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• The Secret Loves of Geek Girls Dark Horse Books (Milwaukie, OR), 2016
• The Spectacular Sisterhood of Superwomen: Awesome Female Characters from Comic Book History Quirk Books (Philadelphia, PA), 2017

1. The spectacular sisterhood of superwomen : awesome female characters from comic book history LCCN 2016946306 Type of material Book Personal name Nicholson, Hope, author. Main title The spectacular sisterhood of superwomen : awesome female characters from comic book history / Hope Nicholson. Published/Produced Philadelphia : Quirk Books, [2017] ©2017 Description 240 pages : illustrations (chiefly color) ; 24 cm ISBN 9781594749483 1594749485 CALL NUMBER Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms 2. The secret loves of geek girls LCCN 2016017604 Type of material Book Main title The secret loves of geek girls / edited by Hope Nicholson ; cover art by Noelle Stevenson. Edition Expanded edition. Published/Produced Milwaukie, OR : Dark Horse Books, 2016. ©2016 Description 279 pages : illustrations (chiefly color) ; 23 cm ISBN 9781506700991 (paperback : Expanded edition) 9780993997013 (paperback : Kickstarter edition) CALL NUMBER HQ801 .S44195 2016 CABIN BRANCH Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE

• Hope Nicholson - https://hopenicholson.com/about/

  Hope Nicholson

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  Hope Nicholson signing

  “Hope has dedicated herself, in part, to bringing back things that have fallen from view” – Margaret Atwood

  “Hope has a national and international reputation for doing fantastic work in terms of recovering lost pop-culture and lost comics.” – Dr. Candida Rifkind

  I am a Winnipeg based freelancer specializing in the research and curation of comic books. Past projects have included the development of the Margaret Atwood/Johnnie Christmas/Tamra Bonvillain graphic novel series Angel Catbird for Dark Horse and writing The Spectacular Sisterhood of Superwomen, a history of female characters in comics for Quirk Books. I am also fortunate to be a Kickstarter Thought Leader! A very cool program that lets me spread my love of the platform and advise new project creators. I speak frequently at conventions and events on women in fandom, Canadian comic book history, and self-publishing. Oh, and I run the Prairie Comics Festival in Winnipeg!

  But my main passion and focus is my publishing house, Bedside Press. Bedside Press is dedicated to publishing niche books of archival comics and new prose/comic collections.

  Projects in Production:
  The Secret Loves of Geek Girls: Redux – a followup to The Secret Loves of Geek Girls featuring new short comics and prose stories from the original cast about geekery, dating, crushes, and love. Published by Bedside Press. Kickstarter begins June 20, 2017.

  Gothic Tales of Haunted Love – a new comics anthology of stories based on the 1970s gothic romance genre, edited by Hope Nicholson and Sam Beiko. Published by Bedside Press. Kickstarter begins July 15, 2017.

  Window Horses – An adaptation of the Ann Marie Fleming NFB film starring Sandra Oh, about a young Persian/Chinese poet who travels from Canada to Iran for a poetry competition and learns the truth about her estranged father. Published by Bedside Press. Coming Summer 2017.

  Samurai Style/Honey Dill – A new flipbook digest featuring short comics by Winnipeg-based comic creators: Jamie Isfeld with Samurai Style and Ryan and Laura Harby with Honey Dill. Published by Bedside Press. Coming Fall 2017.

  Habibi: An anthology of Muslimah love – a new anthology of romance stories and comics by Muslim women. Curated by Hadeel al-Massari and edited by Nyala Ali. Published by Bedside Press. Coming Fall 2017.

  The Secret Loves of Geeks – a new anthology by Dark Horse Comics curated by Hope Nicholson. A sequel to The Secret Loves of Geek Girls with all new creators from all genders telling true and vulnerable stories of love, sex, and dating. Coming February 14, 2017.

  Projects currently released:
  Fashion In Action – a reprint of 1980s action-adventure comic series by John K Snyder III featuring an all-female team of bodyguards for hire! Published by Bedside Press.

  Enough Space for Everyone Else – a comics anthology of outer space stories without colonial or imperial themes! Curated by J.N. Monk and Lee Black and published by Bedside Press.

  Prairie Comics Zine – a comic one-shot featuring stories by Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta creators distributed exclusively by Kickstarter. Curated by Hope Nicholson.

  The Spectacular Sisterhood of Superwomen – a gallery sampler and historical overview of female characters in comics. Written by Hope Nicholson, published by Quirk Books.

  Wow Comics #01 – a reprint of one of the first comic books published in Canada, by Bell Features. In full colour! Published by Bedside Press.

  The Polka Dot Pirate – a reprint of all of the adventures of Polka Dot Pirate, a 1940s Canadian comic book superhero. Published by Bedside Press.

  Love Beyond Body, Space, and Time – An all-prose (no comics!) anthology of sci-fi stories featuring LGBT characters by indigenous creators! Featuring stories by Richard van Camp, Giles Benaway, and David Robertson. Published by Bedside Press.

  Angel Catbird – Consulting editor for a graphic novel series by Margaret Atwood, Johnnie Christmas and Tamra Bonvillain for Dark Horse Comics.

  A Bunch of Jews (A Minyen Yidn) – A translation of a 1930s Yiddish collection of short stories that take place in Belarus and Brooklyn, adapted by Trina Robbins and illustrated by a bevy of underground and independent comic stars. Published by Bedside Press.

  The Secret Loves of Geek Girls – A mixed medium anthology of true stories from women in fandom on love, sex, and dating. Published by Bedside Press, republished by Dark Horse Comics.

  Brok Windsor – A reprint of 1940s Canadian comic featuring Brok Windsor, a Winnipeg doctor who discovers a magical forgotten island in cottage country. Published by Bedside Press.

  Moonshot vol. 1 & 2- Collections of comic book stories by North American Indigenous writers across all genres and nations. Published by AH Comics and edited by Hope Nicholson.

  Lost Heroes – A documentary film on the history of Canadian superheroes. Produced by Farpoint Films, associate producer and researcher is Hope Nicholson.

  Nelvana of the Northern Lights – A reprint of 1940s Canadian comic book featuring Nelvana, an Inuit demigoddess. Published first under CGA Comics (co-owner Hope Nicholson), then by IDW Publishing.

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  HOPE NICHOLSON EXPLORES COMICS HISTORY WITH THE SPECTACULAR SISTERHOOD OF SUPERWOMEN
  Contributed by

  Swapna Krishna
  @skrishna
  Apr 13, 2017
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  Hope Nicholson is a well-known name in the comics industry. From editing, writing, and producing hit anthologies like The Secret Loves of Geek Girls to bringing attention to forgotten works of comics through her indie publisher Bedside Press to editing Angel Catbird by Margaret Atwood, Johnnie Christmas and Tamra Bonvillain, Nicholson's got her fingers in many exciting and interesting comix projects.

  She's also put together a new book: The Spectacular Sisterhood of Superwomen: Awesome Female Characters from Comic Book History, a gorgeous, colorful archive that takes readers through decades of comic book history and picks out some of the most interesting, iconic and oft-forgotten female characters comics has to offer. Through these characters, Nicholson tells the fascinating story of comics.

  I'm so honored that Hope took the time to sit down with me to chat about putting together the book, the way women have been represented over the years and the importance of showing different facets of women — race, culture, sexuality, orientation, body shape and size — on the page.

  Zoom In
  Where did you even FIND all these characters? This book is an amazing collection of female comic book characters, many of whom have been forgotten to history. What was your research process like?

  Hope Nicholson: Oh boy, this might be kinda boring to other people!

  It was a really fun process, but I wanted to go about my research in different ways. I found previous histories limiting (aside from Trina Robbin's excellent work) and obviously very male-focused and exclusionary, so I ignored all previously written comic history books and went straight for something I love a lot: data. Basically my process for selecting characters, after writing down each one that came to mind (which was exhausted at about 50 characters), was to go to comics.org and export the data of published books in certain time frames, and also go to Diamond Sales, NYT best-sellers, and Mike's Newstand, a website that also collects data, but only by major publishers.

