The Best Present Ever!

Some readers might have noticed that I've been doing quite a bit for the new weekly story comic, The Phoenix! Well, here's a chance to see what it's all about - The Phoenix have made a lovely gift box that contains a mini-comic, goodies, and a 5 issues subscription all in one, and you can order it straight from the website. For people living outside the UK, don't worry, The Phoenix will be going digital some time soon too ^_^ (stay tuned for more on that later).

Investigating Gender Bias in the BCAs

Back in march 2012, I posted an article about Sexism in Comics, in which I polled my local bookshops. What I discovered was that even if you focus exclusively on “indie” publishers, the industry is still heavily dominated by male creators. The indie collection in Blackwells Oxford consisted of 16% female creators, and the collection in Waterstones Oxford just 9%. Similar results came in from other people who polled their local shops. Interestingly though, when I dragged out my pile of self-published comics from conventions over the last few years, I found that it consisted of 49% female creators!

This seemed to suggest something sober, but still hopeful. Only 20 or so years ago, a woman working in the comics industry was a genuine rarity, but since then a small but significant percentage of female creators has appeared on our bookshelves, meaning that it’s now easily possible to list a more than a few well-known female creators. This is a great achievement, but unfortunately it can create the illusion that indie comics have reached a greater state of gender parity than they really have.

Moving on to the topic at hand, my only experience with comic awards in the UK in the past has been the Eagle Awards, and despite Freakangels winning twice, I found it to be an alienating experience. The awards for the most part went out to a stream of US creators, franchise titles, and larger US publishers. In 2012, out of a massive total of 145 nominations across 29 categories, I counted only 7 female creators, and the only woman who won an award was up for best editor. Not one female artist or writer awarded, and 29 awards handed out.

A few weeks ago I attended the new British Comic Awards as Kate Brown’s +1 (she’d been nominated for Best Children’s Book), and in the interest of full disclosure, I'll document how I felt whilst watching them here:

Initially, my reaction was something along the lines of "finally, a PROPER award!". There were only a few categories, and all the nominations were for British books and creators. They were all from a range of genres and publishers and not one of them came from a franchise - it was all original or adapted material. The committee choosing the nominees consisted of 2 women and 5 men, already above the bookshop averages I noted earlier, and the judges were 1/3^rd women, even higher still.

The best book went to Nelson, an anthology that I looked at closely whilst doing my earlier article. It contains 53 creators, 14 of whom are women, which is a better male/female ratio than either bookshop shelf I polled! It’s an extremely deserving book, and I felt like the whole industry was getting a prize.

Most significantly, of 5 nominees for Emerging Talent, two were women, and Joceline Fenton, someone whose self-published work I’ve long admired, took the prize. She did so by merit, but I also felt that the 40% female make-up of a category all about the future was representative of the change in comics that I, amongst many other creators, have been waiting for.

After the initial buzz there was time to discuss and reflect. I realised that there were a few potential flaws in the setup, including some repeat nominations and a panel that included creators nominating other creators. But I (and others I talked to) felt that those were ultimately minor niggles in what was one of the most positive moments for UK comics in many, many years.

However, since the award, by far the biggest press that the BCAs have received has been for not having decent female representation.

I know that there are many ways in which gender discrimination can occur, and it’s often hard to spot when they’re at work unless you’re on the lookout. So I decided to put aside my initial feelings, and do a proper investigation of the awards.

Gender representation in the BCAs was brought into focus by the Forbidden Planet article, Thoughts from Thought Bubble, featuring an interview with Philippa Rice, and became most visible when Laura Sneddon posted the article “Where were all the women at theBritish Comic Awards?”  on New Statesman. Laura’s article sums the story up nicely and is worth a read. It contains a lot of commentary from the people involved, along with official statements from some of the organisers, and links to parts of a key discussion that occurred on twitter between Philippa and a few of the committee members.

