Women In Comics Statistics: DC, January 2011 In Review

Now that we’ve got all the data from January, we can take a step back and look at the month as a whole.  Things can fluctuate from week to week, but a month’s information gives us a decent picture of how things actually roll in these companies.  As always, to learn more about this statistics project, click here.

The monthly reviews will be slightly different, in that I’ll post the usual charts but then we’ll go through each category one by one.  This will hopefully be more interesting in the coming months, when we have previous months to compare with.  So, in January 2011 DC Comics released 70 new comic books featuring 594 creators, 528 male and 66 female.  The percentages break down like this:

While 11.1% isn’t huge, you will see in the next post that it beats the hell out of Marvel.  But still, this is a paltry amount.  Statistics only tell us the what and not the why, and I’d be very interested to hear what the DC brass has to say about why these numbers are so low.  Let’s break them down further in a chart:

And go through them individually:

Covers – 9 of 132, 6.8%: This is a low number, but it is interesting that a lot of the women credited on covers are doing the main pencilling and inking which, no offense to colourists, are the big name gigs.  Amy Reeder, Nicola Scott, Yuko Shimizu, and Fiona Staples all were the primary artists on covers this month.

Writers – 2 of 89, 2.2%: I’ve mentioned the low writing stats before… it’s sort of appalling.  Only TWO comics were written by a woman, and both of them were written by Gail Simone.  One gal writing comics with the huge slate of books DC puts out is embarrassing.

Pencillers – 3 of 88, 3.4%: This is pretty terrible.  Again, huge slate of books, and three gigs for women.  At least it was three different artists (Adriana Melo, Nicola Scott, and Becky Cloonan).

Inkers – 3 of 93, 3.2%: See the above two comments… this is crazy low.

Colourists – 11 of 79, 13.9%: Apparently colouring is the field to go into if you want to work on art at DC.  These numbers aren’t great in and of themselves, but comparatively they’re astronomical.

Letterers – 3 of 73, 4.1%: My mother and sister are the neatest printers in the world, while my father and I write near illegibly.  I don’t know how true that is for everyone, but I thought it was interesting given these stats.

Editors – 20 of 89, 22.5%: Given how superhero comics have consciously sought out male readers for decades now, 22.5% is a fairly good number.  I don’t expect gender stats in comics to equal out to half and half… it’s not a medium that been lady friendly for a long time now.  So yeah, I think that’s a decent amount.

Assistant Editors – 18 of 45, 40%: This is impressively high… though the “assistant” thing sort of concerns me.  I don’t know what goes into assistant editing, and perhaps it’s a super involved and awesome job (if any assistant editors would like to let me know what they do, I’d be glad to hear it and post it), but I find it somewhat troubling that the category with the biggest percentage has the word “assistant” in it.