It’s Free Comic Book Day today – the North American comic book industry’s annual push to bring in more readers by distributing popular all-ages comics for free through thousands of retailers. Unfortunately, while comics may be for everyone, the culture around them has a lot of growing up left to do.



Last month, journalist Janelle Asselin penned a scathing and thorough critique of a Teen Titans cover for the widely-read industry website, Comic Book Resources. The resulting backlash escalated quickly from ordinary disagreement to ad feminam attacks on her professional experience, various sexual epithets and, ultimately, rape threats embedded anonymously into the fields of a survey she's conducting on sexual harassment in the comics industry.

Sadly, none of this surprised me. I can't say for sure that every woman working in comics has faced some form of sexism or sexual harassment. But I've certainly had my share, despite being openly gay and therefore not suspected of sleeping my way up the ladder – a common assumption and laughably uncommon occurrence. That included textbook incidents like the drunk superior at an offsite office party who locked his arm around my shoulders, trying to pull me towards him for a kiss ("If you don't take that off me right now," I said, "I'll break it."), and subtler slights, like "girl ghetto" assignments and all sorts of presumptions that I lacked comics knowledge, although I've read, edited, written and drawn them for years.

It isn't hard to make the connection between Wonder Girl's head-sized breasts on that cover and a publishing sector that's still got a chronic problem with women. Entire websites have been devoted to comics' lopsided use of sex and ultraviolence against female characters; marketing ideas are still more often aimed at humiliating them than, say, marrying them to each other. Two weeks after the Wonder Girl cover release, Dynamite Entertainment distributed warning-free preview pages of a Game of Thrones comic adaptation featuring a graphic rape scene, and all-access comics websites everywhere, including Comic Book Resources, ran them.

Earth Prime Weekly (@EarthPrimeWkly) First cover for DC's new Teen Titans #1! The new team includes Red Robin, Wonder Girl, Raven, Bunker and Beast Boy. pic.twitter.com/c2baqGexfd

Asselin, a friend and former DC Comics editorial colleague of mine, has handled the Teen Titans fuss just fine, showing up her critics both one-on-one and en masse via Twitter and Tumblr. Unfortunately, her original point – that the industry is squandering its vast potential with these choices – got almost entirely lost in the uproar. Too bad, because it's not enough to speak out against bionic boobs and office harassment. Comics is at risk of becoming irrelevant in today's diverse and fast-changing publishing landscape.



Asselin's conclusion was that publishers need to sell comics by and to new demographics, especially girls and women. Like many of the industry's best advocates, she backs up her beliefs proactively, by writing a monthly column called Hire This Woman. The title is self-explanatory. But why is the onus on individual commentators like us to keep pointing this out?

For a very long time I've said that if you want to broaden the horizons of comics, there is no substitute for getting more women (and a broader range of ethnic, racial and cultural experience) into the business of making and publishing them. It's time I got more specific.

Women do now fill far more of the editorial and creative ranks in the comics industry, but there are still very few women in senior editorial management. Women are getting the bestselling books into stores and greenlighting the million-dollar movie franchises, but they're barely represented among the creative executives who map out the universes and storytelling strategies. That's where you cement broad-based, long-term loyalty to authors and characters, tap new audiences and trends, and grow readership, without which none of those books or movies would exist.

Take, for example, how Time Warner scaled back DC's influential Vertigo imprint, which broadened comics immeasurably with Neil Gaiman's Sandman and many more groundbreaking creations of non-superhero genre fiction. Smaller, nimbler publishers are jumping into the vacuum, snapping up female talent and building new franchises, most famously with a little something called The Walking Dead. But they are, by definition, smaller.

It's great to see smaller publishers filling the void – but it means that the industry leaders aren't actually leading. They definitely aren't plowing even a fraction of their movie millions into original content. They should be laboratories for great comics, but they're becoming cages.

Some new, female-friendly takes on superheroes are getting through the big publishers, from Young Avengers to Detective Comics. But the commercial and literary power of comics as a whole is so much greater than superhero comics. There are fiction (like The Walking Dead and Saga) and nonfiction (like Art Spiegelman's Maus, Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, Alison Bechdel's Fun Home and Rep. John Lewis's March) comics that illustrate the medium's potential to reflect a truly diverse world and become a real marketplace of ideas.



In the era of transmedia, comics in the US is still an absurdly cultish medium, and most of its resources are directed at a male audience and a single genre. The day when comics' potential to show the greatest range of people, worlds and ideas to the most people is achieved – that is the day that comics will truly be free.

• This article was amended on 6 May 2014 to correct the phrase ad feminam, from ad feminem as the original said.