Comic Shop Ladies Night
By Jocelyn Cornforth
Another successful Comic Shop Ladies Night was held this past April, as a great group of women came out to Silver Snail Comics in downtown Toronto to socialize and share their mutual love of comic books and geek culture. Silver Snail manager, Jules, happily hosted the women-only event this time around, offering American cover prices to the attendees and showcasing a wide range of strong female-centric comic books on the shelves today.
Comic Shop Ladies Night is a recurring quarterly event held at different comic book venues around Toronto, and Diana McCallum, one of the organizers, said its primary goal is to provide a welcoming, safe, LGBTQ-friendly space for all female-identifying comic book fans to get together. Several women who attended the night said they appreciated this opportunity.
Despite statistics that comic book readers are now evenly split between men and women, some attendees said there are still comic book stores out there that aren’t female-friendly, especially those in small towns. Comic Shop Ladies Night was the opposite of that.
One attendee said she came to her first Ladies Night several months ago only knowing one person and left knowing five. Carmen, who heard about the event on Facebook and was attending the event by herself for the first time, quickly found herself chatting and wandering the store with new acquaintances.
The event offered something for everyone, with comic book interests as diverse as the women attending the event.
Carmen said she was more a fan of indie comic books than the traditional super hero fare, with Image Comics producing some of her favourite series. She recommended Saga and the Wicked and the Devine as good places to start for women looking to dip their toes into the indie comic book scene for the first time.
Iris, meanwhile, said Thor was among her favourite series, while another attendee raved about the Transformers comic books. Much to her surprise, she said Transformers has some of the best writing and characters she has ever seen. It was particularly interesting how Transformers depicts a world without genders.
Elsewhere, a group of women discussed their love and admiration of the work of Kate Beaton, a comic book artist, writer and creator from Canada’s East Coast who topped the New York Times Graphic Novel Best Sellers list in 2015 with her book Step Aside, Pop. Nikki, who had her dogs Bagel and Kaya with her (both female of course!), said she was looking forward to meeting creators like Kate at the annual Toronto Comic Arts Festival, which was at the Toronto Reference Library in May.
Throughout the evening raffles were held for comic books and swag, including Gracie Klutz headbands, and a Muskoka Beer representative was on hand with samples of their beers. Cassandra was happy to win one of the last draws of the night, although she admitted her friend Exy, who recently graduated from Animation school, was the real comic book fan of the two. At a table in the café area of the store, other women (including Miranda who wrote her Phd thesis on Romantic poetry in comic books) chilled out with friends, colouring images of female superheroes.
As Erin Cossar, another one of the organizers said (as she posed for pictures with Thor’s hammer), everyone should come out wearing whatever they want, being as geeky or non-geeky as they happen to be, and feeling comfortable and free to share their unique love of comic books with one another. That is what Comic Shop Ladies Night is for.
