Women as Readers of Graphic Novels
The topic of "Women as Readers of Graphic Novels" explores the evolving landscape of comic readership, particularly focusing on female audiences. Historically, comic readership in the U.S. was predominantly male by the mid-20th century, with significant numbers of women reading romance comics in the 1940s. However, the decline of romance comics and the implementation of the Comics Code led to a reduction in content targeted toward women, alienating them from the medium for decades. The resurgence of female readers began in the 1990s and accelerated with the introduction of manga, which featured stories appealing to women and girls, such as yaoi, and was more accessible through mainstream bookstores.
In recent years, there has been a noticeable shift, with publishers increasingly recognizing women as a valuable audience. This is reflected in the production of graphic novels and adaptations targeting female interests, including adaptations of classic literature and popular media. Female readers typically gravitate toward narratives emphasizing emotional depth and relationships, aligning with genres traditionally viewed as feminine. The growth of female readership has led to a diversification of comic content, showcasing stories that resonate with a broader demographic and addressing themes beyond conventional romantic narratives. Ultimately, the presence of women in the graphic novel space has not only expanded readership but has also enriched the storytelling landscape within the medium.
Women as Readers of Graphic Novels
Definition
Comics originally had a wide-ranging readership in terms of gender and age. By the 1970s, however, the readership was primarily young males. The number of female comics readers began to increase by the 1990s, and continued to grow into the 2020s. Scholars and publishers have frequently been interested in how graphic novels garner a female readership and how women read graphic novels in ways associated with their gender.
Introduction
There have been periods in the history of comics in the United States in which women made up the majority of readers, but this has not been the case since the mid-twentieth century. During the 1940s, women were voracious readers of romance comics, which offered adult female readers more grown-up versions of the love-triangle dilemmas so common in the Archie comics. Women and girls of various ages were courted by publishing companies such as Timely Comicsthe precursor to Marvel ComicsHarvey Comics, and MLJ Magazineslater Archie Comicsy the late 1940s, female comic book readers outnumbered males in the United States.
Romance comics were among the casualties of the moral panic about comics that precipitated the implementation of the Comics Code in 1954. Like the horror comics also quickly neutered by the code, romance comics became so altered by the stipulations of the code that they lost their adult readerswho moved on to less censored reading material such as romance novels. In the wake of this decline in readership, publishers streamlined their output, and women were no longer courted with titles geared toward them as readers of comics. This difficult period for the industry saw a decline in the staple superhero genre as wella slow but steady increase followed the sharp drop in female readership of comics as focus shifted to males in their teens and early twenties.
By the 1970s, little comics content was geared toward female readerswomen had gotten the message that comics were not for them. Some prominent female cartoonists were part of the underground comics movement. However, this scene is more commonly linked to artists such as Robert Crumb and Gilbert Shelton. It also featured artists who created alternative comics for women, including Trina Robbins, Lisa Lyons, Meredith Kurtzman, and Hurricane Nancy Kalish. While these comics were crafted for an adult female readership, their circulation was not extensive beyond the underground circles of creators and readers. The comics anthology Wimmen's Comix was published until the early 1990s but never circulated broadly. Some other independent comics have struck a chord with female readers, notably Jaime, Gilbert, and Mario Hernandez's Love and Rockets (1982-1996), but little else seemed to attract a female audience.
Comics for Female Readers
Throughout the 1980s, independently published black-and-white comics flourished, and some of that boom brought in female creators, publishers, and readers. For the most part, though, women were alienated by the move to direct sales in small comic shops staffed and frequented by the young men who were still targeted by comics publishers long after female readers had been forgotten. Archie comics could still be purchased from newsstands and grocery stores, but most other comics had shifted to a direct-distribution model. Because readers often ordered or reserved titles in advance at local comic shops so that the shop owners would know how many copies to order from publishers, sales were mainly geared toward elite readers who knew what titles were coming out and when. This direct-distribution method further concentrated readership among males. However, the target age increased since the cost of comic books also expanded beyond the means of many young boys.