  From there I scanned the titles and looked for ones that popped out to me as interesting or curious that might have female leads. I also organized them by sales data when I could, or by volume of comic titles -- much of this data I didn't end up using but I wanted to make sure I featured some best-selling characters as well as obscure ones, plus it gave me a fairly accurate view of the shifts in genres/publishers over time. I also used the public domain superheroes website for a lot of clues on rare public domain characters.

  And finally, I asked friends to recommend titles for me; for example, Steve Manale recommended Street Angel, which I would have never discovered otherwise. This was also very useful when doing more modern comics since there is VERY LITTLE history written about webcomics, so I had to go straight to the sources: people who started off in webcomics.

  In addition to that, I looked for advertisements in the comics that would lead me to other ones, and that was a big help as well in discovering some pretty obscure ones. For example, The "Top 100" lists of comic shop sales that was distributed in Amazing Heroes really helped showcase indie comics that sold well at the time but are now completely forgotten.

  For example, in the sales chart below, I found the character 'Vanity,' which I otherwise would have never heard of, and featured her in the book. I had a list of about 353 characters that were interesting to me and featured I think about 100 of these in the final book.

  Zoom In
  How did you decide who to/not to include? The Internet always has an opinion, after all, and I'm sure you'll get "I can't BELIEVE you didn't include X!"

  Yeah, I felt if I decided to angle the book as "the best female characters" I would get a lot of that. So instead I wanted to make it clear that this is a sampler of characters, popular and unpopular, who represent some facet of the comic book industry and history. I wanted to give comic fans a lot of new material to chew on with characters even diehard fans would have never heard of, but also be a fun and entertaining intro to comics history for the casual reader. I also wanted to represent a lot of different genres; comics are very very intertwined with superheroes and always have been, but there's a lot of other work out there! The one limitation I had was no autobio/memoir books and no evil characters, since that's just not the focus of this book.

  Going back decades means you were going to find a lot of cringeworthy representation, which you comment on the book. Did you feel dejected by it? How did you handle it internally? Was it hard to put that aside and look for the good?

  Oh yes, I think one day I was reading The Adventures of Phoebe Zeit-geist and I just reached my breaking point. NO MORE RAPEY PORN, I cried. The 1970s with their indie comics that just focused on exploiting women sexually and the 1990s comics that were all about the male gaze were really, really difficult to get through (plus those Image comics in the '90s had the tightest, smallest lettering that gave me headaches and as a result I didn't end up featuring them much). But honestly, whenever that happened, I looked at my list and chose a different character to read instead, like Wendy the Witch. Something lighter to break it up. And some characters, like Superbitch and Empowered, have a complexity of exploitation and relevance, so it was important to not dismiss all sex comics.

  You focus on a lot of sex-positive female characters in this collection, which is great. Is that issue important to you? How do you feel about so many male writers penning sex-positive women?

  It for sure is important to me! I wish that I could have focused on more asexual representation as well, but especially when it comes to women, this isn't often represented. Jamie's girlfriend Erin in Girls with Slingshots is asexual so I was able to mention her, but I would have loved to include more characters. As it is, I think sex-positivity has often failed to include those with low sex drives or interpersonal desire. It was also important for me to take a step back with some of the sex comics and look at, "Okay, I don't like this, but is it bad, is it exploitative? Or is it just not to my taste?" as in the case when I was reviewing Small Favors.

  Regarding men writing sex-positive women ... it is possible. Jaime Hernandez is the greatest writer of women's inner worlds than many writers of any gender, but it is rare. Women's sexualities are often connected with danger and wariness, and I don't see that represented as often. It's easy to say, "This female character can be as sexy as she wants because she has the power to bust bad guys in the face!" but that lacks a lot of nuance of why women are hesitant to showcase their sexuality, even if they have a high sex drive. There's a lot of ways to hurt someone that have nothing to do with physical strength.

  How have things changed for female comic book characters over time? What trends did you see?

  Things have ebbed and flowed a lot in various directions. Women characters in the '40s had a wide range of personalities. Vengeful, sexy, driven, sweet. That kinda disappeared for a long time. At the same time, comics were awful at diverse representation of women in terms of race and culture. This has gotten measurably better, especially in the last decade, and in the last 2–3 years there's also been a big shift in transgender representation which has been great to see and I hope to see continued. There is still some representation that is very rare to see in comics, so by no means are we at the best we can be. Especially in regards to Indigenous representation and asexual representation. Plus we could use more chubby girls on the comic book page, to be honest.

  Do you have a favorite character or two from the collection?

  Yes, I often say Maureen Marine. I think because I was so delighted to discover her, she had a silly name, a silly backstory but holy goodness was she VENGEFUL. She was a preteen girl whose parents died in a shipwreck and she became the sole female inhabitant—and ruler—of a race of undersea mermen, who she often led to war.

  Other than that, I think I'd have to say Jalisco, who has been a favorite character of mine for a long time. I think mostly because all artists seem scared to make their main characters ugly, unless they are men. Being pretty or not pretty doesn't affect your crime-solving skills but it does affect your daily life, and Jalisco in Chicanos really showcased that. There's a lot about that series that puts me off in terms of violence and queer representation, but the main lead is so enjoyable that, well ... it's a problematic fave, I guess.

  So many of these characters haven't had their runs reprinted. Do you think that might be different if they were male characters, or is that the nature of old comics?

  Well, looking back into the history of comics, I was very glad to focus on the female characters because to be honest most of the male characters were very bland and generic. The reason being likely is so that the reader could project themselves easily onto the character, and male is the 'default standard.' But if I had to write a whole book on male representation, it would be a lot harder to slog through the research. Plus in regards to representation of masculinity, it's pretty generically bad across the eras, I suspect; there hasn't been too much push to create sensitive or sweet male characters who aren't children, though there are notable exceptions like Jericho in Teen Titans or Redlance in Elfquest. But I digress.

  I think it's more important maybe to look at the creators. In the cases of female creators created by men, they were often reprinted. But those created by women, less so. How many times have you seen R. Crumb artwork of women out there, as a canon of comic history, but less so Pudge: the Girl Blimp by Lee Marrs?

  Girl genres too are much less represented in reprints, and this is because of the peculiar market we have where nostalgia/collecting really is overwhelmed by men. I am sure academics know the reasons why, but the fact is very few women are into nostalgia and collecting. They like to do things with comics, and always have, but the obsession with possessing the physical artifact isn't there. Maybe it's a money thing more than interest? Less women have the disposable income to spend on trinkets like this, but we do see a lot of women in archives and librarian work, so there is an interest and fascination with old literature. The mostly male readership of archive comics don't seem to care much about romance or fashion comics. And if the nostalgia market isn't there, why risk a reprint, I suppose. I'd love to do a fashion in comics book, though; it was really something that has fascinated me through the research process. Everyone likes fashion, right?

  It might be strange to end on a question about production, but I'm a book nerd and this physical book is gorgeous. Did you have any input in how you wanted it to look? What do you think of the final product?

  It is gorgeous! It made me feel really angry at my own published books, haha, since I'll never be able to have books from my own small press that look as good! Oh well, something to strive for.

  In regards to the visual look, really I had no input, so I was very excited to see it turn out. My big thing from working in the film industry as a visual researcher for a while and publishing reprints is that I really, really tried to get as high-res images as I could so they would look sharp and clean in the book. I think I failed on one pin-up; that will likely bug me until the end of my days, but the rest looks gorgeous! The only other advice I had to the designer was to make sure a wide range of characters in terms of eras, genres and appearance were featured on the cover pages in the grid, which they did well. The designer really outdid themselves in the project, I couldn't be more happy. It makes me feel very good.

  The Spectacular Sisterhood of Superwomen: Awesome Female Characters from Comic Book History will be released on May 2 from Quirk Books.

