Truthout

We All Lose Out on Great Media When Racial and Sexual Diversity Is Lacking

Tuesday, 09 October 2012 10:05 By Justin Hall and Anne Elizabeth Moore, Truthout | Graphic Journalism
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100912ld fbHere at Ladydrawers HQ, we know that gendered barriers to media access affect everyone: women, trans, and non-binary gender creators lose out financially, and guys get stuck reading the same old points of view filtered through characters created by the same pool of creators, every month. Of course, it's not just gender diversity that's lacking in comics. The same thing can be said for racial and sexual diversity: we all lose out on great media when it's mostly made by straight white dudes. Even straight white dudes know it!

So we invited our first dude, Justin Hall, to illustrate this strip. It looks at who is keeping comics from exploring the racial, sexual, and gender diversity we know exists in the world. Because although we saw in our very first strip that publishers aren't hiring women and trans creators, it also turns out that the most diverse comics come from the most corporate publishers. We're as shocked as you are! 

Click here to open the comic full-size in a new window.

Ladydrawers

Copyright, Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.

Anne Elizabeth Moore

Anne Elizabeth Moore is a Fulbright scholar and author of Unmarketable: Brandalism, Copyfighting, Mocketing, and the Erosion of Integrity (The New Press, 2007) and Hey Kidz, Buy This Book (Soft Skull, 2004). Co-editor and publisher of now-defunct Punk Planet, founding editor of the Best American Comics series from Houghton Mifflin, Moore teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and works with young women in Cambodia on independent media projects. Her latest book, Cambodian Grrrl (Cantankerous Titles, 2011), was called "The best travel book I've read this year," by a USA Today reviewer and "piercingly honest" by The Rumpus.

Justin Hall

Justin Hall is an award-winning cartoonist and the creator of Glamazonia, True Travel Tales, and Hard To Swallow, as well as contributions to publications such as the Houghton Miflin Best American Comics 2006Book of Boy Trouble, and the S.F. Bay Guardian. He recently compiled and edited No Straight Lines: Four Decades of Queer Comics for Fantagraphics Books. He teaches cartooning at the California College of the Arts, and is on the board of Prism Comics, a non-profit supporting LGBT comics. www.justinhallcomics.com

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