Kachi Rocks // The Girl at the Comic Shop

The Girl at the Comic Shop

Last night I read Laura Hudson’s absolutely spot-on analysis of the insulting way women have been portrayed so far in DC’s New 52. After reading a small smattering of the 1000+ responses from her article (something I don’t usually do), I noticed a trend, mostly two different types of replies: Men and women who agree with Laura and want change, or men who are upset with her for generalizing the White Straight Male demographic and accusing her of lumping all of them together.

I’ve been working at a comic shop for over four and a half years. I’ll be reaching my fifth year in March. I haven’t stayed at this store for the sake of my health, I do it because I. LOVE. COMICS. I love the combination of the art of storytelling and the syntax of illustration. I love that I can talk to other people about it and know I’m not being spoken down to. But there’s always a ripped seam in every silver lining.

When I got hired on at my shop, it was because I had a strong enthusiasm for manga. Manga had a way of speaking directly towards girls and not belittling them. Sailor Moon wasn’t “The Girl” she was “The Hero.” Most of the words used to describe her and the team weren’t gender-inclusive: “Guardians,” “Soldiers,” and “Scouts.” Her team was aggressive, strong, passionate, and everything I knew I could be in myself and my friends.

The longer I worked in the store, the more I walked away from manga and became increasingly interested in other comics, specifically Marvel. My first foray into mainstream American comics was Brian K. Vaughn’s run on Runaways. I absolutely loved the characters Nico and Gert and thought they were incredibly interesting and well thought out female characters. This was something I was used to seeing in manga and figured didn’t exist in mainstream American comics.

Being inaugurated as the ‘Comic Shop Girl’ gave me a few certain responsibilities, the first of which I was told that men wouldn’t want to talk to me. They would be aggressive towards me. Also I would be hit on many times. My job is to smile and take it one for the team. And this has all happened.

Men have dismissed my opinion, but flocked to the ones of my male coworkers. Men have told me I’m not good at my job. Men have hit on me, made moves, and talked me up in ways considered insulting to my intelligence. I’ve been told my opinions are “cute” and that I’m “naive.” And yet here I am, every week, ringing up your comics.

I had one customer contact me through Twitter. He said: “I guess you’re my favorite clerk in Austin. Even if I have caught you rolling your eyes at my purchases! Followed, I suppose.” WOW. I mean- WOW. I didn’t know what to tell this guy. It’s not really in my nature to keep a grudge, but I’ll never forget how overwhelmingly backhanded this message was.

My comic shop is unique in that we do get a fair amount of female patronage, but I’m not about to dismiss the fact that a good 90% of the people that show up at 9am Wednesday mornings are men on their way to work to get their weekly fix.

DC’s New 52 has been an incredible mixed blessing. My store is also unique because we’re stable enough to order a ton of books, something that most comic shops can’t handle. With the New 52, we ordered tons of copies, but have continued to sell out and have customers clamor for more. Great for us! Fantastic for DC! But the response of the customers is a little disheartening.

There was a man who pouted, a grown-ass man POUTING, because we sold out of copies of Catwoman #1 (we told him we’d get more copies in next week, and we’d set one aside for him but still, pouting). Catwoman was the first issue we sold out of on Wednesday. We sold out before we opened, all of the issues went to people through their pull checklists. The number one most requested issue was Catwoman. I flipped through the issue. I saw what was in there. Color me, as a bleeding-heart comics fan, unimpressed.

I’ve always been confused by the presence of Starfire in the mainstream DCU, because my first introduction to her was in the kid’s television show Teen Titans Go!, where she was an innocent and cute alien girl, but also the most powerful on the team. I remember going to a Borders as a teenager and seeing a Teen Titans book on the shelf. I was sickened by the girl in the g-string bikini. Of course, I acknowledge that this version of Starfire predates the one I was introduced to, but what stunned me was that there was no buffer. People, primarily children, who enjoyed the TTG version of Starfire were going to be forced to look at this version of her when they moved onto the actual comic books (which I assume is the goal of the cartoon, to promote the franchise and recruit new fans). Needless to say, I put the book back on the shelf and have never gave a passing glance to a Teen Titans book since.

See a trend here? I don’t like what I see, so I don’t pay for it. I have a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to objectifying women. Look on my shelves and you’ll see Grant Morrison, Ai Yazawa, Becky Cloonan, Alan Heinberg, Scott McCloud, Tim Fish, Naoko Takeuchi, CLAMP, Peter David, Mark Waid, Jen Van Meter, Matt Fraction, and hundreds of others. You will never see Geoff Johns, Jim Lee, or Dan Didio.

When I see a man come into the store wearing a shirt with a pin-up girl and a gross quote, you know what I immediately think? It isn’t “Wow, that woman on that shirt is so liberated in her sexuality that she’s having fun standing that way in high-heels!” It’s more like “Wow. This is how that man views women. This man cares so little about what women think, he walks around in a public place wearing a shirt that acts like a slap to her face.” (I have seen some pretty awful shirts and the like come into the shop).

People at the shop act like I don’t care, which almost leaves me to believe that they either think I’m invisible or they think I’m “cool with it.” Yeah, because I’m cool with being told, time and time again, that it’s tits and ass that make the girl. I have literally been told more times than I care to mention that my breasts are too small to make me ‘conventionally attractive.’

So when men tell me I’m overreacting because I take offense to how Catwoman and Starfire are being interpreted in the New 52, I guess I’ll just have to take a deep breath and smile (only because it’s in my job description to be courteous). Most men will never know because they’ll never have to go through what women have had to go through for centuries. They can sympathize, but they’ll never really know. It’s the exact same as any other civil rights case with a privileged class feeling resentment over the uprising of an underclass.

I will not be told that I am wrong to feel the way I feel about this. I will not be okay with people thinking that the state of representation of women in comics is fine. I will not be told my femininity is somehow undermined and defined by your masculinity.

POSTED 8 months ago

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