Looking at gender balance and feminist issues in comics is extremely important, and by carrying out this investigation I hope to continue the conversation and add a new voice. After making myself familiar with the background material, the central discussion issues seem to be the following:

1. Out of 17 nominees, only 3 were women.
2.  This ratio doesn’t represent the levels of diversity in the comic industry at large, or the Thought Bubble show floor.
3. Karrie Fransman, Mary Talbot and Simone Lia and many other deserving women were not nominated.
4. The committee and the judges were in the majority, male/white/English/straight/non-disabled.
5. The committee that chose the nominees contained creators who worked in Nelson, which won an award.
6. Philippa’s criticisms of the awards were silenced by male members of the committee. 

I went about investigating these criticisms one by one and here’s what I found:

1 - Out of 17 nominees, only 3 were women.

On first glance, this seems like a poor ratio of male to female creators, and looking at it outside the context of the award ceremony, I can understand why it intuitively made some commentators annoyed. However, the investigation I did in my Sexism in Comics article puts this in a different light.

3 female creators may not seem like much, but with only 14 other nominees, that’s still 18% female representation, which is actually higher than the Indie sections of the bookshop shelves that I polled.
Looking at the nominees further, I realised that WoodrowPhoenix was included on the list because he is one of the editors of Nelson (Rob Davis, the other editor, was also nominated for Don Quixote), which as an anthology features 26% female creators. Given this, Woodrow should really be treated as one “hybrid-nominee” who is proportionally gendered, and when you run the maths with that in mind, the female percentage goes up to 19%. Furthermore, when you poll the winners, you get even better numbers: 25% female (with Nelson represented by our “hybrid-nominee”).

So far the awards seem not only representative when it comes to gender, but actually a little progressive. They’re a huge step forward from the Eagles, and at least a small step forward from Indie comics in general.

2 - This ratio doesn’t represent the diversity visible on the Thought Bubble show floor. 

A count of the Thought Bubble guest-list shows that 17% of the guest-list is female, meaning that the percentage of female nominees in the BCAs was actually higher than the percentage of female guests at Thought Bubble.

However, when I used the exhibitor list instead of the guest list, I counted 28% female exhibitors (please note this was a very difficult quantity to measure given the number of pseudonyms and collectives involved, as with any other statistic in this article, I'd welcome outside corroboration). This is an interesting result, because I observed a similar thing when compared my own collection of published and self-published material, and when I looked into the distribution of female nominees in the BCAs I found the same thing again.

In the Emerging Talent category, 40% (2 out of 5) of nominees were women, and the winner was a woman. This means that the awards not only have a representative ratio overall, but they also celebrate a rising female percentage when considering talent of the future.

3 - Karrie Fransman, Mary Talbot and Simone Lia were not nominated

Now here’s where it gets tricky, because it gets personal. So far, statistics have been enough, but this criticism is based on the individual merits of these particular creators.

Personally, I think these creators are deserving of awards, and I could also extend this with more qualifying female creators that weren’t nominated. Sarah Burgess and Sally Jane Thompson were two that I thought of whilst watching the awards themselves.

However, an award can, in the end, only pay homage to a limited number of creators. This means there will ALWAYS be unrepresented creators, both male and female. There’s a lot of talent in the UK industry, despite how small it is, which means that there are bound to be disenfranchised people who believe that good material has been passed over (for example, I read an article on CBR that was annoyed at how the deserving material in 2000AD and The Beano was passed over).

The best that any award committee can do is offer an informed opinion, tempered by consensus and discussion. This means that no matter the award, no matter the industry, there will always be people who disagree with that opinion. The important question when it comes to gender representation should be not who but how many. So far, examining the BCAs has shown that they have a male/female ratio that is both realistic and forward looking.

4 - The committee and the judges were in the majority, white/male/English/straight/non-disabled.

The committee consisted of 29% women, and the judging panel was 1/3^rd women. This is not just representative of the industry as it stands, but significantly better.

Regarding the other elements of this criticism, the organiser Adam Cadwell had the following comment to give:

“we had one Scottish person on the Committee, Vicky Stonebridge, and one gay man amongst the Judges, Stephen L Holland”.

EDIT: And Dan Berry points out on twitter that he's Welsh.