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• Dork Shelf - http://dorkshelf.com/2014/09/03/interview-hope-nicholson/

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  Brok Windsor
  Interview: Hope Nicholson
  By Andrew Parker September 3, 2014 | 8:01 am

  Hope Nicholson has already done a lot when it comes to preserving the legacy of the long neglected Canadian Whites of comic book history, and she has recently embarked on a second major restoration effort to bring back a major part of our pop culture heritage.

  While researching in university, Nicholson, a lifelong comic fan, came across an almost secret history that she had never been made aware of. Following the conservation efforts of World War II which led to no American comics being available North of the border, Canadian artists, writers, and publishers came up with their own superheroes and daring crime fighters. It was something that stuck with Nicholson long enough to work as a producer on the documentary Lost Heroes –a great overview of the Canadian comics industry and its ups and downs over some seminal moments that are often forgotten – and to a successful collaboration with Rachel Richey in 2013 to bring back and restore the Nelvana of the Northen Lights series, Nicholson’s favourite character from that particular era and a female hero that might have been the first of her kind.

  Now thanks to her previous work, Nicholson has successfully found the basic funding necessary to move on to her next project: the restoration of Brok Windsor, a Canadian Robinson Crusoe type who lives on an island with his girlfriend Starra and has grown to enormous size. Intrigued by the comics stunning artwork and a personal connection to the material, it was easy for Nicholson to become engaged with the character. Although her Kickstarter has reached its base goal to complete a basic run, it continues throughout the month with hopes of reaching a larger audience than just a cursory, limited edition run.

  We caught up for coffee with Nicholson last month to talk about her history with Canadian comics, what drew her to Brok Windsor, and the challenges faced with such a large scale restoration of a now sadly obscure and hard to find bit of our publishing history.

  Dork Shelf: Let’s start with your personal history with Canadian comics, not necessarily with Brok or Nelvana, but in general. Because this isn’t the first time you’ve done something for classic Canadian comic history.

  Picture via Winnipeg Free Press
  Picture via Winnipeg Free Press
  Hope Nicholson: As much as I like to have a more romantic story than I do, it honestly started with Wikipedia while I was doing my undergraduate degree. It was about eight years ago now, and I had always been a big fan of comic books and I had read them my entire life. I had an essay that I had to do on forms of Canadian media, and I thought “Well, comics are media, so I’m going to do that!” (laughs) Really as many times as I could I always find a way to come back to comics whenever I had to do a paper.

  So I googled “Canadian comic books,” and I found these essays that led me to all of these books that I started reading, and I thought it was crazy. Then I started asking all the comics people I knew to see if they knew about this. I think the first person I asked that knew about these was Mark Askwith when I was doing a TV internship. He was the first person ever who took my interest beyond just online research because he actually had copies of these books. Actually, I waited my entire internship to bring them by, and he never did. (laughs) It was only when I was interviewing him for Lost Heroes, the documentary, that he finally brought them into a screening and all I could think was, “Wow, this would have been really great when I was twenty and I had never seen them before.”

  But yeah, it fascinated me that we had this history with comics, and it frustrated me because after a while I stopped thinking that I was part of this cool club that knew about these obscure things to thinking that if a large bunch of people didn’t know about these and that we weren’t sharing them, then what’s the point? So, that’s why I’ve been doing this.

  DS: In some cases, these comic characters shouldn’t be obscure. Some of them should arguably more famous than a lot of their American counterparts.

  HN: Oh, absolutely. I hear different accounts from different people about how much kids actually enjoyed these comics growing up. Some people I talked to said that kids up here couldn’t wait for the American comics to come back, but then some people who read the comics back then would say that they loved Freelance more than they loved Superman or Captain Marvel. It’s a very confused history. There’s really no way to tell with any great degree of accuracy a sense of before and after.

  DS: When you were going down this researching rabbit hole and you started branching off into other areas, what were the character that popped out to you the most? There are two very obviously that stuck with you, or you wouldn’t have spent this much effort into trying to get them restored, but once you started reading them, what stuck out?

  HN: For years and years, it was really just Nelvana. The others I vaguely knew about, but I just kept going back to Nelvana of the Northern Lights. Just ask my schoolmates from back in the day, I would always be saying, “You know, we really need a dramatic feature film about Nelvana.” I would just daydream about it constantly. I thought about doing a documentary just on Nelvana alone. Eventually, that did happen, but it was about all of the comics and that was a much larger process with a lot of different winding roads, as most projects are. The most obvious thing I could have done at the time would have been to reprint the comics, but back then I just couldn’t find most of them and because the thought never really entered my head. Plus, I was honestly just waiting to see if anyone else was going to do it.

  Nelvana was definitely my first obsession.

  DS: So when it comes to tracking down all of these back issues so you can reprint them, how much of an undertaking are we talking about? What are the easiest parts of tracking these issues down and what’s the most frustrating aspect of it?

  HN: Getting the comics is very difficult. I’m lucky that I know a lot of people in the comics industry, and that’s both artists and collectors and retailers. I draw upon every single one of them to make this work. I wouldn’t be able to do any of this without them.

  Collectors do a great job of helping me keep track of and find these issues, but even they don’t know exactly where everything would be. Then I would look at archives and go through that, but it was only with Nelvana and now with Brok Windsor that once I started the Kickstarter campaigns that people would see it and come to me and say, “I’ve got a bunch of those comic books!” Then in some cases I would go to their house, and they might end up having the biggest collections anyone has ever seen and no one knows about them.

  And to draw attention to that campaign, that’s where the artists and retailers are indispensible. They put the link on their Facebook page or Twitter, they help out with some artwork to get them to the page, and that’s when collectors start finding me the most and helping me track down these books. And without Kickstarter, none of this would have been able to take shape. It’s an example of a really great perpetuating cycle.

  DS: What is your relationship like to the collectors you get in touch with? I’m sure some of them are fine with you taking care of something they’ve spent their life preserving, but I’m guessing that others need a bit of convincing.

  HN: I think people can tell pretty easily from either talking to me or from what I post online that I have a passion for these comics that’ verges on the absurd. (laughs) The research that I do into these is pretty in depth. For example, for Nelvana of the Northern Lights, I was going through pages of Franz Johnson’s diary, who was the artist who first met Nelvana, who was a real person. I didn’t know that until saw that he had a gallery show in Ontario in 1970, and I emailed the gallery to ask if they had anything that other people might not have.

  With Brok Windsor now, we reached out to Jon St. Ables’ old team that worked with him. When people see me posting things like that, a lot of times I think that I’m just shouting into the ether, but it’s amazing how people can come back to it.

  It’s all about finding that sense of authenticity. One of the collectors recently got in touch with me about this issue of Brok Windsor that I just could not find. Absolutely, 100%, I thought this thing was lost for good. I looked high and low. I went through 2,200 collections and nothing was ever there. Finally, one guy came forward and said “You know, I didn’t want to tell you this…” because the collectors community can be very aggressive in regards to things this rare and he was actually concerned about maintaining a sense of anonymity. He said, “reading your post I can see that you have a real passion about the subject and that I have this issue.” It was an issue right in the middle of Brok’s storyline, and it’s one that some collectors I talked to didn’t even believe existed because so few people had actually seen a copy. No one had seen a copy, or a cover, or a page, or a mention, not anything. That was a huge help.

  DS: At what point and how did you make the transition from Nelvana to Brok Windsor?

  HN: I’d say the first time I had heard about Brok was when I was looking through history books, and I was vaguely aware of him being one of the more interesting characters from the Vancouver published books. Other than that, I didn’t think much of him at the time because my brain was focused very much on Nelvana, and basically when we were making the documentary and doing research for Lost Heroes I was asked to track down some issues of Brok Windsor. So I found them and sent them over and then when I saw the film, I think that was when I really realized that Brok Windsor looked great! The artwork stood out so much more than any of the other comic books, and that actually includes Nelvana. On screen was when I first thought it was really interesting.

