Women In Comics: Marvel, April 27, 2011

While DC was busy having their worst week ever (the worst week ever for either publisher, in fact), Marvel had one of its best weeks yet this year.  On April 27, 2011, Marvel released 25 new comics with 231 credited creators, 204 male and 27 female.  Here are the percentages:

I feel like I’m in Bizarro world this week.  DC is posting Marvel-like numbers, Marvel is posting DC-like numbers… it’s all very confusing.  After a couple of low weeks, this 11.7% is a great number for Marvel, and a nice bookend to the 10.9% they began the month with.  Marvel’s not particularly consistent with their numbers, but overall they’ve been trending up some lately.  Here are the numbers by category:

And all charted up:

On the creative side, these are some really good numbers.  Writers especially… Marvel’s commitment to female writers has often been the only bright spot during some pretty bad weeks, so it’s nice to see them post a big number on a damn good week.  Editorially, assistant editors killed it while full editors were surprisingly low.  As solid as the overall numbers are, there’s still some definite room for improvement. Editors, obviously, could use a boost, and the complete lack of letterers is a constant bring-down.  The editorial numbers don’t carry Marvel as much as they do at DC, and I think Marvel is very well positioned to post even better numbers if they keep doing what they’re doing on the creative side and boost the editorial ranks.

Notes:

• I have no idea what the book is about, but Thunderstrike #5 came out this week and “Thunderstruck” by AC/DC has been in my head the entire time I wrote up this week’s stats.
• The busiest book of the week was the non-adjectived X-Men #10 with 16 creators, one of them a woman.
• The book with the most female creators by percentage was Osborn #5, sadly the final issue of the mini-series.  It was 3 of 7, but Anita Blake: Circus of the Damned Ingenue #3 also had 3 female creators.  Two books with 3 female creators?!  What the H?!
• Sports Show with Norm Macdonald amuses me.
• To learn more about this statistics project and its methodology click here, and to see the previous stats click here.

Tags: Marvel, Women In Comics Statistics