Comics

If you look back in history for a couple of decades, you will notice the blatant sexism that existed in throughout the time periods. Of course, these ideologies also appear in various forms of media including comics. In the article, “Girl, You will be an Invisible Woman Soon: Defining Serial Characters”, Osvaldo Oyola talks about how Susan Richards, the Invisible Girl in the Fantastic Four comics, is treated with a sexist attitude by her husband. One of the main problems that Oyola talked about when comic book authors are trying to put female characters on the right path is continuity. Authors need to be consistent with the story and therefore need to mold what had already happened to the characters into a reasonable explanation as to how the new change came to be. This stops authors from completely redefining the female characters into the strong hearted independent human beings because they were not originally in the storyline. Webcomics have a lot in common with print comics, but you will not see as much of a sexuality problem in webcomics because of the following reasons: Webcomics started out later, in a time period where sexism is not as prevalent; Webcomics were originally niche products, where activists of all sorts of movements are found, they are more likely to have materials promoting gender equality than gender stereotypes; A lot of webcomics have fluid genres and they do not need to care about continuity, and therefore they do not need to abide by contents that have already happened, namely sexist materials. Although webcomics are a lot cleaner than its print counterpart, there are still a lot of sexist material out there. In order for no sexist materials to exist, we need to have a society that does not tolerate sexism first. It would be a hard way getting there, but we are already in the process, and it seems like a bright path ahead.