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Kapow – Where The Women At?

Last year's Kapow comic convention in London was criticised when it came to their comic industry guests, for being all male. Before the show, they did add one female guest and one of the stores exhibiting at the convention brought in Melinda Gebbie for a signing, but the criticism was made, especially compared to the more female focussed MCM London Expo.

Kapow was a sausagefest.

At the time showrunner Mark Millar was adamant, the convention had the biggest comic book guests – and they happened to all be male. He challenged the Geek Syndicate podcast people to name a female A lister in comics, and they failed.

And as this year's comics guests were announced – again they were all male. The criticism now was that the show hadn't learned from the previous year.

No sign of the UK's Posy Simmonds, whose graphic novels get turned into films, no mention of Leah Moore, whose Thrill Electric was published by network TV station Channel 4, nor the all-female Windflower Studio who drew it, not Emma Vieceli who designed the characters, and who drew the Vampire Academy graphic novels, no Denise Mina author of the Girl With The Dragon Tattoo adaptation, nor any of the women working on The Phoenix, the big new comic for middle class kids whose parents shop in Waitrose.

Arts journalist for the Independent, Laura Sneddon, asked Mark Millar on Twitter if there were any female comics guests, as that's what she specialises in covering, name dropping Denise Mina, Karrie Fransman and Kate Brown.

Mark Millar responded that while the show will have half female guests when it comes to TV and film, for comics the show focussed on Marvel, DC, Image, 2000AD, Clint guests, that they could only afford one big US guest in Joe Quesada, and the big name UK creators for the mentioned titles are all male. That Kapow is a "mainstream" show and that female comics creators generally create non-superhero wor, which is mostly outside of their remit.

Which was ironic, as Laura was writing for a "mainstream" newspaper audience and was finding little to cover. Mark even recommended she go to MCM London Expo instead, in a quote that the organisers of that show should really grab for publicity purposes – "MCM have a great line-up of female pros on the UK scene – Mark Millar, Kapow"

It's that classic comics mainstream vs real mainstream battle I seem to have been part of for twenty years now, combined with the recent surge in the idea that a lack of women publically seen working in comics puts off others working on comics, and potential audiences. Heidi MacDonald kicked it up a gear, suggesting more names of potential guests.

Millar stated that neither Leah Moore nor John Reppion were available that weekend, stating that five five women running the show, they wouldn't purposefully omit female creators, they were just looking to get the biggest names and challenging for a big name UK-based female creator who was missing. You can see Lucy and Sarah Unwin talking about the show last year here and here.

I still think Posy Simmonds and Emma Vieceli would count and count big, looking at their signing queues of late. And Becky Cloonan, artist on Conan, is attending Kapow as a fan, it seems. But it is also true that with the specific companies he mentioned and the tyope of comics he's talking about, in the UK it's even more male than in the USA.

Does it matter? It does a bit. Kapow is presenting itself as the face of Comic Con, to the exclusion of other shows, but when it does that it can set the agenda, the way people believe the comics industry is, and as a result, can be self fulfilling. Indeed, Millar chooses much of the material for CLiNT, published by Titan, the company that funds Kapow, so it all seems to feed into itself.

And in reality of course, there will be female comics creators at Kapow, as last year they will have bought sales tables, they will be there selling their work, or maybe signing at others' tables. But, like Melinda Gebbie last year, they won't appear on the guest list or be seen on the website.

So from outside, when it comes to the comic creators at least, it will be wall-to-wall Walls'.

I'll be attending Kapow. As a man.

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