Personally I would definitely buy a Betty & Veronica shoot-em-up. Especially if they’re shooting each other.

The way to grow both female and male readership is to get more all ages comics into public libraries and encourage reading at an early age. The best books to donate to the libraries are the Dark Horse Little Lulu trades, Don Rosa’s Life and Times of Uncle Scrooge, Carl Barks Greatest Duck Tales, and Marvel Masterworks Spider-Man. Those are always checked out.

Maybe the increase in female readers of comics has been matched by an equal increase in male readers, all of them having been drawn in by the decade’s art/indie/manga-in-the-bookstores explosion. A rising tide lifts all boats, and what-not.

Nobody said it was, of course. There was a substantial female audience for Chris Claremont’s X-MEN, for instance.

But the fact that it’s not impossible does not mean it’s all you need to do.

It’s also not impossible to get men to watch THE VIEW (to pick a more extreme example), but it’s not likely the best way either to boost VIEW ratings or to appeal to large numbers of men.

And even with BUFFY out there and selling well, I still wouldn’t be remotely surprised to find that 90% of the superhero audience is male. I wouldn’t be all that surprised to find out that 90% of the audience for the Buffy comic is male, though I also wouldn’t be surprised if it was a bit lower than that. I would be surprised, on the other hand, if the comic’s demographics were anywhere near the TV show’s.

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What would interest me is seeing the demographics of a top manga publisher.

I also agree with Mr. Busiek about encouraging the Big Two and other publishers to look into publishing more comics that might appeal to women.

If they are talking superhero comics, though, the gender proportion shouldn’t be a surprise — it’s like being surprised that the audience for action movies skews male, or that the audience for romance skews female.

I’m a big fan of the superhero genre and of exploring what else it can do, and there’s certainly superhero comics that are capable of attracting and holding female readers, just as there are romances that attract guys (CASABLANCA, for one).

But at heart, superhero comics are a boy-appeal genre, and if publishers want to attract female readers to comics, the answer is to publish material that target audience will be attracted to, not to assume that comics equate to superheroes, so let’s try to sell more superheroes to women.

When Harlequin decided they wanted to reach out to male readers, they didn’t do it by putting more fistfights and fart jokes into their category romance novels; they did it by starting up (or acquiring) the Gold Eagle imprint, and publishing men’s-adventure titles alongside the romances, rather than trying to do one thing for all readers.

Similarly, if Archie wants to attract more male readers, they’re not likely to do it by putting gunplay into BETTY & VERONICA.

So if the survey is talking about superhero readers, gender balance in the readership is probably not going to ever happen. They’re superhero comics; you’re about as likely to succeed at it as you are to find a way to get as many men as women watching THE VIEW.

If the survey is about “mainstream” comics, then the answer is to publish genres and content that will attract women.* As seen with the success of SANDMAN, with the manga explosion, and more. If you want gender outreach in comics, look to FLIGHT and BONE, but don’t be surprised that it’s not happening with THOR and BATMAN.

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*well, part of the answer. The usual caveats about format, distribution and promotion still apply, of course.

I agree with Tom that they’re probably taking little outside of superhero print comics into consideration. I’d love to see the surveys used; see how they’re worded and to whom they are given.