Events: LGBT Comic Signing, Girls Read Comics Project

June 23rd, 2009

This Saturday, June 27, at Jim Hanley’s Universe I, Rica Takashima, Abby Denson, Ariel Schrag, JD Glass and a bunch more LGBTQ comics artists, writers, publishers and distributors will be doing a Prism Comics book signing for Gay Pride. Seriously, don’t miss it – it’s going to be a star-studded event!

Deb Aoki, the highly engaging editor and writer of manga.about.com, was on Twitter yesterday, musing about several recently articles in the mass media that were severely demeaning to women planning on attending San Diego Comic Con. These articles implied everything from “women are only coming for cute boy actors” to “women go to get laid, because as we all know, no women are into comics.” None of these articles mentioned the many women and girls who draw, read or publish comics. Deb was musing about a “protest t-shirt” against invisibility of women in the comics industry and market. The conversation took on a life of its own and viola! a “Girls Read Comics” project was born.

Deb is looking for female artists to contribute one panel of art depicting a female character in American superhero, Indie or Manga style, with an empty word balloon. We’ll be filling in the balloons with comments like “Girls Draw Comics” “Girls Read Comics” “Girls Buy Comics” with (variations for “Women” and “Girls”) and a few other pithy comments submitted by other Twitterers.

T-shirts will probably be sold through Zazzle and proceeds will go to charities such as Friends of Lulu, the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art. We’re going to try and make it so you can choose the charity of your choice, rather than us doing it.

So, if you are a woman, and would like to be contribute an art panel to the project, please contact Deb at debaoki at hotmail dot com. Published artists are especially welcome. Let me suggest that, if you do submit an art piece, you sign the piece somewhere.

If you are a guy and want to help out, feel free to email Deb and ask how you can help, but buying a shirt and showing your support for women who like comics is definitely a *great* way to help.

Comic-Con is coming soon, so if you want to participate, art has to be in by Monday, June 29. My guess is that we’ll keep working on this post Comic-Con, but let’s see if we can get it off the ground asap!

3 Responses

  1. Anonymous says:

    Erica-

    Are you coming to the Anime Expo at the LA Convention Center?

  2. @Anonymous – Not unless they have me out as a guest or someone else flies me in. You can see what the planned appearances are for any given year on Yuricon Events:
    http://www.Yuricon.org/events

  3. Lorena says:

    Looking forward to buying my shirt and wearing it proudly at Comic-Con! Here’s to hoping some awesome submissions are made today. :)a

Leave a Reply to Lorena