Chicks Dig
Comics is the third of Lynne Thomas’s anthologies which look at
female fans of nerd culture, following her Hugo Award-winning Chicks
Dig Time Lords and Whedonistas!
This time, her co-editor is Sigrid Ellis, but it is beginning to feel
like Thomas has gone to the well a little to often on this theme. The
problem, however, may be that her topic of “comics” is too broad to
allow the individual essays to form into a cohesive statement, as was
possible with the earlier books.
Some of the individual essays stand out, especially
when they cause the reader to view the fans’ obsessions in a new way.
Erica McGillivray's article on cosplay points out not only the
fan’s desire to recreate their costumes, and the reasons behind it,
but also very cogently describes the response the characters’ creators
have when they come face to face with someone who cares enough to create
an accurate representation, especially when it isn’t one of the major
characters.
While the early volumes relied heavily on the
voices of fans speaking about finding their community and discovering a
love for Doctor Who or the
works of Joss Whedon, Chicks Dig
Comics feels as if it is more heavily slanted at women who work in
the industry. This means the
volume has more of an insider feel. Instead of being about the fans, it
is about the creators, most of whom arrived at their positions because
they started out as fans. Even those entries by authors who are not
comic creators seem to be written by professional authors rather than by
the "average" fan.
One of the mainstays of comics is the existence of secret (and multiple)
identities. For comic book fans who feel out of place in the
society in which they find themselves, this is a natural hook and more
than one of the essays deals with a fan's strong emotional tie to an
individual character, whether it's Tammy Garrison's declaration of
"I'm Batman" or Caroline Pruett writing about her "Secret
Identity." Perhaps the most moving of these stories, however, is by
editor Ellis, who explained how reading about Kitty Pryde*
helped her come to terms with her own sexuality. This is the kind of
essay which demonstrates the difference comics (or anything, really) can
make in an individual's life.
Unfortunately, most of the stories related in Chicks
Dig Comics aren’t gripping. Rather
than describing the discovery that they are not alone and that others
share their enthusiasm, too many of these essays come across as
listening to a generally meaningless debate about whether Emma Frost is
better than Jean Grey or whether DC and Marvel can be as cool as the
independents. These debates
may be enjoyable for the people who are participating, but to outsiders,
they only serve to strengthen the image of fandom as a geeky ghetto.
The essays in Chicks Dig Comics show the
importance of comics in the lives of the women who read and create them,
however their enjoyment, despite the massive numbers of people who
attend comic conventions each year, comes across as a more isolated
fandom than those covered by Thomas's earlier books. The sense of
community isn't as strong and the breakthroughs are often on a more
isolated level, which is not to say that they aren't important and life
changing, just that for someone reading the essays contained in the
book, the discoveries are not, in general, earth shattering.
