RITUAL DISCLAIMER: Understand, my male friends, acquaintances, and peers, I am pleased for you. Proceed with that understanding.

You're shittin' me? You invited men making comics about women, but not a single woman making comics? You're shittin' me.

Got my pro reg pack for Comic Con International today. It is already binned, as I haven't changed my plans to not go this year. But there'd be another reason; it's repellent. It makes me ill to look at it, as it does many years. It's depressing to look at it and think things like, "What? Fucking Harry Knowles was a better guest than a woman?"
There is not ONE FEMALE SPECIAL GUEST this year. NOT ONE. Not even the token female they usually have. What? Rosario Dawson was busy? Gail Simone's not done enough yet? Someone's first webcomic trumps five years of Marvel and DC work? You're shittin' me.
And sure, I'll include myself: my career speaks for itself.* I'll put my contributions to the comics art form and business against anyone's career than spans the same period. Harry Knowles' boil on the ass of the web trumps me or even the 100 least productive women making comics? YOU'RE SHITTIN' ME.

I'd be really impressed if the featued men commented on this from their position as guests. "I'm pleased to be invited, I sure wish the convention felt my female colleagues, many of whom are as accomplished as any of us male guest, merited the same acclaim." I double-dog dare you. Impress me. Impress your female colleagues.

One of them, Brian Fries, is a guest on the strength of his first work, Mom's Cancer. I'm not missing the irony that a man making a comic about the near-death of inarguably the most important woman in his life is invited, and there's not a single woman making comics who is. It's not lost on me, either, that three of the male guests, Brian Fries, James Kolchaka, and Roger Langridge, make webcomics, which previously could not even be invited to draw a dogfight.
It's good to know webcomics now have the San Diego Testosterony Seal o' Approval.

One might think, from San Diego's (and many other cons) guest lists that comics were, as arcana_j published on snow and printed with piss ink. Because that's certainly how it looks: that the gender who can write largest with their genitals is the one worthy of recognition. Even though women making comics have figured out how to do it backwards and in high heels, making comics in a squat, without even looking.

The first year I went to CCI, it was still called San Diego Comic-Con, and I could count the other female pros attending on one hand. The next year, on slightly less than two. Looking at this year's guest list, there are, apparently, NO women working in comics twenty years on. I wouldn't have to expend myself to raise a single dainty digit (for example, the middle one) to count them.
WHAT does it SAY when one of the most visible public faces of comics ignores its women? For shame, CCI. FOR SHAME.

How could I possibly support this, even in my 1 person in 100,000 or one pro of hundreds or one female pro of HUNDREDS way? It's not much, but it's all mine.

HURT COMICS. BECAUSE COMICS NEED HURTING.







* In case you're late to the party: twenty years and within that I was a pioneer in the manga and anime business in this country, pioneered OEL and $10. price points for GNs with Cathedral Child, Clockwork Angels, and Rumble Girls. (Yes, that would be me and Jim Valentino, not TP.) I am a webcomics pioneer, which meant creating (with Joey Manley) and hiring creators for GirlAMAtic.com: MANY contributors to the FLIGHT anthologies BEFORE those anthologies, Svetlana Chmakova, who has made the best OEL so far from TokyoPop, and Raina Telgemeier, who did the art for the gn adaptation of the insanely popular BABYSITTER'S CLUB.
Before that, I was an original contributor to Modern Tales, the first successful webcomics subscription site. I walked away from Image Comics and made Rumble Girls a print-to-web comic, before GIRL GENIUS or FINDER.

Then I had the ovaries to tell the mainstream to go fuck itself. Yeah, I'd say I'm all that.