telophase | Comic Recs Time!

fumi yoshinaga's "all my darling daughters" is a sort of slice-of-life single-volume manga about the relationship between a woman and her mother, but each story in it also talks about various other women in her life. it's funny and poignant and oh gosh, i might have to reread it right now. XD basically i really love fumi yoshinaga and she's super great. (and ~~eisner nominated.)

ooku - also by yoshinaga - is great, too, especially after the first volume if you are reading for awesome ladies. it can get gruesome at times and the sexual politics aren't great, but it's also commenting on those. the premise is "what if japan lost three-quarters of its men" and it follows two threads - the first female emperor and the most recent (though still several hundred years ago). it won a tiptree award, actually! the tiptree award site might be slightly more nuanced in conveying what it's about. XD it's ongoing, though - i think it will end up being ten volumes?

Claymore. Many women kicking ass with swords, fighting against the male dominated system that created them. It's awesome.

And also? Sailormoon. When people told me that the manga was a much different story than the anime, I didn't realize just HOW different. I'm also enjoying the main romance for the first time, because it's clear that, if anything, Sailormoon is the hero, and Tuxedo Mask the damsel in distress.

Finder by Carla Speed McNeill. The Finder is male, but all the women in the comic are varied, realistic, and wonderfully drawn. It was independently published by McNeill's Lightspeed Press up until the last volume, and it has been picked up by Dark Horse Comics and they have released a rereleased omnibus of at least the first three volumes. (There are eight volumes, I believe.)

Cool, thanks!

Webcomics, but both available in dead-tree format too: Gunnerkrigg Court by Tom Siddell, and Girl Genius by Phil and Kaja Foglio.

On the manga front: Aria (and its prequel Aqua) by Kozue Amano. One of the best manga I've ever read, sweet and wonderful and never even the littlest bit skeevy. Only bad thing is it was published by Tokyopop... D: *clutches precious volumes to chest*

Okay, since Finder has been mentione already, I'll cast my vote for Linda Medley's Castle Waiting - Eisner Award winning - which has competent, realistic women in a fairy-tale setting ^^ (literally, the waiting castle is the one Sleeping Beauty left after her prince took her off).

All comics so far collected in two beautiful hardcover volumes.

I didn't recommend Girl Genius, because the competent women there are often wearing skimpy clothes and lingerie ^^ - and wyrdness said she didn't want that. On the other hand, those sexy ladies really run the show and the men are only support to one of the other lady competing to see who runs the country/world.

Seconding Aria - if you guys can read German, Tokyopop Deutschland released all the volumes.

Oops, forgot something! Though sadly, it is NOT licensed in English so can only be read via scanlations. Still, excellent: Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou by Hitoshi Ashinano, which is thematically a lot like Aria, except it focuses more on fading nostalgia. Absolutely beautiful.

I'm not sure that the lingerie wearing falls into the same sphere here, since a lot of it is done for comedy, rather than pandering to 15-year-old boys. But that'd be for

wyrdness to decide.

I agree ^^

I think Vertigo published Fables, which has a varied cast and the women aren't skeevy that I can recall.

Seconding Girl Genius despite the cheesecake -- it doesn't just pass the Bechdel test, it blows it out of the water, then stitches it back up, reanimates it, and sends it off to feast on the brains of superhero comics. (If you're like me, the first chapter might leave you feeling very dubious about the purported awesome. This too will pass.)

I also recommend Family Man, by Dylan Meconis, which is set in a fictiious east German university town called Familienwald some time in the 1700s, and has rich and honest portraits of women and intercultural characters in that era.

I also like The Meek, a great fantasy comic with fantastic characterization and world building, and Lovelace and Babbage, though sadly both of those are on slow and irregular update schedules.

Also the best available non-skeevy realistic teenage school romance shoujo I've read so far is Kimi ni Todoke, being released by Viz in English.

Really it's a coming-of-age story of one girl who has been misunderstood for her looks all through kindergarten and school and has now entered high school. She fights for acceptance and on the way a popular boy learns to value her sincerity and so do two popular girls who become her friends.

The friendship with the girls is a bedrock for the story and gets lots of screentime and the romance is believable (not to mention that the love interest is NOT a jerk, just a popular guy who rarely lets anything of his deeper emotions show).

Even the inevitable rival for the boy's love is shown in a sympathetic light eventually. There are no true evil characters here.

oh man, seconding finder! the worldbuilding in it is just amazing, too.

It's also one of the comics with the biggest value-add for buying in volumes rather than issues -- the glorious, thorough footnotes. (I have no idea whether that has affected its commercial success.)

Claymore! Almost entirely female cast of women who fight monsters, bond with each other, and angst, for the process that enables them to fight monsters eventually transforms them into monsters themselves. They must then send a letter to their best friend asking her to come kill them while they're still themselves. It's much more about adventure than tragedy, though. Also, their outfits are sensible.

Graphic novels for kids:

Babymouse! (http://www.amazon.com/s?ie=UTF8&tag=mozilla-20&index=blended&link_code=qs&field-keywords=baby%20mouse&sourceid=Mozilla-search#/ref=a9_sc_1?rh=i%3Aaps%2Ck%3Ababymouse&keywords=babymouse&ie=UTF8&qid=1316825018) A kids' series written by a brother-sister team, it's fun, breezy, and super cute.