  That was when I decided to find out a bit more. I just so happened to be going to Vancouver for the Vancouver Comic Festival, so a few months before that I started to read Brok Windsor stories to see if I would be interested in the content itself. I find it hard to get behind a project if I’m not really invested in it personally. There are some characters in the Canadian Whites where… It’s not that I don’t want people to see them and discover them. I do want them to be accessible, but I don’t know if I could get excited about them. Brok Windsor, however, is very easy to get excited about.

  I got in contact with the people who deal with Brok in the States and just hoped they didn’t come back to me and say, “Actually, we’re really ashamed of these and we don’t want them getting out.” If they said that, I probably would have moved on to another character. I went down there and we had coffee, and they were really excited about it. We talked and I got to look through all their work and it was fantastic. Probably about February of this year was when I started work with Brok.

  Brok Windsor - Featured

  DS: What is it about Brok that makes you really want to get attached to this?

  HN: Aside from the artwork, there’s a Winnipeg connection there for me. I’m from there, and Jon Stables worked there. I found out in that missing issue that we were talking about, Brok says he’s from Winnipeg. It’s kind of sad that it’s just a throwaway line in the middle of a story where he says he can’t wait to get back home to Winnipeg, but that got me so excited. (laughs)

  The biggest thing is that it’s a huge challenge to me. I know where all the Toronto produced comics are. I know where all the comics for those are archived. Maple Leaf Publishing, I had no idea because that was a Vancouver based publishing firm. So I jumped in, got my feet wet, and when you google Brok Windsor I want it to be more than just two articles about the history of Brok and for people to be able to find it. I’m big on people having access to these titles, so that drives me the most, especially when it comes to something like Brok.

  Brok’s storylines are really fun. When I was reading the stories when I finally had access to them, Jon Sables was also the writer and he knew that the concept was silly. Telling the story of a man living on a deserted island where the mists make him grow to gigantic size is going to be ridiculous. In this one issue, he comes across these monsters that look like giant, disembodied heads with little tiny legs like spiders, and Brok just punts this thing like it’s a soccer ball, and that’s one of the best issues. It’s ridiculous. It has fun with itself, but it’s still an exciting, fun read.

  DS: For you right now in terms of preserving the Brok Windsor legacy?

  HN: Well, we’ve been funded, which is lucky for us, but the more that we get the more circulation we can get. Right now we’ve raised enough to make probably about a thousand copies, which gets us out there, but it doesn’t give us as much reach as we want. The more reach would be better. The more that we can raise our profile, we might even get a publisher attached. Self-publishing to a wider audience would be a great challenge, too.

  In terms of getting the issues themselves, I am fortunate to say that either all of the issues have been digitized, or that they will be by the end of this week, and with no travelling for me. That was a huge concern for me because most of these comics are out in Vancouver, and travel costs would be way too expensive, and now we can spend more of the money on producing the product, putting it into the work being done, and marketing it.

  I really do want to go down there still, though, because there are letters from the editor of the comics down there that I really want to read for clues about more information on the publisher.

  DS: You sound like you’re also a bit of a history buff as much as you are a comic buff.

  HN: I get really, really excited about niche things. (laughs) If you ask me about Canadian comic history in general, I can give you a great overview, but if you asked me specifically about Nelvana or Brok, I would give you information that no one else does. It’s fun to go in and do archiving and digging up stuff no one else knows. It’s exciting that a lot of this stuff isn’t on the internet. It’s fun finding that stuff. Yesterday, I went to the University of Toronto and looked at a book that was literally falling apart in my hands. I was looking through Country Life magazine, because Jon Sables was doing artwork for them, and that’s the kind of stuff you’ll never find on the internet, and that’s the stuff that gets me excited the most.

  DS: Once everything is digitized, what’s the next step after that in terms of the restoration?

  HN: I’m about 30% done right now because I have raw scans to work with. It can be challenging, especially depending on people who send me lower resolution scans of their collection than might be ideal. It can be hard to preserve the quality. Luckily, compared to Nelvana, Brok was printed really well and using a better process, so that part isn’t too difficult. It’s mostly about the little details and making sure everything flows well in the artwork. I’m not an artist, so it’s sometimes like I’m Photoshopping with a rock in my hands, but I am very careful when it comes to this. I can only hope I can make it look as good or better than when it came out.

  DS: When you start a Kickstarter for something like this and a character that isn’t as well known, what would you say to someone unfamiliar with the work to pitch them on why Brok matters?

  HN: I like to stress to them that this is an important part of popular culture. Their parents and grandparents consumed a lot, but this is something that’s never been archived before in any fashion. Not only is it a comic history thing, but a cultural history thing in general. Most people seem to understand that, and get excited about that. I have a lot of friends and family who wouldn’t pick up a comic book if their life depended on it, but they’re excited to feel and see something new when I explain it like that.

  DS: Is there one issue of Brok that you’re looking forward to sharing with people once again that you might consider a favourite?

  HN: You know, it’s actually much easier to say what my LEAST favourites are. (laughs) My least favourites are the ones from the final year of his run because he leaves the island, and then he’s on the trail of the killer of his friends WHO HAVE NEVER BEEN MENTIONED IN THE SERIES until that point. It really does everything that every bad TV show does when they start to feel like they’re getting desperate for ratings. Plus, he leaves his love behind. Starra, his girlfriend, followed him back to Winnipeg or Toronto or wherever they ended up going back to, and she just stays behind while he goes off on his next two adventure. She left her entire life behind to go on adventures with him and he basically just says, “Have fun here alone with all these strangers!” (laughs) I don’t think he actually likes her very much. (laughs) She really likes him, but I don’t think he ever made up his mind and told her that he liked her. It might have been a one-sided romance. It’s kind of hard to tell. “Yeah, you just stay here with my friends. They’ll take care of you… probably. I, uh, I gotta go to Egypt now. I might not be coming back.”

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  comic book news, reviews and a bunch of other stuff since 2013Browse: Home » 10 things concerning Hope Nicholson and ‘The Spectacular Sisterhood of Superwomen’
  10 things concerning Hope Nicholson and 'The Spectacular Sisterhood of Superwomen'
  10 THINGS CONCERNING HOPE NICHOLSON AND ‘THE SPECTACULAR SISTERHOOD OF SUPERWOMEN’

  May 4, 2017 · in HEY, KIDS! COMICS!, NEWSWIRE
  By Jarrod Jones. If you’re looking for an example of how far comics have come in terms of equal representation, look no further than Hope Nicholson’s The Spectacular Sisterhood of Superwomen.

  Of course, by “equal representation” I don’t just mean between men and women. Comics aren’t so binary as that anymore, and the industry as a whole has only grown more diverse and rich over the generations with voices that represent our entire spectrum: race, gender, religion, sexual orientation… there’s room for everyone here.

  That change is easy to take for granted, and that’s where Sisterhood comes in. In these pages, Nicholson takes care to remind us that there’s a hierarchy to consider as well, and that no matter how many gains have been made, there are still plenty of ceilings left to smash through.

  “We have come a long way,” Nicholson writes in her introduction. “We’ve gone from having 90 percent of comics created by white men to a thriving industry of comics in all sorts of formats created by all sorts of people. And that’s changing the characters we grow up with and love dearly — for the better. […] But along with all these advances, I fear we may be forgetting our history.”

  Hope Nicholson will be the first to tell you that we’re aren’t there yet. This week, I speak with the prolific editor and writer about representation in comics, how progress is rarely a linear path, and yes, Witchblade.

  Cover to ‘Spectacular Sisterhood of Superwomen’. Design by Timothy O’Donnell/Quirk Books
  1. ‘The Spectacular Sisterhood of Superwomen’ serves as a splendid chronicle of women characters in comics: always sincere, rightfully critical and, at times, truly inspiring. You begin by summing up the perplexing developments of Lois Lane and Wonder Woman with razor-sharp accuracy: here are two characters who began with considerable agency and ended up going starry-eyed over Superman at one point or another. Was that your intention, to show where we’re going as an industry by pointing out where we’ve been?

