An interview with Devin Grayson

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By Shane Dingman

Continued from page 11

You once wrote that women are not as into comics as men because of several factors, distribution and the stigma of comic-book-guy types running little out of the way shops being one of them. But you mentioned story straight off, the male power fantasy colliding with the more female interest in story line... these are your words, you related it to an episode of Smallville. Do you think that kind of thinking is A) still true as when you said it, or B) a continuation of the gender myths that you yourself say marginalize women in comics.

First of all, I want to point out that I didn’t just spontaneously say or write that. That was probably my fortieth answer to one of the “chick writer trope” questions I get asked during every single interview, “why are girls less interested in comics than guys are?” After a while I stopped denying the entire assumption of the question and started experimenting — sometimes I’ll answer very stringently against the idea of gender-separated reading interests, and other times I’ll try it on for size; okay, what if females are more interested in relationships and males are more interested in fight scenes? What would that explain?

The story I told about watching Smallville with a teenage girl and two teenage boys is a true story — the boys were very excited every time Clark used his powers and the girl was much more interested in the Lana Lang “romantic” scenes, and I was much more interested in the Lex scenes (which, since I find Michael Rosenbaum incredibly hot, could also fairly, I suppose, be categorized as interest in a “romantic” scene. I certainly didn’t care whether or not Lex was hitting anyone, at any rate).

I just don’t know how to answer a question like this conclusively. I have no idea. My knee-jerk reaction is to be appalled by the idea that fiction is gendered. But on the other hand, everybody has different tastes and likes, and if some of that is determined by sex, I guess that really wouldn’t be all that surprising, at least as far as the socialization goes. I can think about examples of male and female behavior and even apply some of them to myself and understand where some of these generalizations come from. I think these are really interesting questions politically, but I can’t sit on them too long analytically without crashing into my own feelings on the matter, which are that in general I don’t identify with being female at all: I hate the stereotypical portrait of womanhood and would be furious to be shoved into it, I have no interest in speaking for or in anyway representing the kind of female we tend to be talking about when we generalize about females, the people in the world who I love the most tend to be gender-fluid and sexually “alternate” and I feel the need to defend myself and them by not talking about sex in generalized, traditional terms, and, also, the minute I say “I hate being a woman,” I’m flooded with thoughts of, for instance, the struggles in Afghanistan and the equal rights movement here and all the totally cool, strong women in the world who I do share a kinship with, and proudly at that.

So how do I answer these kind of questions? What do women like? How the hell do I know? Personally I absolutely can’t tolerate being boxed into a limiting definition like that, and at the same time, politically I absolutely can’t stand the idea that I would be separated from the struggle of or in any way shirking my responsibility to or chance to advance the cause of, essentially, “my people.” Every single time I sit down to think about one of these questions, all of that comes up for me: my unhappiness with my own body, my revulsion at the general idea of motherhood and resentment about being expected to want that, my intense admiration for and loyalty to the queer and alt communities, the ways in which I think I’m very male, the ways in which I suppose I’m very female...I mean, we’re talking about a group here who run the gamut from Ann Coulter to Suraya Parlika. I just don’t know that you can say anything very definitive about “women.” But that said, I’d love to be able to write fewer fight scenes and have my editors be open to stories that focused more on interpersonal relationships. So, again, I don’t know. Make of that what you will.

Do you find you’re answering the same questions that were being asked of you when you started in this business? Are male comic readers still amazed that a "chick" can write Nightwing, or have they gotten over that?

Exactly the same questions, yes. It’s not the readers so much though, it’s the industry press and the interviewers. Young fathers will come up to me at cons sometimes and go out of their way to say they think it’s “cool” that a woman is writing comics, but I think they mean this more in terms of hoping for an inclusive world for their kids and appreciating signs of it than as an expression of amazement. And every now and then I’ll still run into a fan who sheepishly admits that he didn’t realize I was female until he got in line to get his books signed, but that’s as much about my name as my sex. I don’t have as much contact with them as other creators who frequent message boards or do several conventions every year, but the sense I get is that comic fans have better things to worry about than the sex of the person writing the comic. They’ll love it or hate it totally independent of that. People writing about the people who write comics, on the other hand, have not moved an inch on the subject. Or rather, “it” is still the subject, rather than my work in and of itself. There’s quite enough of my work out there for people to be drawing their own opinions about what it means for a woman to be writing in this industry, but for some reason, my nonfiction responses to questions about gender are still more interesting to most interviews than the fiction I’ve actually developed under this “condition of femaleness.”