Graphic novels adults:

Love and Rockets, of course. Huge, wide-ranging series best known for its awesome female characters.

Skim by Mariko and Jillian Tamaki. Goth girl falls in love, among other complications.

Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi. Life in Iran, followed by life in exile.

Strips:

Dykes to Watch Out For is more than the origin of the Bedchel test, dammit. Consistently awesome for years.

Fox Trot also had great female characters.

Recommended with caveats:

CLAMP has consistently well-developed female characters, when it bothers to have female characters. However, their twists and turns are not always satisfying, and women end up disappearing or dead too often for my taste in many titles.

Black Lagoon by Rei Hiroe has lots of sexualized images of women. IMO, they're the exact opposite of the sexualized blanks Laura Hudson complained about, people with agency, backstories, memories and real personalities.

Can I pimp Marvel/DC stuff that doesn't make me want to kill things? It's a short list.

Heck yes on the Atomic Robo rec- it's a pure fun series, and one that's actually good for all ages. Tesla jokes for the adults!

Eighthing the Finder rec, and adding a vote for anything Dylan Meconis has done ever, but especially Bite Me! and Family Man. Backing Telophase on Elfquest, too, especially the first four books.

And I'm gonna cheer for Girl Genius- yes, there's some underwear-wearing, but the underwear in question is steamy Victoriana, so it's about five layers thicker than standard modern streetwear.

Marvel's Mystic miniseries is kinda amazing, right now. Sad that it's a mini, but still great clothes, great setting, kickass girl heroes in every shape.

Roza is a grand fantasy webcomic:
http://www.junglestudio.com/roza/

Delilah Dirk had flying boats and swordfights and pirates and all kinds of awesome action:
http://www.delilahdirk.com/

And Unsounded has the zombie mages and war dogs and gorgeous art:
http://unsoundedcomic.com/

Runewriters has tentacle monsters and STILL no weird sexual overtones:
http://runewriters.com/

I'm not a tenth of the way through my pull/read list, so, y'know. That should be plenty of evidence to any comic-makers that it's totally possible to have great comics without trying to steal the softcore porn market. 9_9

Haha! I actually do read Girl Genius, it is on my incredibly short list of regularly read web comics. I've been reading it for years after one of my (female) friends enthused about it intensely. :)

I'm not directly opposed to the not wearing of much, sometimes that's what a scene calls for and it would be just as annoying if it was actively avoided. It's like

ebony14 says, in Girl Genius it's mostly for comedic effect or has a reason. Even if the reason is "I want to wear lingerie right now!" it feels like it's done for the sake of the character and not for the audience.

I'll put Castle Waiting on my to read list though, the blurb makes it sound pretty interesting. I think I'm soon going to need to find more hours in the day. :D

I'll also give this one a go too. Thanks :)

An awesome post I am now going to bookmark! I think I'm suddenly going to become very busy with my reading. :D

It won't leave you hanging as the storylines are sometimes episodic, and the longer storylines are fully explored, although it is obvious much more could be told about the castle and its inhabitants.

Fantagraphics have uploaded vides of the finished hardcovers - I've found one of Volume 2 on youtube and Flickr, which has better resolution for the pictures.

If you should decide to go for the whole available series so far after taste-testing, I can tell you that the getting-together part of the love story has just been released in English via Volume 10 (and I think the time was well spent and needed to be believable), but the story doesn't finish there - because in real life a mutual declaration doesn't end the troubles in a relationship either.

It's really the way that is the most important in this manga, compared to the eventual goal that has been reached, which is why showing more of developments after the declaration works so well. And the friends and class reaction are ALWAYS part of the story, just like in real life. But bear in mind, it is shoujo - so it is stylised somewhat. Shoujo isn't supposed to be nitty gritty comic.

There was a lovely 26 episode anime that told the whole story (basically page by page from the manga because it's so well paced) up to that declaration (I believe it has been licensed and I'm definitely buying it when it comes out - the only thing I had to really get used to was the heroine's voice), four more volumes have been released in Japan since then (and I'm not getting tired of the story yet, myself).

So, Strangers in Paradise, by Terry Moore, is not unproblematic (OMG plotting and pacing problems what) but it has a story centered around great, very three-dimensional female characters. It's a comic which both has cheesecake shots and looks hard at what the characters in the shots are thinking about being in cheesecake shots (and gets a lot of points from me for the fact that one of the characters most frequently portrayed in stereotypically-sexy ways is also heavier than mainstream-beauty-images suggest you can be while still being the hottest person in the cast).

Rapunzel's Revenge and Calamity Jack by Shannon Hale. (What Tangled wants to be when it grows up.)

My Faith in Frankie was Vertigo, but it's rare bisexual romance(s) done well and happily.

Nthing Finder. And Babymouse needs more love!

Can I pimp Marvel/DC stuff that doesn't make me want to kill things? It's a short list.

Yes, please do!

ETA: And I made a new post for it! Woo! http://telophase.livejournal.com/2104855.html

Edited 2011-09-29 14:31 (UTC)

Definitely! The best manga series I ever read :-)

Comic Recs Time!

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