Geek Girl Con is a dream come true, it’s lgbtq- and POC-positive, everywhere you look there are creative, brilliant women, and the vibe is positively joyful. I keep having to miss panels I am dying to see..
Amazing. Amazing.
The first Women In Comics panel I attended, there were nine panelists…
I am having an AMAZING time. I wonder if they’d consider setting up a franchise opportunity…
Seriously, this con is the greatest. Everyone is so HAPPY to be here. Me included.
Karen is being modest.
Last night, she ran a panel that was giving scholarly papers about female superheroes.
Her’s was about Queer characters, in this case all lesbians, and their family structures, both biological and by personal choice. It focused on Renee Montoya, Batwoman, and Scandal Savage, and was fucking BRILLIANT.
I mean, both Greg Rucka and I write a lot on a subtextual level, and I think we both try to tell a surface story that is compelling on its own, but if you look at the stories and give them thought, there are vitamins and rewards upon second reading. That’s the hope, anyway.
Karen, who goes by the handle Sapphohands on some message boards, is a PHD student in Sussex, and she just found an amazing amount of the intended understory themes in all three books. It was absolutely brilliant and humanizing. I loved it.
Then there was a paper by a professor whose name escapes me who uses a lot of comics in her work. She analyzed my Wonder Woman, specifically going over the gender themes and how many traditionally male roles and plot points were subverted to female themes. Again, astoundingly smart stuff. She was using Rise of The Olympian, which isn’t my favorite of my Wonder Woman works for various reasons, but she did remind me about the stuff in it that did mean a lot to me, stuff that I think was very subversive.
It was so thoughtful, and the questions afterwards were so smart…I love this con, it’s just amazing. I hope there are more like it, soon. It’s an astounding creative success. I hope it’s a commercial one, as well.
The discussion after was brief, they kicked us out for time.
The only real complaint about the books that we heard (and again, the discussion was short, there may have been more with time), was from a very smart woman who sat right behind me (I didn’t make my presence known, I just wanted to sit in to support scholarly discussion of comics), who felt that Scandal telling her father, Vandal Savage, that she would not give him a true heir, was giving the message that lesbians don’t want to have families, or are anti-childbearing.
It’s an interesting point, I think it’s a fair observation to make—I will have to reread the scene because I’m pretty sure that Scandal just objects to Vandal’s manipulations, not the IDEA of childbearing.
But I thought that was a very interesting and powerful observation. Are there, aside from Apollo and Midnighter, any gay heroes/villains at DC or Marvel who actually have a kid? No one leaps to mind.
Another thing on the list of stuff that needs to happen.
Anyway, it was lovely to see these books discussed intelligently, on that kind of level. I have several books that get regular coverage at colleges, I’ve given a lot of lectures and discussions on The Circle, in particular. But this was probably the best such discussion I’ve attended.
