Pen-Elayne on the Web

Another Women and Comics Update

Haven't done one of these in awhile; curtailing my activity in Friends of Lulu in favor of better time management and the usual winter semi-hibernation has shifted my priorities a bit. But I did find a few hours to organize and send FoL webmeister Chris Kohler my updates for the Women Doing Comics list, which have now been uploaded. If you check the list and spot missing credits, bad links, or names that should be on the list but aren't, please e-mail me with the additional info; particularly since the priority shift, I rely heavily on the reports of others. The criteria for inclusion on the list should be clear from the page title, but for some reason people sometimes have trouble grasping it so here it is again:

The Women Part - You need to be female or female-identified (like Jeff Jones, for instance).

The Doing Part - Your work needs to be currently available, or else the list would read "doing and having done" or something like that. I've begun work on the fairly ambitious "Herstory" page listing all the women who've done comics in the past and are currently either doing something else or have left this mortal plane, but the additions are taking such a long time - and again, are rather backburner - that I don't see completing the first pass for awhile. (Nonetheless, if you spot a woman on the WDC page who should probably be on the Herstory page instead, please let me know.)

The Comics Part - Your work needs to be comics. I tend to be fairly inclusive here, webcomics and editorial comics and comic strips certainly count. Anything that involves telling a story or a gag. But I personally don't consider caricatures and illustrations and sketches and fan art/fanfic and oekaki and dojinshi to be comics, although they're often a good start and I applaud all the women currently engaged in those activities. If you're a woman doing admin work at a comic book company or writing about comics or selling comics - in other words, stuff that doesn't involve storytelling but is still industry-related - your name should be on the not-updated-quite-so-often Industrial Strength Women list, not the WDC.
Hope that clears everything up for now.

The other thing I'm finding interesting is the ramp-up of Prophecy Magazine, whose website I highly recommend not only to professional-level female comic creators interested in actually getting a decent page rate and good exposure for their work that doesn't happen to be superhero in nature, but to folks seeking a good read. Dirk Deppey mentions more about them, including linking to this thread on Tartsville which features a lot of give and take about the business end of the enterprise.