I’d also like to point out that it’s perfectly possible for someone to be disabled without that fact being physically obvious, or subject to public knowledge.

I want to be clear about this: diversity, minority representation and gender representation are massively important factors and should never be swept under the carpet or left un-discussed. However, given the limited number of judges and committee members, the elements of diversity that they already display, along with the male/white/straight/non-disabled majority in the industry itself, it seems not only unfair, but inaccurate to accuse the awards of prejudice in these respects.

5 - The committee that chose the nominees contained creators who worked in Nelson.

This is a tricky one! As a creator I know that it’s nearly impossible to completely untangle the work I create from the work I like and the people I want to promote and work alongside. Dan Berry seems to share this feeling, because he states that it’s one of the reasons he stepped down. However, this would only be a gender issue if it had turned out that the BCAs really did under-represent the proportion of female creators in the industry, which, given what I’ve discovered so far, I don’t believe they have.

In order to make one last effort to confirm the lack of gender bias in the awards, I contacted Adam Cadwell, the founder and organiser of the awards, and he agreed to send me the “long list” from which they chose the nominees. Knowing how sensitive something like this list is, I offered not to publish individual names from the list, only statistics, but I can confirm that it was EXHAUSTIVE!

 A quick poll of names in the list revealed 24% female creators.  That’s 5% higher than the list of nominees, and higher in general than I’ve come to expect from lists of comic creators. Before coming to any conclusions, I gave a lot of consideration to that 5% drop, and there are two reasons that I haven’t been able to rule it as evidence of gender bias.

The first is statistical and a bit technical. In a pool of 17 people, changing the gender of just one nominee changes the percentages by 5.88%. In any selection process that involves one primary criteria (in this case merit) that governs the outcome of a secondary criteria (in this case gender), there’s a random element to the distribution of the secondary criteria. To use an analogy, if you roll 60 dice, 30 of which are black and 30 of which are red, and then pick only the dice showing a 6, you’ll find that with repeated rolls, on average half of the dice showing sixes will be black and half of them will be red. However, in each individual result, there’ll be variations. You wouldn’t be surprised to roll 11 sixes, of which 5 were black and 6 were red. But then, 6 red and 5 black would be equally unsurprising. The same thing is happening with the award with equally limited numbers. Whilst 4 female nominees would have put the female percentage at 24% (exactly the same as the long-list), it’s not surprising or suspicious to see 3, nor would it have been surprising or suspicious to see 5. However, had there been 0-1 or 7-17, there might have been more reason to suspect bias, either positive or negative.
 
Secondly, a lot of the female names I counted were obviously listed for Emerging Talent, meaning that the long-list also exhibited the same bias towards a larger female percentage amongst younger creators and self-publishers.

In all, I can’t find any compelling evidence for gender bias here, so the issue seems to be about filling the committee with creators rather than the gender or sexism of those creators.

This now becomes a problem I can’t really tackle with statistics. Having a panel that includes creators nominating other creators may be easy to criticise as a system, but it has its merits as well as its weaknesses. The Eagles have shown us what can happen when it’s the consumers who choose, and there’s no-one better qualified to judge a good comic than an experienced creator. Even a critic may overlook elements of storytelling and qualities in construction that a switched-on creator would identify.

Sure, creators have biases, but so do journalists, editors, curators and publishers, and I can’t imagine who to turn to for an informed critical opinion outside of those specialisms. The UK industry is small enough that there will always be personal tensions in place, no matter who is on the committee and who is nominated.

There is also a major flaw to the arguments that call for changes to the rules governing the makeup of the committee: there already are anti-bias rules in place. You can read the details in this official blog entry published prior to the awards going public.

Adam Cadwell also has the following to say regarding the exception that allowed Nelson to be nominated:

"Regarding Nelson, it was a tricky one to choose. Both myself and fellow committee member Dan Berry both had chapters in the book. None of our own work was eligible for nomination of course but we all agreed that because we each only contributed 1/54th of the book, it was unfair to the other 52 artists and the impressive work they did on it to disallow the whole book. There has been some finger pointing about this which we perhaps should have expected but I believe it would have won regardless of our involvement because it's such a unique project and an engrossing story."