Do you still feel that questions along that line challenge your identity as a human being?

Yeah, totally. Even more so as a writer. Imagine admiring the hell out of a group of people and what they do and working really hard to be included in that work. And you actually get there, you’re in, you’re one of the guys, except that every single time you have to interact with the press the very first thing they point out is that you’re not. They’re not judging the quality of your work or your ability to get along with the rest of the group or what you’ve produced, they just want you to talk about what it feels like to be an outsider. Well, I’m not an outsider. I’m a professional. I’m a writer — that’s a conscious decision on my part and something I’ve worked very hard to achieve. Being female, on the other hand, is something I was born into and have no control over.

I mean, there really seems to be this idea out there that women spend every single moment of their lives thinking about being women. Like instead of me going, “whoa, I love writing and this medium is so cool and I wonder if I could do it professionally?” I supposedly thought “Interesting...as a female I really enjoy these male comics and I wonder if I could break into this male industry and write female comics from a female’s perspective for a female audience?” That is totally ridiculous and marginalizing. You know I’m a writer because I have published written work out there — I’ve offered that, that’s fair game. But what makes you so sure that I’m a woman? Maybe I don’t feel like a woman, maybe I don’t identify that way. Maybe if you met me you’d realize I’m one of the least feminine people you’ve ever met. Or maybe not — maybe you’d see the breasts and the lipstick and the flawless social training in consideration and compliance and you’d think I was completely charming in a very typically female way. It’s complicated, and to really understand you’d have to be able to “read” me. But that is not on the table, that’s not something I’ve worked to put out there.

Being asked about being a “female comic writer” essentially takes me out of a context I’ve worked very hard to be included in (comic writer) and puts me in a context I find very isolating and ill-fitting. And after seven or eight years in the industry and literally hundreds of interviews the message becomes clear: I am not going to be allowed to assimilate. I don’t think that’s conscious on the part of most people, but it is powerful. And yes, it is a direct challenge to my humanity.

You mentioned that to ignore gender bias is to give it power. Has that been true in your case, or are you extrapolating from other people’s experience?

That was actually something my mother said once when we were discussing it, but it felt very true to me. And yes, gender bias is one of the things that, the minute you relax and stop worrying about it, can come back and bite you in the ass. In my case, personally, I really think that there was not much of it at DC when I started, so it was easy not to worry about, and indeed, with that group of people, appropriate not to worry about. I think I mistook their coolness as individuals for company culture, but then they all left for various reasons, and the people who came in to replace them were not as uniformly cool about it. So suddenly it is a problem again, but I’d become very unguarded about it and during the first several instances of it, it really caught me by surprise.

My inclination is still to ignore it most of the time, but when it costs me a job or triggers inappropriate press (like during a recent radio show when a colleague followed up phoned-in comments of mine with the charming observation that I was “really cute and probably got a lot of attention from lonely, male editors” when I was breaking in, when, in fact, he was the only one who hit on me during that period) then, yeah, I regret having not been more vocal and active in its opposition all along, though I’m also grateful for the reprieves.

Also you mention that you’re reluctant to take on “girl frenzy” type projects, because to write an all-woman title is to make the work about your experience as a female writer, and not just a DC comics writer... Are there any female characters you’d be happy to pen in their own title?

Well, I’ve done a few — Catwoman and Black Widow most prominently — and I love both those characters and really enjoyed working with them and would be thrilled to do so again. And I do think that the longer I’m in the industry producing good work, the less of an issue it should be. Both DC and Marvel have a lot of great female characters I’d love to work with (some of the X-nonMen, like Jean Grey, Rogue, and Mystique, are characters I’d love to do more with, for example), but I do feel I have to be a little bit careful when accepting or going after assignments. I’m more relaxed about that now than I was early on in my career, though, and hope that I can continue to be so. I don’t want to have to discriminate either.