Some shops had extensive inventories of back issues that could help readers get caught up on a story once they discovered a title in progress, but most needed help to afford to rent spaces large enough to house many back issues for such readers. Generally, back issues were displayed in long drawer boxes and filed by title. This system continued to privilege elite readers with ties to comics fandom, which was also perceived as unwelcoming to females during this period.
Manga and Media Adaptations
When mangaJapanese comicsfirst appeared in the U.S. market in the 1980s, the imported titles were primarily intended for male readers and sold in the same specialty comic stores as American comics. Since around 2002, sales in mainstream bookstores have fueled large growth in manga's share of graphic novel sales, particularly of content explicitly geared to female readers. Most titles found in bookstores are those written for a female audience, while comic shops have tended to give more space to manga aimed at their regular customers, 85 to 90 percent of whom are men. Some mainstream publishers broke into the translated manga business in the United States and targeted both bookstores and comic shops, aiming primarily at female readers.
The Japanese publishing industry is divided into publications geared to specific age and gender demographics. Consequently, a great deal of content is deemed suitable for female readers. More importantly, it has gained a large readership and fan base among female readers. One genre marketed explicitly toward female readers is yaoi, which features love stories between attractive young men. Yaoi is popular among older female readers, from teenagers to women in their forties and older. It has brought female readers into direct-sales comic shops, online bookstores, and comics retailers. In comparison, many manga titles marketed to younger readers line the shelves of mainstream bookstores, and there tend to be fewer Yaoi titles in these more traditional book-buying venues.
The increase in female manga readers due to sales in mainstream bookshops, sales through online booksellers, and growing online fan communities has also impacted the North American comics industry. After decades of being largely ignored by the industry, women became the target audience of an increasing number of American comics, including manga-like titles and superhero miniseries such as Marvel Her-Oes, Girl Comics, and Heralds, all released by Marvel in the summer of 2010. In addition to these, comics publishers have produced an increasing number of comic book adaptations of works of literature that have long been associated primarily with female readers, such as the novels of Jane Austen or even parodies of her work such as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2009; graphic novel adaptation, 2010).
In addition to literature, comics have also been adapted from other female-targeted media, such as films and television shows. The publication of Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight, the comic book continuation of Joss Whedon's television series, led many female fans to venture into the world of comics. Other television-based series with sizeable female fan bases have also been adapted to comics, helping to expand the female readership. Titles like Buffy can tap into existing fan bases to create a ready-made audience for new comics based on existing characters and stories.
In the 2020s, female creators produced many notable graphic novel works, some of which with very powerful effect. Many of these went beyond traditional themes of romantic relationships. For example, in 2021, writer Rebecca Hall and artist Hugo Martinez produced The Hidden History of Women-led Slave Revolts. This work documented the leadership roles enslaved women had played in different eras to end slavery forcibly. Other graphic novel titles showcased accomplished female characters in their professional fields. Examples included Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Female historical figures were also the central characters in works such as Catherine's War, a 2022 graphic novel centered on World War II.
Impact
Female readers may enjoy any graphic novel genre, but as in other media, they tend to gravitate toward specific types of content. Stories that focus on relationships have less action and more talking and deal with emotion directly; while not exclusively the domain of female audiences and certainly not the only type of stories they enjoy, they echo genres that are traditionally considered feminine, such as soap operas and romances, and are therefore more familiar to female readers. All these familiar aspects of female-targeted storytelling can be found in manga titles aimed at women and girls. Manga has been a significant factor in both the increase in female readers of graphic novels and the expansion of content geared toward a greater diversity of comics readership. In addition, the influx of manga into mainstream bookstores coincided with the increase in the publication of trade-paperback compilations of comic book series, making the back catalog of many comics more readily available. Many male and female comic readers have begun to purchase these compilations, which can easily be bought online or in mainstream bookstores, instead of the individual issues of current comics. This broader availability of more diverse content has helped expand American comics' female readership. Its works have been translated from other languages, and the subsequent increase in female readers has resulted in more comics content geared toward women and a growing female audience for series not necessarily aimed at them.
Bibliography
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