Final Minx Creative Count

In honor of the late Chick Checks, let’s count female creators: The complete 2007 Minx lineup was announced yesterday. Two are by male writer/artists. Two are by separate male writers and artists. One is by a male writer with two male artists. One is cowritten by a male and his daughter and illustrated by a male. One is by a female writer and male artist. (I’ve talked about the new imprint previously here and here.)

So, we have seven books with a total of 14 creators, of which two are female (and one’s role, if accurately reported, opens the door to cries of nepotism, although it does shoot down all those people arguing vehemently that DC needed to use only recognizable, well-known names and that’s why they couldn’t include more women). 2 out of 14 is 14.28%. Counting the editors as creators (but is that really the kind of book we’re hoping for, strongly editorial-driven?) raises the percentage to 25% (4 out of 16), which certainly reads much better.

For comparison, that’s better than DC staple-format comics did every week but one when I was looking for female creator names in those credits. Their average over five months (two years ago) was 9.22%. (Marvel, due to more editorial assistants at the time, always did better than DC, averaging 11.52% over the same time frame.) And as is the case in this situation, the strongest representation was usually among editorial.

But I can only imagine what the press would do if the Logo channel, targeted at gays, had over 85% of their shows created by straights. Perhaps that’s not a fair example, given that gays already get a lot of Hollywood work, and the same can’t be said about women in comics. How many black creators does BET have? How many black actors are represented on that network? I know Lifetime has a ton of visible females.

In short, how do you talk to a target audience if you’re not allowing members of that audience to speak?