Females and Diversity in Mainstream Comics
There was a charge leveled against most mainstream comics that they are white men power fantasies. Looking over the Marvel and DC universe of old, most of the heroes were indeed Caucasian males. However I feel that this is too harsh a judgement for many reasons; many of the superheroes were created in the 60's when diversity wasn't such a big thing and the comics were aimed at the youth audience, who were traditionally white. So the comics mostly dealt with young white males given or gaining extraordinary powers. This worked for many years but as the story canon has become more obtuse and conflicted it has been difficult for a younger, newer and more diverse audience to access comics.
In a day and age of billion dollar grossing movies the comics industry is trying to branch out and appeal to the diverse audience who access and appreciate these films globally and why shouldn't it? If comics continued on the traditional path they would die a slow death.
When I went to comic shops in the 90's it was mostly older white folk ( which was surprising as I lived in a very culturally diverse town in East London, a melting pot of ethnicities) only really diversifying with the explosion in Marvel Flair '95 and '96 cards due to the popularity of the X Men animated series. But now with Kaboom, Image and small publishing prints it's much more diverse. A large amount of younger female readers have joined the comics wave, either writing, drawing or reading the new versions of classic characters.
Sensing this new audience demographic Marvel and DC have attempted to diversify their cast. The success of comics like the soft rebooted Ms Marvel and She Hulk have led to DC broadening their target audience with comics such as Batgirl and Black Canary (both reboots which don't negate what happened before).
I'm a British Asian male and I love the traditional comics but the newer more diverse comics speak to me (as I mentioned in my article about how Ms Marvel is changing the world). I'm really enjoying the new wave of diversity in comics and long may it continue. Reading the recent trades of She Hulk by Soule and Pulido I came to the 'Legal briefs' page at the back, where the creators come together to share their views, ideas and opinions. A piece written by the editor Jeanine Schaefer really spoke to me as a recent father to a daughter. Women are represented in mainstream comics but only recently are they really getting their due in my opinion.