Not too long ago, David Willis over at Shortpacked! drew a particularly powerful and popular comic featuring Bruce Wayne and his multiple adopted sons. In this comic, Bruce Wayne calls all of his “tiny clones” to him; his Robins approach him one by one and they are scrutinized by their mentor. Dick, Jason, Tim, and Damian are all approved, with Bruce applauding each boy’s black hair and blue eyes—even pointing out that he approves of Jason altering his appearance to look the same as his fellows.
And then Stephanie Brown shows up. The lone female Robin in the former main DC Universe. She’s bright and smiling when she meets Bruce; he frowns as he surveys her—she doesn’t have black hair and blue eyes. Her eyes are green. Her hair’s blonde. And she is not a man.
Willis doesn’t write any dialogue. He just draws Bruce pointing Stephanie towards the door.
In a few panels, Willis illustrated DC’s treatment of Stephanie Brown, a female character with no shortage of fan support and a loyal following. But, more than that—and this may not have been Willis’s intent—it illustrates DC’s treatment of their female readers.
The saga of Stephanie Brown, particularly the recent issues with the New 52, really is an excellent parallel for the struggles of female comic book fans.
Stephanie was Robin. It was a brief tenure, but she wore the suit. She worked with Batman. She trained with the other members of the Batfamily. The mantle was taken away from her—which doesn’t erase the face that she once held it. She died, came back, and kept fighting as an ally of the Bat. And through all this, she received no respect from her fellow heroes.
And then she became Batgirl. There was an outcry of rage from Cassandra Cain fans, and rightfully so—Cass is another great female character that’s been horribly treated by DC. But the book went on, and it introduced new readers to Stephanie Brown and convinced skeptics that a character introduced mainly as a tool for incorporating after school special-type teen issues and a character that had been sloppily handled for years could lead a successful and delightful Batgirl book.
In spite of this success, the coming of the New 52 ended her book and, it seems, removed her entirely from the DC Universe so that she could be replaced by Barbara Gordon, a fine character in her own right, but that’s neither here nor there.
The point is Stephanie was something different. Different and good, and her book, thanks in no small part to Bryan Q. Miller’s spot on writing, could have done a great deal for broadening DC’s readership.
But DC didn’t want her. They wanted to return to the classic Batgirl, the classic Batman, so on, so forth.
There’s no way to guess what DC’s true motivations were for the New 52. Theories abound on the whys, and there are plenty of official reasons. But one thing is clear: things that are new, things that are not what is expected, are not cherished or nourished at DC.
And, it certainly seems, female readers are among those things that are not welcomed. We’re shouted down on the internet. We’re openly mocked at panels. We’re berated and pushed aside and told that, because of our sex, we shouldn’t even like comic books to begin with.
We’re different from the expected male readers, so they don’t want us.
Change is scary; no one can argue that. But for an industry that claims it wants to adapt to new technologies, branch into other media, and reach more readers, it’s necessary.
When DC embraced Stephanie Brown, they had a trade paperback that made it onto a USA Today list of Essential Reading in Graphic Novels. They had an on ramp for new readers. Good things came from it.
This is not to say that there hasn’t been success with the New 52, or that there haven’t been some books or issues of books that have been both appealing to female readers and successful in that demographic. But there’s definitely some food for thought here.
DC embraced something different, and there were positive results.
Maybe, then, they should try to embrace different readers.
Maybe good things could come from that as well.
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