  Hope Nicholson: I suppose I just wanted to have an even-handed view of the industry as a whole. It’s easy to be nostalgic, and it’s easy to say “we’re the best we’ve ever been”, and neither is quite true. Progress isn’t a linear path, it’s a lot of ups and downs, and I just wanted everyone to explore the historical journey with me.

  2. This book features some serious deep cuts — Torchy Brown was an eye-popping character find for me, I’m ashamed to admit. What went into your research? Did you have access to publisher archives? Did you seek out private collectors?

  HN: In terms of research, most of it was from the source material itself, reading comics, either digital or physical, and then also analyzing data. Data itself can lie and be misread, but if you go in and look at the numbers you can at least see some general truths. What publishers disappear, what comics had the most issues/lengthiest runs, which genres come to prominence and then fade. It can be harder to find some of the source material, but in 80% of the cases you can find content if you look and ask. A lot of the rest came from general knowledge of the comics industry that I’ve absorbed over the years.

  I wouldn’t lie that a lot of my “general knowledge” likely came a lot from Trina Robbins’ research as well! She’s definitely paved the ground and set the scene for feminist comics research.

  3. Speaking of Torchy Brown, her creator, Jackie Ormes, is but one of a precious few female creators of color featured in the book. It definitely wasn’t a surprise to see so many white male creators in this context, sadly, but how heartening is it to see women of color join the industry in larger numbers in the last twenty years?

  HP: Oh, it’s fantastic; that’s definitely where we are seeing a significant push in terms of diversity. This could still be much better, in terms of content by the Big Two, and definitely in terms of Indigenous content and creators as well. But in the last decade that’s been the biggest, and most welcome, change to the industry is the inclusion of more creators who are not white.

  That’s the thing though, right? There’s always been creators who weren’t white making things, but they had no access to distribution. Now we have small press, we have Kickstarters, we have social media, they don’t need a big publisher to survive and thrive.

  4. Your approach to female characters from the mid-to-late Eighties and throughout the Nineties is one of the more honest I’ve ever seen published. I’ve engaged in plenty of grousing about characters like Silk Spectre and Witchblade over the years, and to see someone tackle both characters the way you did was very cathartic. When you’re evaluating problematic characters, do you think it’s damaging to attempt to reconcile them as being “a product of their time” or do you think it’s necessary to call out these issues as they arise?

  HN: Nothing is a product of its time. If in the 1940s there were black and queer comics creators, that comics were tackling social issues, I certainly won’t give the 1990s a pass! At the same time it’s easy to say that characters are completely bad, and I don’t think Silk Spectre and Witchblade are without value either; if they were they wouldn’t be in the book — I had to cut out Panda from Body Bags for that reason, I just couldn’t say anything kind about it.

  I tried to approach characters and analyze why other people liked them and what they offered, but be honest about the negative effects they had on readership too. I grew into comics when T&A comics were at their peak. I was lucky enough to find content like Mars, Elfquest, West Coast Avengers, Dazzler, that was a lot less ‘bad girl’ inspired, but for many young girls they grew attached to comics like Gen-13, like Witchblade. Tini Howard speaks of her love for Witchblade in the book, and I think I felt if I respected Tini, it gave me a new way to look at Witchblade!

  For Watchmen, I felt that the way Alan Moore handled sexual assault was in some ways better than other comics. It wasn’t glossed over, it wasn’t portrayed as a mid-alley attack. It showcased some real complexity in the case of what women’s reactions are to attack, and how personal it is. I don’t think it was handled well, and I’ve discussed this a bit before. It was a tiny baby step in a discussion that needs more care than it provided.

  5. I’m astounded by the book’s strikingly Chip Kidd-esque minimal design — it’s sleek, but it’s structured too, which lets the eyes hungrily take in all the information on its pages. How did you put together this book? Was this design set from the start, or did it evolve over time?

  HN: Oh that’s all thanks to our designer Timothy O’Donnell. He’s a star. I just gave him folders and folders of reference images, and they all took care of it over at Quirk. I have no head for layout or design aesthetics, so I let them go wild and I was beyond thrilled with the result.

  In terms of content, I am kind of fastidious about numbers and getting a bit of everything, so I did have a structure for myself: “ten characters for each decade, one big character for each decade, characters in each major genre, characters from different publishers, a history overview for each decade that discusses sales, distribution, fans, creators, and content”. That evolved as the book was being researched too, and I figured out more what I wanted to talk about.

  6. One thing I noticed was your inclusion of Maggie Chascarillo from Jaime Hernandez’s ‘Love and Rockets’, but you did not include a female character from Gilberto’s world of Palomar. Was there a reason to exclude characters like Luba or Fritz? Gilberto has always had an… interesting approach to women.

  HN: Well, it’s no secret I prefer Jaime to Gilbert in terms of stories, but I did like Palomar too. It lost me as a reader after time, but there’s no reason I wouldn’t feature one of the characters. Perhaps in a future book!

  7. You illustrate a brilliant point with your Icon pieces: that certain characters serve a grander purpose by showing how too often female characters are “just extensions of the men in their lives”, even if it wasn’t exactly the intention of the creator, like Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Silk Spectre. That sentiment lends itself marvelously to a thought you have about Ramona Flowers later on, that “every girl wants to be a Ramona Flowers, but it doesn’t seem like many guys want to be Scott Pilgrim.” Do you think that people’s reactions to characters like Ramona Flowers are in a way a response to the “girlfriend” stock characters that have populated comic books for generations?

  HN: Even in a dearth of comics goodness, women will read and find and absorb comics, and make it into their own. That’s always been what separates a fanboy from a fangirl, to be very, very broad. Fanboys are known for analyzing facts and statistics, for collecting items. Fangirls take the content and transform it — into cosplay, into fanfiction. I think women like Ramona Flowers because she looked cool. And she could skate through time and space, that was pretty neat. Sometimes, it’s okay to like characters because they’re neat.

  8. One of the things you wrote that really struck me was your Icon piece on Wonder Woman: “… Diana has the added pressure to be everything. And as a result, she becomes nothing.” Where do you think the pressure for Wonder Woman to be a perfect feminist icon comes from? Is it because she’s the most visible female hero — or is it because of something far more ingrained in her character?

  HN: Definitely it’s because she’s the most visible and known female hero, and the first to just be written so boldly in her beliefs and her strengths that she’s been cemented into everyone’s mind. I think Superman has a similar type of pressure, to be such a perfect example of masculinity that he becomes very bland. These characters are the backbone of our comic stories, so we hold on to them very, very tightly. Maybe we don’t need to though. Maybe we can let them go.

  Like any fan has ever been able to do that!

  9. I especially love that the book’s final icon, the character who represents our present age, is Kamala Khan. Do you feel that she represents the entire purpose behind ‘Sisterhood’ — that Kamala Khan is representative of all the progress that’s been made in comics?

  HN: No, not really. I’d say that Check, Please! is a better example, but unfortunately it’s a comic that doesn’t have a female lead so I couldn’t feature it! Marvel is still very limited in what it does. Very slow to change. Our future, in terms of seeing progress, is in the bookstores. It’s online.

  I’m not sure what place Marvel and DC Comics have in the world; they certainly still sell very well, though, and every so often there is a gem like Ms. Marvel. But she’s still a factory creation, and that’s limiting.

  10. You work incredibly hard at projects that include a vast array of creative voices. What’s next for you?

  HN: The next big project that isn’t out yet is Gothic Tales of Haunted Love, an anthology of new gothic romance stories that I’ll be Kickstarting through my publishing company Bedside Press in July. I discovered the gothic romance comic genre while doing research for this book and even though I hate horror, it obsessed me. I can’t wait to showcase new stories in an old genre!

  Before: 10 things concerning Ryan Ferrier, politics (kinda), and his IDW series, ‘D4VEocracy’

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• CBR - https://www.cbr.com/hope-nicholson-exposes-the-secret-loves-of-geek-girls/

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  Hope Nicholson Exposes The Secret Loves of Geek Girls
  10.05.2016
  by Michael C Lorah
  in Comic News
  Comment
  Hope Nicholson Exposes The Secret Loves of Geek Girls

  Dating sucks. We all know it to be true. Just meeting someone is difficult enough, and that’s before all the stress of saying the wrong thing, trying to be somehow not-boring, and figuring out some way to actually look good. Then, you look around and see so many functional, even happy(!), relationships that you just know you’re doing something wrong.

