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I'm Cathy Leamy, an East Coast cartoonist and blogger on comics, pop culture, and design. Check out my comics! They tend to be about me.

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Saturday, December 16, 2006

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comic: The Paper Mirror



I'm still thinking about DC's upcoming Minx line and the reaction to the gender makeup of its creative teams (i.e., not many women for an imprint aimed at young girls).

From a business sense, there's nothing wrong about this. DC isn't building some FUBU girlpower collective. Their goal is to get girls to buy DC comics, full stop.

Good creators can build stories about people who aren't like them. Men can write about women (Whiteout), women can write about men (Finder), $apples can write about $oranges, and so on. And DC has hired some great creators for this venture.

At the same time, I wonder about Minx's potential lack of paper mirror moments, especially for an audience who really needs them. Sometimes only the people who've been there can really capture the mood and, maybe even more importantly, the details. Hacker movies sporting fakey Hollywood OS, on-location tales with incorrect or mishmashed backgrounds - the devil's in the details, and when the details are wrong, my conviction in the story falters and sometimes I even feel disrespected. "Hey, I'm glad that me and my kind are such great story fodder for you guys - now could you take five minutes to actually talk to one of us and get some facts about what we're really like?"

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7 comments!     click to join in

1 Mister Wolf   (9:10am - Dec 17, 2006)

Love it!

2 Bahlactus   (4:31pm - Dec 17, 2006)

I dig this term, paper mirror. More and more as I read I am hoping to identify with someone who is like me in the story. It could be as simple as (he's a brutha), or, playing to some sensibility that I have at any given time. When you look in the paper mirror and something is actually reflected back -- you can't beat that.

3 jim   (8:05pm - Dec 18, 2006)

cool beans-i like this strip

my exclamation key is broken :(

4 David Welsh   (7:46am - Dec 19, 2006)

I love this so much. I really do.

5 Jeph!   (12:05pm - Jan 2, 2007)

Speaking as a straight white male in his late 20s, I don't see what all the fuss is about. ;-)

6 Greg Downing   (5:44pm - Jun 30, 2007)

I actually saw this comic posted somewhere else: on a Girl-Wonder blog, and I immediately recognized the artwork as you.

You do great stuff, Kitty. Keep doing it. :)

7 Robert   (1:35pm - Jul 23, 2007)

This was beautifully done. I can still remember the first electric thrill of reading an independent comic and feeling that shock 'Oh goddess, this artist is in my brain! I want to do THIS, too!'.

Unfortunately for me, the work in question was Barry Blair's 'Elflord'. ;<

Robert

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