I hate pointing fingers and giving bad rap, but I'm truly… shocked. I tried applying to a web publishing company that claims it helps get female comic writers and artists out there. I was excited to apply, but for months I heard nothing. I did some research and to my astonishment, I discovered they only help out female writers and comic writers who write steamy romance and X-rated comics where all the main protagonists are women.

I'm angry not because of what they do support, but because of the false advertisement and stereotyping of female comic writers. There is nothing wrong with steamy romance or writing X-rated work with female leads, but there is something wrong when you claim you support all female comic writers, when in reality, you support one kind. We lady comic writers are just like gentlemen comic writers: we can write ANYTHING that comes to our imagination not just about love or naughty stuff. And we shouldn't have to have female protagonists (or gay male protagonists) to prove our work is progressive, original and can captivate an audience.

And what really leaves a bitter taste in my mouth is that the group was run by a woman. Like… Is support for your fellow sisters? Is this a group that includes ALL women comic writers? Is this really pushing forward the idea that women can write anything men can?

I think in today's day and age, this is not right. Either change your slogan on which kind of comics you help publish or start opening the doors to ALL women comic writers like you claim you do.

Any other ladies here had a similar experience?

Interesting. I never knew that such things happened.
I hope you don't mind but I put this in the General Discussion area :)

I hate the thought of people being pushed into writing only one type of thing.
It always annoys me when people tell me “men write about this sort of stuff and women write about that”
Or that certain genres are for men and others are for women. “Boys movies and chick flicks”. Those people need to die.

Be my guest. And really, I am glad other people agree. Being truly progressive means being open to anything and everything. Another good example is let's just say you have a gay protagonist, does it mean they HAVE to have a love interest to flaunt how gay they are? No because while gay people want to be loved, they have other hopes and dreams too. Plus, it's important to show that they go through the same things we straight people do like kissing a lot of frogs before finding the prince/princess. Heck, they even wind up in toxic relationships. That is why I hate maintstream BL. I love GOOD WELL WRITTEN characters. I don't care about which way they swing, what pronoun they identify with, what colour they are or which God they pray to.

I have no problem with romance or steamy, mature content.. but I thought the big stereotype was that women **only** wrote that stuff, and was not good for anything else. I feel like this would only be reinforcing the stereotype.

I, for one, am not a big romantic and succkkkk at writing romance haha.

Funny. I've sorted wanted to create some x-rated stuff but can't bring myself to do it, for some outdated reasons (worried about how I'll be perceived, etc…)

I know a few writers who made conscious decisions to write porn just so they could get the help to break into writing.

Another sort of backed into it. He wrote a porn piece that took off and found its way into a anthology. He's since expanded it into a novel and it found a publisher and an audience.

And I researched the whole bodice ripper romance genre and wrote a few scenes and was going to go that route before veering off into webcomics. There are such things as fantasy romances that have some pretty racy scenes. I was reworking Searsha's story along those lines but hit a stone wall.

And I had a full female pseudonym with bio all prepared.

The other big thing is Young Adult fantasy and horror. That's also easy to break into with just the right piece. And of course I hit another stone wall. Perfect ideas but no firm way to get from here to there in the story.

Yeah, but it's one thing to do it because you want to and another to have to do it to get noticed around here. Art is supposed to be a form of free speech. If I want to make clean comics that are more action oriented, I will.

ashtree house wrote:
I have no problem with romance or steamy, mature content.. but I thought the big stereotype was that women **only** wrote that stuff, and was not good for anything else. I feel like this would only be reinforcing the stereotype.

I, for one, am not a big romantic and succkkkk at writing romance haha.

I am a big romantic, but I like writing about it on my own time and I really hate it when I am excluded just because I don't write like that.

mks_monsters wrote:
Yeah, but it's one thing to do it because you want to and another to have to do it to get noticed around here. Art is supposed to be a form of free speech. If I want to make clean comics that are more action oriented, I will.

One of the reasons I went from high epic fantasy to silly satire of exploitation sci-fi was to get noticed.

Look at the last two pages of Go a Viking Joked about it: “No readers so all boobs, all the time.”

I made a conscious choice against my better judgment and background so that I had readers if I ever decided to do less racy silly stuff.

And I found out I enjoyed doing it despite myself.

Transparency would be a big help. I can understand if a publisher or company has a set style or theme they want to keep to since it might work for them but advertising it as such is important. Otherwise it wastes everybody's time.
That goes for all job descriptions tbh.

Last year, I traveled to Tokyo with a good friend of mine. He is quite an American expert about anime, manga, and hentai. He’s even had a voice-over commentary on some anime DVDs. However, I’m not a fan, but really wanted to visit Japan. He took me to a giant comic book convention, Comiket in a huge hall at a place simply called Tokyo Big Sight.

One thing that really struck me was that 85 percent of the tables there were with female cartoonists trying to sell their books. I wasn’t able to see a lot of them and wouldn’t be a good judge, but it seemed like they covered all sorts of various genres. I certainly didn’t see anything that would be thought of as porn or adult. Japan is a lot more straight-laced than we here in the States are led to believe.

As for me, I’ve always enjoyed drawing underground comix with lots of drugs, sex, and violence. When I moved to the Duck Webcomics, I realized that my kind of stuff wasn’t going to be read by just any viewer. They would need to be signed-in to see my adult stuff. So, I’ve actually kind of mellowed out my comix so that it’s merely mature, than adult.

— Rick Rudge

I've come up against this more than a few times, and I think it's something a lot of creators just starting off never learn until a situation where they're shocked and disillusioned like this.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with being out to write and promote only sexier stories for a more mature audience, and if you feel your demographic is under-represented in that authorship, I think it's an admirable endeavour. However, I do think a large part especially of doing adult-oriented work and challenging the mainstream involves being kind of a ride or die bitch about it. It's the same sort of thing with a lot of gays, myself included, making a concerted decision to come out to people; if you don't let people know, they will never likely know, and it won't be important to them at all. You will never accomplish what you're setting out to do, because people won't know why it's important. They should be much more up-front about what they're trying to accomplish, because this seems to just be getting people interested who aren't suited for the job.

Ultimately, all good writers of any sex or gender should be supported and appreciated, because one's genitals don't dictate one's ability. There are remarkably few professions where one's genitals even factor in remotely to the work or the industry. If you want to distinguish yourself, just write good stuff and don't rely on your own inborn physical traits or established identity to sell it, and don't make the mistake of thinking that sharing an inborn physical trait with others will help you. I'm super-gay, but the gay community doesn't help me. And it's the same for most anyone I know, regardless of what social groups they happen to be in. We cannot rely on those superficial and often utterly irrelevant commonalities to recommend us. Even if we rely on the novelty of tackling things rarely depicted or addressed, nothing new remains new for long.

as a “woman” (big question mark there tbh) who writes romance, and steamy xxx rated stuff with somewhat female/nb leads, there's a big stigma against you if you write romance and anything x rated, so it's nice to see people getting supported to be published for that kind of work.

but, they should have advertised it better as only being open to certain genres. otherwise that seems a bit rude to leave you hanging for months when your work isn't exactly what they're looking for - at least an email would have been polite