  Well you’re not, and Hope Nicholson has the proof. Writer, editor and publisher of Bedside Press, Nicholson has shepherded the anthology “The Secret Loves of Geek Girls” into creation. Funded via a Kickstarter campaign (where it raised an astounding 330% of its requested funding), “Secret Loves of Geek Girls” assembles a stunning list of female creators, sharing stories of dating, sex and the four-lettered word: ‘love.’

  With contributors including novelist Margaret Atwood; comic scribes and cartoonists like Marjorie Liu, Mariko Tamaki, Carla Speed McNeil, and Trina Robbins; gaming writers Soha Kareem and Cara Ellison; and Discovery Channel personality Twiggy Tallant, the anthology covers nearly every possible base in letting women (and men) know that their experiences are not unusual or embarrassing. The emotions are universal, no matter the particulars of the circumstances.

  If you missed these acclaimed (with a GoodReads rating over 4.2) tales of lust, anxiety, confusion and true emotional connection the first time around, fear not. “The Secret Loves of Geek Girls” gets a wider release this October from Dark Horse Comics, with several new stories as well.

  CBR News caught up with editor and creator Hope Nicholson to talk about the stuff that we all stress when talking about.

  CBR News: Your own story in “The Secret Loves of Geek Girls” explains why you felt a book like this needed to be, but for those who’ve not read it and are considering it, can you explain a little bit why you went through the time, sweat and expense of assembling all this talent to expound on this theme?

  SLGG art_by_Deena_Pagliarello

  Hope Nicholson: Many of these stories I had heard verbally long before I decided to make the book. It was my frustration with the fact that they did seem so fresh, so new, and no one had been writing stories like these down. I had my own confusion about love and dating, and connecting to these women and hearing their stories really helped calm me down. But if people didn’t have these communities like I did, they can’t benefit, and they can get stuck in their own heads about their worries. The hope of this book wasn’t that it would be a self-help book per se (you can see that no one woman has the same story or decision!) but just a way for readers to feel less alone, and more connected to a wider community.

  One of my favorites is Marguerite Bennett’s “Minas Tirth,” which uses “Lord of the Rings” geography (and figs!) in an amazing seduction sequence, but then completely upends expectations about these two women’s compatibility. If there is an underlying message to the entire book, it may be that geek interests alone do not create a relationship or alleviate the anxieties of one. Does that sound right to you?

  No — I’d be very reluctant to say there is any underlying message! The main point might be that these are stories of vastly different women, in similar and different situations, who react differently or the same, and all have different results regardless of their actions. The main message, if any, is “there really is no how-to guide for dating; it’s all random. That’s OK. Don’t beat yourself up because you think you chose the wrong path.”

  Loretta Jean’s “Leveling Up Your Dating Profile” is a really nice how-to manual for online daters to spotlight their interests and appeal to others geeks (without creating an impersonal list of interests). Meanwhile “Read: 1:19am” (Jen Aprahamian) reads almost every anxiety possible into the delays and toneless communiques of text messages and trying to learn a new person that way. As much as technology changes how we reach one another, the underlying human connection and communication remains that constant, doesn’t it?

  My mother told me yesterday about how she used to wait by the phone anxiously for a boy to call her after a date. My grandmother would say that she would wait to be called on by guys (only to hide in her room if the wrong one came to the door). Technology changes nothing except for the speed of our dating anxieties. Everything is the same, just sped up a little.

  Well, to be honest, I’m not very fond of waiting myself, though it’s an inevitability in relationships at certain points. If at all possible, I don’t mind following up and checking in. Like ripping off a band-aid.

  “Secret Loves of Geek Girls” was initially funded on Kickstarter and released through your own Bedside Press. How did you wind up in collaboration with Dark Horse for this edition? How much extra material was added for the expanded edition?

  SLGG Bemused P1 300

  I had started working with Dark Horse when I brought them the Margaret Atwood, Johnnie Christmas and Tamra Bonvillain graphic novel series “Angel Catbird.” When time came that I was considering a distributor or publishing partner to expand the reach of “Secret Loves of Geek Girls,” they were on my list to be considered along with Abrams, First Second, and IDW. I went with Dark Horse because I was so impressed with editor Daniel Chabon’s attitude and energy when working with him on “Angel Catbird.” He has the rare ability to not bullshit in order to get what he wants; he’s a straight shooter but also genuinely kind. It’s a good and rare aspect of an editor. In addition to that, I had worked with Penguin Random House in their sales department and had been really impressed with their sales team and their enthusiasm for diving into markets; since Dark Horse does book sales through PRH, it seemed like a great fit.

  There was only a bit new material added. We changed the cover, though not because Gisèle Lagacé’s original cover wasn’t brilliant and gorgeous (it’s now on the back cover and inside title page) but to differentiate it from the Kickstarter edition, and to add a new member to the team, Noelle Stevenson. We also had one story removed from an author who didn’t want it for the Dark Horse edition, and added a few new things. We added new forewords by Kelly Sue DeConnick and Colleen Doran, both of whom are women who impress me deeply. We also added a new pinup by Genevieve FT, two new one-page comics by Carla Speed McNeil and Paulina Ganucheau, and one new prose story by Marjorie Liu. There were also various small changes to colours and text in some stories that we only caught after it was released and were fixed for this edition.

  The title definitely reflects the often hidden nature of women with traditional geek interests, and I think that’s hidden on two levels – that women don’t always feel comfortable admitting their interests to family or friends, and that even within geek culture, women are often overlooked, unappreciated, or considered poseurs. Assembling all these women in one place to tell these stories, it really gives power and a sense of community, doesn’t it?

  That’s the idea. We build our own communities to connect, and for clear reasons, we don’t always feel comfortable broadcasting these groups. Of course, it’s likely more than 70% of the comics reading population don’t consider women poseurs. It’s just this small group of (usually) men who seem to think that we’re in their clubhouse when it’s actually, “We aren’t in your clubhouse. We built our damn hangout for everyone and we’re all sharing this space.” They forget women have always been in fandom. We have women in the anthology who gently remind them of that. (We women must always be gentle with the truth, right?) People forget history quickly if they don’t like what it says.

  As a guy, the main thing that leapt out at me reading this is just how universal the anxiety of love/dating/building a relationship and life with someone truly is. The individual specifics may change (I know zip about gaming and had to look up JRPG, for example) in these intensely personal and profoundly philosophical stories, there is a universality to the emotions, isn’t there?

  Yes, I myself had trouble editing the gaming related stories, as I’ve only really played very basic games, and women like Cara Ellison, Sam Maggs and Soha Kareem are far above me in their knowledge! I definitely think anxiety in dating is common regardless of genders. I remember speaking to a guy friend who was frustrated and said, “Why do women never text you back right away when you text them?” I was so surprised because “I thought it was you guys who only did that!”

  SLGG CSM Geek Girls

  While female voices in comics have nearly always existed in comics (see “Wimmen’s Comix”), they haven’t always had much profile in the industry. While we have a long way to go toward achieving balanced representation, it must feel rewarding to have so many talented women available for a project like this?

  It’s rewarding and frustrating. “Secret Loves” is one of many projects that have sought to showcase “Look, we’re clearly here, so knock off your complaining,” and it doesn’t seem to absorb. It goes back and forth. In many ways, gender ratio was the best in the 1940s, but there weren’t a great deal of female creators then (much less for women who weren’t white) and were fewer outlets for non-commercial comic work. Luckily readership increases regardless, so hopefully people who pick on others will quiet down when they’re outnumbered.

  You don’t often find the mixture of comics and prose within a single anthology like you’ve done here. How early on did that approach come into focus and why the mixed presentations rather than one or the other?