6 - Philippa’s objections were silenced by male members of the committee.

So far, the criticisms levelled at the awards haven’t held up well to close scrutiny, which means that all the furore boils down to this final issue: a debate that occurred on twitter. Here’s a transcript of the debate.

The way the conversation was characterised by Laura Sneddon in her article was: 

“The whole discussion ended in Rice apologising profusely for offering her opinion when asked in an interview, with many onlookers absolutely livid at how she had been effectively silenced.”

Philippa's apology reads:

“Yeah I'm sorry if you feel I've accused you of stuff, there's no need to get defensive”.

After which she didn’t engage in the conversation any further. Adam’s contribution to the conversation can be summed up with this tweet:

"I'd much rather people raise questions than assume or accuse. Please ask away, there's an email, twitter and an open blog.” 

Given that Adam’s tweets are neither silencing nor aggressive, the only part of the conversation I can find that might be considered as such is Matt Sheret’s (a member of the BCAs committee) response to Philippa’s apology:

“That's a very manipulative way of phrasing that. Adam's pored a year of his life into this, and was around all weekend for you to take this to in person. So was I. So was Dan.”

I can see how this might read as a man telling a woman she shouldn’t have spoken in public. It’s important to note though that this comment came after Philippa’s apology, which reads to me as an “I’m sorry you feel that way” rather than an “I’m sorry for saying what I did”.

However, I've broken this all down into parts, and named each person involved not to offer my own interpretation (no-one but the involved parties know what they really meant to do and say), but to demonstrate that nothing is straight forward when you’re dealing with the nuances of two human beings interacting – regardless of gender. This wasn’t just a woman and a man talking, it was Philippa Rice and Matt Sherett, two complex people, and crucially, friends.

And that’s what this whole gender issue seems to boil down to. An unfortunate public exchange between friends with different opinions who are extremely invested in their work and care very deeply about what it is that they do. Both Philippa and Matt have since stepped away from the debate and Philippa’s original interview is still publicly accessible.

Far from being silenced, the issue Philippa raised has not only been discussed, it has become the most visible coverage the BCAs have received.

And discussion is all for the good - if I didn’t think it was, I wouldn’t have written this! But I’m alarmed at how personal it has become. Opinions have become entrenched, facts are being lost in the face of personal accusations, and there have even been suggestions about threatening or aggressive messages exchanged in private, which are impossible to investigate or comment on

What makes this hardest is that I admire and respect everyone involved. Laura, Adam, Philippa and Matt are all real assets to British comics, which in general has been one of the most freindly and welcoming communities I've ever entered into. It upsets me to see them and the industry set at odds. I think it’s time to give all the individuals involved a break, focus on the facts and figures, and reach our own conclusions. Please take mine with a pinch of salt, question and cross-analyse my statistics, and debate my conclusions.

For what it’s worth though, I feel that the BCAs are one of the great recent achievements of British Comics, and I hope they continue and maintain a reputation as not only the premier award in the UK, but an award that any reader around the world can come to for quality and inspiration. I feel that it’s good that gender representation is being discussed, but unfortunate that the opening exchanges weren’t more carefully investigated and considered.

I hope that issues of gender continue to be discussed level-headedly, and that everyone involved can find it within themselves to keep an open mind.

Here’s to British comic creators of all genders. You rock! Please be kind to each other, and give each other the benefit of the doubt. We're all in this together.

The Ballad of Kickstarter Part 2

Previously, in The Ballad of Kickstarter Part 1 we’ve seen our romantic myths about publishing shattered by drunken Uncle Kickstarter, and we’ve stumbled in on Aunty Publishing swigging gin at two in the afternoon. But, the human heart is nothing if not hopeful!

If it’s not the case that every book on the shelf is a success, and if publishing isn’t a well-oiled machine in which everyone is paid well and good work always gets rewarded, then we need another myth!

