DC lack of women creators and a simple solution to how they can fix it.

Recently DC comics has been getting a lot of negative news due to the lack of women writing comics for DC post relaunch. The number will drop to just a hand full of women writers to just two. That’s a sad fact indeed but due to the low number of women that where writing for the main DCU before this the fact that they will only have two or less woman writing for them isn’t too surprising. A sad fact but not surprising because the comic book pro has been largely White dudes.

The comic industry has long been in need of increasing it’s diversity both in the characters they show and the creators they hire (as well as editors, marketing staff etc., etc.) and that is one of the things that DC has said they will be doing with this reboot. I don’t know the break down of the ethnicities of the people that well be writing for DC after this reboot but in terms of gender diversity they are taking a step back instead of ahead. Even though the people running DC realize they need to increase their diversity more they are still a little slow in doing so (at least behind the scenes,) But this isn’t where DC really dropped the ball on this issue.
Where DC really dropped the ball was at Comic-con, where at a panel a woman dress as Batgirl along with her kid dressed as Spoiler asked a panel made up of Dan Didio, Jim Lee and Grant Morrison about the fact that their was only one woman writing for them after their relaunch. Instead of responding to the woman professionally, the panel was dismissive of her point and mockingly rude toward her. Dan Didio told her they only picked the best scripts. Which maybe true but is one of those things that still doesn’t sound good when you think of the issue at hand, since it could be taken that their where no good women writers for them to publish. Responses like that reflected negatively on DC.

But here’s the thing after this story broke out the internerd there started to be a few reports that DC actually did talk to at least a few women comic pros to work on some relaunched titles. Some of them had other jobs at the time, other pitches just didn’t get picked. If DC just said “we actually did contact take a number of women writers, but we where able to come to any deals in time for the relaunch.” Then this thing may have played out a lot differently.

But sadly they didn’t and so what DC needs to do now is some good PR spinning. The first thing they need to do is issue an apology and then a dress the issue at. DC comics needs more diversity in their writing staff. At the very least DC should take a page out of Marvel’s book and release an anthology comic featuring all women creators (and maybe characters,) a new Sensational comics title would be fine if they want to use an old comic book title. While they are at it DC could have a few other anthology books as training ground for new and up coming writers and artist.