  Well, actually the project was first intended to be prose only! Most of my friends weren’t comics creators, just regular fans. But as time went on, some approached me to do comics and the numbers grew until I decided to merge them both into one.

  In her introduction, Kelly Sue DeConnick writes a bit about rebelling against romance in her own writing, as it’s often stereotyped as the only storytelling women find interesting. Did you have any reservations about creating a book entirely about relationships and love?

  I think I dealt with those issues long ago, though I definitely understand them. No one wants to fall into a stereotype, but we all have questions about romance, love, and sex. I have no shame in discussing them. I am glad that Kelly Sue discussed this in her foreword though, as there is an attraction to just “being one of the boys” and that includes a resistance to discussing feelings and emotions. Hopefully women, and men, who feel like that can start to be vulnerable without being scared.

  I’m sure it’s frustrating that as a woman in comics, you’re sometimes expected to speak for all women. Having this book, with its wide range of voices, to put in somebody’s hand should go a long way toward alleviating that universal expectation.

  SLGG dh_jwoodall_page1

  It is very frustrating. And you want to make sure you reach out to everyone, but sometimes that isn’t easy, because there is a vast variety of women out there! One thing that was frustrating in particular is that I wasn’t pitched any stories by any women who consider themselves asexual, and I thought that was something important to talk about. The other problem is that by the very concept and title of the book, it limits stories to women who define themselves by their gender, and some people feel neither male nor female (gender is a binary construct not set in stone!)

  Will there be a “More Secret Loves of Geek Girls”?

  Why not “Secret Loves of Geek Men”?! Let’s hear what the other gender has to say, and all of the variety of love stories. I bet a lot of them are the same. There’s a great diversity in men, but they don’t seem to encourage it as much as they do for women’s stories. I want to hear stories from queer men, trans men, asexual men, men with high sex drives, low sex drives. I think that could be quite important, and I’m in the early stages of making this book as well. I’ve been trying to decide whether to do three volumes – geek girls, geek guys, and just ‘geeks’ (ungendered, men, women, and nonbinary creators). We’ll see. It’s a lot of work!

  What’s next for you and Bedside Press?

  Oh, well I keep busy. I just wrote a book on comic book history for Quirk Books due out next summer called “The Spectacular Sisterhood of Superwomen.” It’s a light read that showcases ten female characters in comics from each decade, along with a brief decade overview of the changes in the comics industry and fandom.

  Next month, I have a prose collection called “Love Beyond Body, Space, and Time” coming out that showcases queer indigenous sci-fi stories.

  In October I’ll be releasing “Fashion In Action,” a reprint of a largely unknown 1980s series by John K Snyder III.

  I’ll also be beginning a new Kickstarter in October for an original Trina Robbins graphic novel by a variety of artists that is a memoir adaptation of her father’s life. It’s called “A Minyan Yidn (Un Andere Zacken)” which translates to: “A Bunch of Jews (and other stuff).” It’s definitely going to be a fun, touching book I’m eager to showcase.

  After that is printed and released, I’ll be starting a Kickstarter that revitalizes the gothic romance genre, called “Gothic Tales of Haunted Love” and have some amazing talent lined up for this.

  I also am still working on 1940s Canadian comic restorations which I hope to showcase in the next few months!

  I’m doing some work on projects that other people are spearheading, “Enough Space for Everyone Else,” a collection of diverse sci-fi comics with editor J.N. Monk, which should come out by December, and “Moonshot v2,” an indigenous comics anthology which is currently on Kickstarter now on which I’ll be the editor (but not publisher) if it succeeds.

  “The Secret Loves of Geek Girls” is in stores now.

  SLGG GeekGirls_Genevieve_FT
  TAGS: Dark Horse Comics, Hope Nicholson, The Secret Loves Of Geek Girls

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11/1/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1509578353429 1/4
Print Marked Items
Superior Superwomen
Print.
71.2 (Summer 2017): p12.
COPYRIGHT 2017 F+W Media, Inc.
http://www.printmag.com/
Full Text: 
YOU KNOW SUPERMAN, Batman and Spiderman. But how familiar are you with their heroine counterparts? Since
the beginning of comic book history, women have been a staple of the medium, and author Hope Nicholson is here with
a collection of "the weirdest, coolest, most of-their-time female characters in comics."
As founder and owner of the Bedside Press, Nicholson is known for publishing Secret Loves of Greek Girls and editing
Margaret Atwood's Angel Catbird. Now she's taking readers through the fierce history of women in the comic industry--
both real and fictional--with The Spectacular Sisterhood of Superwomen. Meet prominent characters from the birth of
the medium (Super Ann; Flyin' Jenny; and Sheena, Queen of the Jungle) alongside modern marvels and authors such as
Ming Doyle, Emily Carroll and Pia Guerra.
Each chapter highlights a diverse roster of both iconic and atypical heroes. Discover beautiful vintage art and essential
reading suggestions, and finish each chapter with an analysis of the "Hero of the Decade," full of facts, insights and
thoughtful critiques. "In this history, we've shown that women are not storming the clubhouse built by male creators--
we've been here, building the industry and community, from the very start," Nicholson says. "We'll never fade away."
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Superior Superwomen." Print, Summer 2017, p. 12. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA503310348&it=r&asid=7ee675efea5d1341b124a55c589c62cc.
Accessed 1 Nov. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A503310348
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The Spectacular Sisterhood of Superwomen
Mary Cowper
MBR Bookwatch.
(May 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Midwest Book Review
http://www.midwestbookreview.com
Full Text: 
The Spectacular Sisterhood of Superwomen
Hope Nicholson
Quirk Books
215 Church Street, Philadelphia PA 19106
www.quirkbooks.com
9781594749483, $24.95, HC, 240pp, www.amazon.com
Synopsis: It is a common mistake thinking that comic books have not or cannot feature strong female protagonists.
"The Spectacular Sisterhood of Superwomen: Awesome Female Characters from Comic Book History" by Hope
Nicholson (who is the owner and founder of Bedside Press, specializing in archival and anthology comics collections)
readers will meet simply fascinating exemplars of the powerful, compelling, entertaining, and heroic female characters
who've populated comic books from the very beginning of this media.
The spectacular sisterhood of comics includes costumed crimebusters like Miss Fury, super-spies like Tiffany Sinn, sci-
fi pioneers like Gale Allen, and even kid troublemakers like Little Lulu. With vintage art, publication details, a decadeby-decade
survey of industry trends and women's roles in comics, and spotlights on iconic favorites like Wonder
Woman and Ms. Marvel, "The Spectacular Sisterhood of Superwomen" proves that not only do strong female
protagonists belong in comics, they've always been there.
Critique: Profusely illustrated, impressively informative, exceptionally written, organized and presented in a decade by
decade format starting with the 1930s and concluding with the 2010s, "The Spectacular Sisterhood of Superwomen" is
an inherently fascinating and consistently compelling read from cover to cover. Adhering to impeccable standards of
scholarship and exhaustive research, "The Spectacular Sisterhood of Superwomen" is a unique and very highly
recommended addition to personal, community, and academic library Literary Studies collections in general, and comic
book history supplemental studies reading lists in particular.
Mary Cowper
Reviewer
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
Cowper, Mary. "The Spectacular Sisterhood of Superwomen." MBR Bookwatch, May 2017. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA497797032&it=r&asid=f1e4c8c41b8f12c78191e0ee66f8beb4.
Accessed 1 Nov. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A497797032
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The Spectacular Sisterhood of Superwomen:
Awesome Female Characters from Comic Book
History
Publishers Weekly.
264.5 (Jan. 30, 2017): p189.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text: 
The Spectacular Sisterhood of Superwomen: Awesome Female Characters from Comic Book History
Hope Nicholson. Quirk, $24.95 (240p)
ISBN 978-1-59474-948-3
Comic book heroines have come a long way and not always by the expected routes, as Nicholson, founder of Bedside
Press, traces in this informative and entertaining encyclopedia of female characters in comics. Moving decade by
decade, Nicholson--who admits in the introduction that her survey is far from definitive, and reminds readers that one of
the reasons to follow the progress of female characters is that they're often more interesting than their male
counterparts--acquaints readers with names both new and commonplace. Only diehard comics fans will likely know the
exploits of, say, Ultra Violet, a "bobby-soxer with the ability to shape-change into her wildest fantasies," first seen in
1947, or 1985's Sindi Shade, who "is trying to commit the greatest crime of all: checking out a library book." But
Nicholson makes even the relative unknowns sound as fascinating as that familiar Amazonian warrior, Wonder Woman
(who, for trivia nerds, first appeared in DC's All Star Comics #8 in 1941, in a decade Nicholson calls the Golden Age of
comics). Since superheroes, female and otherwise, permeate so much of our current culture, it's a real treat to get such
rich history of how characters such as Carol "Ms. Marvel" Danvers emerged and evolved, and Nicholson is a
trustworthy, knowledgeable guide. (May)
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
"The Spectacular Sisterhood of Superwomen: Awesome Female Characters from Comic Book History." Publishers
Weekly, 30 Jan. 2017, p. 189. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA480195217&it=r&asid=7040e6bcaa4f65c838843a302563c092.
Accessed 1 Nov. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A480195217
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The Secret Loves of Geek Girls, Expanded
Edition
Briana Shemroske
Booklist.
113.8 (Dec. 15, 2016): p34.
COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text: 
The Secret Loves of Geek Girls, Expanded Edition.
Ed. by Hope Nicholson.
2016. 256p. illus. Dark Horse, paper, $14.99 (9781506700991). 741.5.
In this paean to all things geek, an all-female crew of contributors (among them, Margaret Atwood, Marjorie Liu, and
Adrienne Kress) spotlights loneliness, love, and longing in both fiery fandoms (Sailor Moon, Final Fantasy 7) and raw
realities (divorce, distance). Initially published via Kickstarter, this newly expanded edition marries vivid single-page
illustrations and intimate prose with compact comics. Diana McCallum's "Four Fictional Happy Endings (That Are
about to Go Tragically Wrong)" uproariously skewers Hollywood classics (not even The Princess Bride is safe). Megan
Kearney's "Regards to the Goblin King" astutely explores the sexual undertones of gothic romance, from Dracula to
Labyrinth. And J. M. Frey's "How Fanfiction Made Me Gay" relates the reading and writing of sensuous stories to the
formation of one's best and truest self. Refreshingly varied in its scope, this unique anthology covers everything from
trivial text-message sagas to harrowing recollections of abuse. Crafted by creators and fans alike, this collection is a
tender portrait of fandom and friendship, a testament to creativity, and a rallying cry for unshakable individuality. --
Briana Shemroske
Shemroske, Briana
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
Shemroske, Briana. "The Secret Loves of Geek Girls, Expanded Edition." Booklist, 15 Dec. 2016, p. 34+. General
OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA476563516&it=r&asid=c931a1283165b9b2d77702383eeda419.
Accessed 1 Nov. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A476563516

