We Play, published in 2021 (and this year in the US as What is Home, Mum?). It comprises 30 interconnected stories exploring themes of identity from the east London Muslim diaspora, in which Khan grew up.
So this is what else the convention's about. Promoting Islamic propaganda, and as noted before, this was the same convention that shunned Frank Miller at the behest of a local ideologue. No wonder Thought Bubble's decidedly irrelevant, despite what they're telling. It's little more than a politically motivated convention that's not improving the medium one bit. And assuming they mean the action-adventure genre's domination by men was broken, even that claim is hopelessly silly.

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