Amusingly, the shortest month of the year had comics shipping five times, so we’ve got five weeks to look at in our monthly rundown. So that means February 2012’s stats are super-sized, with bigger charts and more data!! It’s all terribly exciting. DC had a fairly average month in February, though the extra week helped to make up for a slow start. Let’s take a look at their overall totals:
DC’s first weeks have not been good at all lately, but starting out at 7.5% isn’t the worst number we’ve seen in this slot. Things got better from there, though, with DC hovering around their average range for a few weeks before finishing off with a strong 14.5%. All in all, things should equal out to about average for the month. DC is nothing if not the epitome of consistency, good and bad. Onto the super-sized mega-chart:
It’s time for the zero counter!! Now, the zero counter is based on our usual 32 spot chart, but with the extra shipping week we’ve got 40 spots so we need to adjust. Thus 12 out of 40 gives us a comparable zero counter total of 9.6. That’s DC’s lowest total yet, which is nice to see. Hopefully this more consistent use of female creators continues next month when we return to our regular sized chart.
As always, we’ll start with the big name categories. Female cover artists did okay in February with one zero week, one good week, and a few low but consistent showing. All in all, it balances out to the usual range.
There were a couple weeks without female writers, and never more than one female writer in the weeks there were some. Luckily Gears of Wars came out this month or there would have been three zeroes. And as always, pray for the safety of Gail Simone lest she be hit by a bus or some such and DC’s superhero line loses its entire female writing staff.
Pencillers and inkers didn’t have a great month either. Both had two weeks with one each and three zeroes, and oddly no weeks where there was both a female penciller and inker. I guess DC didn’t want to shock us with two lady artists in the same week. Very thoughtful of them.
Colourists had an odd month with an awful week, two subpar weeks, and then two weeks that we’d used to call slightly above average, but given DC’s lack of female colourists lately we have to call it pretty stellar this days. For letterers, the gal with my favourite name in the comics business, Saida Temofonte, is still holding down the fort, though oddly all of her credits are always on video game properties or books that were digital first.
Editorial was very up and down, bookended by two bad weeks with a really good week in the middle. The good week likely won’t counteract the two bad weeks, so editorial might be a little lower than usual this month. Assistant editors did great though!! One week has a bit below average, but there were two weeks in the 50% range for the first time ever I think. That last week the chart cuts off goes all the way to a whopping 54.5%, which is huge. So well done, assistant editors!!
Overall, the things that are usually bad were fairly bad and the things that were good were fairly good. Like I said earlier, DC is consistency personified. It would just be nice if they consistently hired more women.
Notes:
- The busiest book of the month was Justice League #6 with 18 creators, 1 of them a woman. They were clearly in a rush to get this one out on time… it had 5 inkers and 4 colourists!! One of those inkers was Sandra Hope. I don’t know how much of the book she did, but she pitched in to help them meet the deadline.
- The book with the highest percentage of female creators was Birds of Prey #6 at 3 of 7, followed closely by Batgirl #6 and Voodoo #6 at 3 of 8. All of these books were edited by Bobbie Chase, by the way, DC’s new Executive Editor.
- To learn more about this statistics project and its methodology click here, and to see the previous stats click here.
TIM HANLEY 