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Gendercrunching The DC New 52 – Week One by Tim Hanley

Published Thu, 08 Sep 2011 09:02:23 -0500

Last updated Wed, 28 Sep 2016 19:20:20 -0500

Tim Hanley writes for Bleeding Cool;

I'll be doing the women in comics stats for DC and Marvel like always this month, but since the DC relaunch is sort of a big deal, we're going to have special reports on the New 52 as they're released… hopefully very soon after they're released, if I can keep on top of things.

Now, just looking at the DCnU requires a bit of an adjustment for those who follow these stats (here's an explanation of the methodology for those of you who don't follow the stats). We're used to seeing DC in the 11% percent range, but that's for all of their books, including Vertigo and the kid's books and such. Stripped down to just the main DC line and the 375 comics they've released from January to August, the key number for comparison is 9.4%. That's the overall percentage of female creators for the DC proper for all of 2011 thus far.

This week, we've got thirteen new number ones, plus Justice League #1 from last week. I added it in because it seemed a little silly to give it its own post last week, so I saved it. On September 7, 2011, DC released 14 (really 13, plus 1 from the week before) brand new titles featuring 105 credited creators, 97 male and 8 female. Here are the percentages, in new Justice League inspired colours:

So we're nearly two percent less than the average amount. If you want to get into a whole percentage of percentage thing, this 7.6% is almost twenty percent below the average total of female creators. It's not a particularly great beginning, and here's the part where I would say something about how it looks like it might get better or worse, but I literally have NO idea how it'll go. It's a whole new universe, folks!! Let's look at the categories:

And chart them up:

Gail Simone had Batgirl #1 this week, so there's your lady writer. And then nothing until editorial. I wasn't expecting any pencillers or inkers, but I thought we'd maybe get a colourist or two, or maybe even just one on a cover. But no. Plus in editorial, only 2 of the female credits were for full editors, while the other 5 were for assistant editors. Assistant editors are of course super important, but it's nice to spread things around some and not have all the ladies in the category with "assistant" in the title. Also interesting is that this week belonged to the Bat-books… Janelle Asselin and Katie Kubert assistant edited Detective Comics #1 while Gail Simone wrote, Bobbie Chase edited, and the very busy Katie Kubert again assistant edited Batgirl #1. That's 5 of the 8 female credits in only two books. What we have here is an epic lack of distribution all around.

Check back next week to see what's happening for Week Two of the DCnU!!

Notes:

There was a three-way tie for busiest book of the week between Action Comics #1, Men of War #1, and Justice League #1, all with 10 creators. Only Men of War #1 had a lady on the book, with Kate Stewart assistant editing.
The book with the most female creators by number and percentage was Batgirl #1 at 3 of 8.
Thanks to the many sites where I scrounged information on the credits for these new books today, and to Todd McCallum for kindly filling in the rest.
To learn more about this statistics project and its methodology click here, and to see the previous stats click here.