I just wanted to point folks to a couple of good posts on gender and webcomics readership. First there’s a post by Brooke Spangler of A Girl And Her Fed on gender and webcomic popularity which looks at the Most Read list of webcomics I posted this month. Then Gary Tyrrell of FLEEN riffs on some ideas of how different types of readers (reader versus, say, SUPERFAN) might explain some of the differences (plus Gary does a good job of explaining some of the issues with using Project Wonderful data for a most read list — all of which seem like reasonable criticisms to me).
Brooke’s essay is well worth reading because it’s a conundrum to the extent it’s true (although again I think Gary is positing why it’s hard to tell if it’s really true based on the type of limited data we have to work with).
One article from ComixTalk’s archives I would recomend everyone take another look at is Erik Melander’s look at gender and comics from our April 2005 issue. He took a look at the numbers of creators in different segments of comics to find that women made up a larger percentage of the number of creators in webcomics than other segments. I’d say Brooke’s question goes to the gender breakdown of successful webcomic creators — which would be a subset of Erik’s dataset (which would be a great idea to update). Circling back to Gary, I’m not entirely sure that the Most Read list is the way to determine that subset of successful webcomic creators — other variables are probably more important — like cumulative income associated with making comics for starters.
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