Here it is: “Crowd Funding is Easy Money”.

Even if Uncle kickstarter is mostly drunk, he’s also stinking rich, and he gives it out to ANYONE with a half-arsed comic or a lame idea for a video game. Even whilst we ridicule him, and poke fun at all his silly unprofessional ideas, we secretly wish that we were the ones he was giving money to, because surely anyone with half a brain and some spare time can get funded!

And I must admit, that without fully realising it, I’d bought into slightly less jaded version this idea myself when I started the IndieGoGo campaign for The Firelight Isle. I’d just come off the back of an extremely popular webcomic, working for one of the best known writers in comics, I was confident and a little naïve. It didn’t take me a long time to realise my mistake, and I’m going to be honest about exactly how I made it, so that others can approach crowd funding realistically too:

1. I went in without enough material. You can’t get proper funds off the back of vague promises about a project to come. I’d gone so far as to create a website, do some poster art, write up paragraphs about how I’d use the money, but in the end, I hadn’t got a single page of the actual project to show up-front. Half way through the campaign I was less than half way to my total, and my traffic rates were dropping alarmingly. I knew that I needed to do something a little special to reach my goal. Because there were solid reasons that I couldn’t produce sample pages, I made an animated trailer instead, and that did the trick, but it was a LOT of work to make something good enough to get people properly excited.
2.  I underestimated how much effort promotion is. Promoting my project and driving traffic to the site was hard work! This is a major factor, you can’t just send out one or two tweets and a blog article and wait, you have to be constantly reminding people, constantly talking about it, constantly coming up with ways to make people excited enough to talk about your project to other people. You have to call in favours and bug people who you know don’t want to be bugged. It wasn’t until after I’d made the trailer, and talked to my sister (who works in digital marketing) that I really cracked this, and even then it took effort.
3. I didn't realise how much money Admin costs. Even after you’ve made your total, the simple fact that you’ve succeeded comes with its own burden. Emailing everyone, spending the time to track the money, fulfil the perks, keep the site updated, it all takes time, and the money for that time has to come from somewhere.
4. Perks and Fees mean that totals aren't as impressive as they seem. You can knock anywhere between 20% and 50% of the total money raised by any kickstarter campaign off simply because of the money tied up in fees and fulfilling people’s perks. Even very very well-funded campaigns will rarely actually make any profit, and profit isn’t the purpose. All the money eventually goes back into something directly relating to the campaign.

So you need at least a few of the following to get a successful campaign finished:

• good material that stands out from the crowd
• a head for business and admin
• a head for marketing and time to generate traffic
• a pre-existing crowd of fans who already trust you
• a back-log of projects
• perseverance and the confidence to shout about yourself.

And if you don’t have a number of those things, you won’t have a successful campaign. I learnt all this on the fly, and even after achieving my goal, I’ve had to be careful with every penny I raised in order to use it how I’d promised to use it.

Hopefully I’ve shattered two myths here about publishing and crowd funding respectively. We can dispense with all this “drunken uncle and aunt” stuff. Crowd funding is not easy money, and more often than not, you need to be a dedicated creator with a pre-existing fan-base to think about getting a decent sum of money for a new project.

To end with, have a glance at the most funded comics and games. It’s full of recognisable creators, properties with large fan bases, professional looking products and well managed project pages.

So, some things to remember about kickstarter: If they weren't asking you for funding, they'd have to ask a publisher. If you didn't have to take a risk, an editor would. If you don't pay for the costs of production up-front, you still pay for them with the price of the product itself! Kickstarter cuts out the middle-man, and it can be argued whether this is ultimately a good or a bad thing. But one way or the other, it makes the creative process a lot more transparent, and this is a positive change in my opinion.

The Ballad of Kickstarter Part 1

Walk into a book store, and what do you see? Thousands of books, all calmly waiting in stock, all neatly categorised, all with a price-tag and a bar-code. It’s a serene vision of publishing, and it’s easy to imagine that every author on the shelves is in a special, equally serene position. They’re professionals, they made it big, they found a publisher, and they’re in the shops! And your entertainment comes from the realms of their misty imagination, directly into your hands.