"Superior Superwomen." Print, Summer 2017, p. 12. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA503310348&it=r. Accessed 1 Nov. 2017. Cowper, Mary. "The Spectacular Sisterhood of Superwomen." MBR Bookwatch, May 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA497797032&it=r. Accessed 1 Nov. 2017. "The Spectacular Sisterhood of Superwomen: Awesome Female Characters from Comic Book History." Publishers Weekly, 30 Jan. 2017, p. 189. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA480195217&it=r. Accessed 1 Nov. 2017. Shemroske, Briana. "The Secret Loves of Geek Girls, Expanded Edition." Booklist, 15 Dec. 2016, p. 34+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA476563516&it=r. Accessed 1 Nov. 2017.

• New York Times
  https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/02/books/review/spectacular-sisterhood-of-superwomen-hope-nicholson.html
  Word count: 776

  A Superheroine Hall of Fame Surveys 9 Decades of Women in Capes
  By J. D. BIERSDORFERJUNE 2, 2017
  Continue reading the main storyShare This Page
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  Tomboy, fighting crime in the 1950s, from the comic “Captain Flash.”
  THE SPECTACULAR SISTERHOOD OF SUPERWOMEN
  Awesome Female Characters From Comic Book History
  By Hope Nicholson
  Illustrated. 240 pp. Quirk Books. $24.95.

  Wonder Woman’s debut this month as an action-movie headliner is a long time coming, taking about 76 years from her first printed appearance in 1941’s All Star Comics, No. 8, to the thundering surround-sound cinemas of 2017. Superman only took a mere 10 years to leap from the pages of the legendary 1938 Action Comics, No. 1, to his first live-action film in 1948.

  This sort of lackluster support from the male-dominated popular culture business often reinforces the notion that women in comics have not always had the easiest time of it — on either side of the page. In “The Spectacular Sisterhood of Superwomen,” however, the archivist and author Hope Nicholson provides a much-needed overview of the nearly nine decades in which women have steadily been a part of comics history as characters, writers, artists and critics, as well as their impact on the medium.

  Photo

  Starlight, Huron hero.
  The book is illustrated with images from the original source material and propelled by a casual, opinionated writing style. Serious sequential-art aficionados may find “Spectacular Sisterhood” a compulsive page-turner that keeps one going to see what overlooked creations Nicholson has freed from the phantom zone of forgotten culture. By design, the book is not meant to be a comprehensive survey of every heroic woman ever to bust through a few hand-drawn panels but, as Nicholson writes in the introduction, “the weirdest, coolest, most of-their-time female characters in comics — for better or for worse.”

  The “better” and “worse” parts quickly become apparent, as plucky heroines, sleuths and career girls looking for romance are mixed in with those familiar cantilever-bosomed gals fighting on, impractically clad in their battle thongs and stiletto heels. Between the extremes, though, Nicholson has unearthed some gems like “Torchy Brown: From Dixie to Harlem,” a 1930s newspaper strip by Jackie Ormes, a black female cartoonist. “Survivalwoman,” a 1975 feminist comic tweaking Canadian identity issues, created under a pseudonym by the ever-active author Margaret Atwood, and Leia Weathington’s 2012 “The Legend of Bold Riley” (about an empathetic young Indian-inspired princess’s adventures in both swordwork and seduction) get the spotlight as well.

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  Continue reading the main story

  Full satisfaction with these types of subjective history books hinges on the author’s judgment about who makes the cut. While Wonder Woman, Supergirl and Batgirl get major ink, Nicholson skips long looks at many of the well-documented female heroes who get enough attention on their own, like fan-favorite Storm of “X-Men” fame and the goth-girl rendition of Death from Neil Gaiman’s “Sandman” series.

  Photo

  Still, some indie notables definitely feel missing in action, like Noelle Stevenson’s sassy shape-shifter, Nimona, from the award-winning 2012 eponymous web comic and Katina (Kachoo) Choovanski, Terry Moore’s emotionally volatile artist chronicled in his 1990s opus “Strangers in Paradise.” These absences are more deeply felt when some of the characters Nicholson focuses on are pure sexploitation creations, making it hard to contemplate the unique impact that “Superbitch” and “American Woman” had at the time after vamping through one or two issues at most.

  The inclusion of such titillating characters gives Nicholson the opportunity in several places to explore the effects of the misogyny, homophobia and racism that have been an ongoing struggle in the industry, and to point out how authentic representation has improved. Case in point, she holds up the current iteration of Ms. Marvel as a teenage Muslim Pakistani-American fangirl adjusting to life with superpowers — and scripted by G. Willow Wilson, herself a Muslim.

  Even with its frequent dips into thorny social issues, “The Spectacular Sisterhood of Superwomen” remains an upbeat celebration of women in comics. Browsing the book sparks a bit of the same flat-out escapist glee that led many of us to the medium in the first place. After all, as Nicholson observes, “Sometimes we all just need to read the adventures of a girl in a cape saving orphans with her flying horse.”

  J. D. Biersdorfer is the production editor for the Book Review and writes the daily Tech Tip column for The Times.

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