Chara comics your soul for my tits

Glen Weldon reviews the 50 comics available at participating comics shops for 2015’s Free Comic Book Day, coming May 2 — what to pick up free, skip, and buy while you’re in the shop.

I have been a reader of superhero comics since I *could *read, buying them off the spinner rack for a quarter.

My love for them was sealed when I watched (in reruns) the first appearance of Batgirl on the

These comics were also the two sales powerhouses for Marvel and DC–X-Men so much so that it spawned an industry.

Best of all, both titles featured women in prominent roles, with cool powers. Most importantly, they were also friends with each other. I stayed hooked for a long time, until my twins were born about a decade ago and I ran out of money and time to read superhero comics on a regular basis.

But one thing made no sense to me. While the rest of the world had discovered strong females characters who sometimes carried the lead in movies and television shows, superhero comics seemed to have flat-out

Neal Adams, Marshall Rogers, Dick Dillin, Dave Cockrum, George Perez, John Byrne…all drew extremely good-looking women whose primary characteristic wasn't that the male readers considered them bedtime companions. They were sexy because they were strong and competent. But the current artwork isn't about that. It is, to be blunt, about women as fan wank material to a great degree. It's not all artists and all artwork but it was enough that when I took my daughter into a comic shop several years ago, she said "Mom, why do all the girls have so few clothes on? And why do they stand that weird way?" (And she was looking at DC and Marvel titles, not Image!)

DC stated that they wanted to appeal to a wider audience than the current direct market. While I was bummed to see the end of several titles I was enjoying that were canceled to make way for this new thing, I thought this was a great step. Get comics out of the shop and into the hands of a wider audience. And that wider audience should include more female-friendly titles or, better stated, non-fanwank material. DC had most likely noticed that 40 percent of the audience this year at San Diego Comic Con were female. They must know that 40 percent of the 12 million registered World of Warcraft players are women. They had to see the planning of the first ever

4. Starfire, a character on a popular Cartoon Network program marketed to kids, while previously full of sex appeal in the comics but also warm and engaging with a personality, was turned into an emotionless sex doll in

And they've kept on saying it, despite the vast internet cries of "beating a dead horse," and "comics are not for girls," and "they're just not the target market." And my favorite, the "men are idealized too, so stop complaining about the female artwork." That one is so prevalent that a professor at Bowling Green University repeated it in an article for

But I object to the idea that somehow, well-written and well-drawn female characters who look beautiful and powerful at the same time will suddenly make the male audience run for the hills. Women read a ton. They love male characters. They're not asking for a radical changeover. They''re just asking, as Busiek said and Hudson said in her article, that the two major superhero companies stop actively trying to drive them away. The movies, especially Marvel's movies, do a great job also appealing to the female audience.