This article is from the archive of our partner .

For a brief moment on Thursday afternoon at New York Comic Con, a group of women there to talk about women in comics talked instead about Wall Street. They pointed out that the male-dominated financial industry was closing the gender gap better than what's going on in mainstream comics.

"I took a look at the numbers and said 'Wow Wall Street does a better job,'" said Amy Chu, publisher and founder of Alpha Girl Comics. After Chu, who holds an MBA from Harvard, let loose with that revelation, fellow panelist Becky Cloonan chimed in with her own number-crunching, noting that around 40 percent of attendees at New York Comic Con are women. "But just 6 percent of the special guests are women. We have to work on this," Cloonan said.

Those two observations about women in the comics industry punctuated an afternoon of discussion about how far women working in the comics industry need to go before a "Women in Comics" panel isn't necessary. Women — as Chu, Cloonan, and their fellow panelists, creator Erica Schultz and librarians Claudia McGivney, Megan Kociolek, Emily Weisenstein and Laura Pope-Robbins will tell you — have come a long way in comics, closing the gender gap in the independent comic industry.