why a girl needs comics

About 4-5 years ago, I started getting back into comics. Going to the comic book store became a thing we did as a family, as the kids and even my wife read comics. It’s not unusual to find us all sitting in the living room after a comic run and reading our comic books.

In a way, it’s exciting to see my kids enjoy comics in a way I like to think I did when I was their ages. And I think about how important comics were to me . . . getting interested in drawing, reading, writing. But I’m most aware of my daughter whom we have tried to raise with good attitudes about women and men, about differences. On her own, though, she has seized upon that need to identify with female characters.

She often follows my son into his interests, like Ben 10, Teen Titans, and Legion of Superheroes. But she consistently focuses on the female characters, almost in a way that my son doesn’t when he plays and talks about characters. He doesn’t talk about ‘male characters’ but just picks out the ones he likes, which tend to be male. But my daughter is more purposeful, calling attention to the gender of the characters. I don’t know what to make of this, which I’m sure some people would jump on and judge. Instead, I only take from it that this is something very important to my daughter and could have a significant role in her development.

So, we buy the few girl comics available, though I wince at a couple of them, like Black Cat, who come across more like sex kittens for boys. She is still learning to read, so in addition to the Legion and Titans comics, she seems to like Powerpuff Girls and Totally Spies the most right now. [The minx comics are for older girl readers.] The latter somewhat bugs me because, even though the girls are spies and are saving rather than being saved, they still talk about stereotypes, like shopping. But I think the strong female leads are more important than that. Plus, my daughter is now having to wear glasses with the stigma and self-consciousness that goes with them.

I don’t have any generalization or conclusion: I just find it interesting, to see an idea I thought was true [comics were important to me and now to my kids] but with a not-unexpected twist of emphasis for my daughter. Are these strong female characters more important to her than the strong characters are to my son? I don’t know.

However, I do think this is possibly a good example of how pop culture can do something better than other cultural products. Yes, she gets good role models from her mother, from other women in our family, from the real world. As we all had ice cream at Braum’s last night, after we voted, we talked about how, yes, women can be president [and one just might be soon]. but it’s not the same. As cool and strong and intelligent as mom is, she doesn’t defeat space monkeys or save the world. It might sound trivial, but I think we take for granted even a silly thing like male superheroes because we’re used to it. Seeing women superheroes, though better than it used to be, is not as common, but I think it’s important, or at least it seems to be for my daughter.

Update: Edited for some really bad sentences.