Suddenly, in stumbles crowd-funding, like some embarrassing drunken uncle.
“I’ll write you a book if you give me some money” it drawls “I’ve been working on this since I was 12, it’s an epic story of…”

Uncomfortably, you shuffle out of the shop, wishing that the internet had never been invented.

I once heard someone call kickstarter a “tax on the imagination”, and I can imagine what sort of thing might have prompted the phrase! They’d just seen an embarrassing project get no funding. A creator who took their money never did anything with it. A project they backed and loved didn’t make the target. A project they had absolutely no respect for and didn’t back got $2,000,000.

It’s easy to imagine that these problems are unique to kickstarter, brand new creative dilemmas, brought into being by the evils of the internet. The truth is a little less comforting. That uncertain feeling of excitement mingled with caution that you get when you see a good idea before you see a good product may feel brand new, but editors and publishers around the world are very familiar with it.

For every book in our serene bookshop, there are failed projects, missed deadlines, people working for free, squandered money, and wannabe authors being given their first chance – it just happens where the general public can’t see it. The true “tax on the imagination” is the inflated price of each individual book that bears the burden of the entire creative process! When you pay for a book, you’re paying the author, editor, proof reader, publisher, designer, cover artist, warehouse, printer, distributor and bookshop, not to mention the costs of running a business in which success is the exception, not the rule! The vast majority of books on the shelves never even make their money back. They make a loss for the publisher, who relies on their popular titles to break even. The same in various proportions goes for comics, games, films, you name it.

Does Uncle Kickstarter look quite so drunken now? He’s just the long lost twin of Aunty Publishing, and she’s cracking out the gin again.

I'd hazard a guess that the only imaginations being taxed by crowd funding are the imaginations of people who don’t like thinking about the mouldy under-belly of the creative process...

TO BE CONTINUED in The Ballad of Kickstarter Part 2

Comics Literacy

It is often said that comics can be a stepping stone to reading, and in many ways it’s true. Comics can be vivid, attractive and easy to read. The interpretation of drawings comes intuitively to most children, especially to those who find large blocks of text off-putting.  In many cases “reluctant readers” are simply children that find it easier to learn visually than linguistically. However, this comfortable idea does a disservice to comics, allowing critics to retain the familiar idea that they’re subservient to prose: a step down in terms of literary merit, only worth using as a step up to the “real thing”.

The truth is that comics are nothing more or less than fusion of words and images with which any story of any level of complexity and merit can be told.  They have their own rich language with limitless potential, so fully understanding them requires a special hybrid of visual and textual literacy that hasn’t yet entered into education.

One step on from colourful comics for children and pulpy comics for teenagers, there’s a world of visual acuity to be discovered! In this world, subtleties of expression, quality of pose and gesture, complexity of metaphoric imagery, attention to visual detail, and the narrative flow of text and image come together to create an visual experience on a level with the most challenging of prose. Many of the skills that make a great novel are combined with many of the skills that make a great painting (and more besides!) when making a great comic.

Sadly, this experience remains unimagined by the vast majority of adults in the UK, who may have only learned to appreciate linguistic quality, never how to appreciate visual quality. Even if you handed them a masterpiece of comic storytelling, the difference between it and a kid’s comic would be just as incomprehensible as the difference between Twilight and Dickens would be to someone who had only just learned primary-level English.

As a culture, we’re immersed in images (television, film, internet, video games, advertising), yet compulsory art education teaches only the rudiments of artistic skill, vocational art is looked down upon as an untenable career option, and modern art has become a strange field in which skill and value have a dubious relationship. Most people in the UK are adrift in a sea of images with no boat and no chart.

Is it any wonder that children see the prose thrust on them by education as irrelevant to their lives? Is it any wonder that the visual entertainment they turn to is often crude, and often looked down upon by adults?

Reading kid’s comics can certainly be a bridge to prose, but more than that, it can be a bridge to a visually literate culture that is capable of properly understanding itself.