Webcomics by Female Creators

Dylan Meconis' vampire comic Bite Me (Source: BiteMeComic.com)

My History with Manga & Comics is a series of blog posts that explore the artists and works of art that have directly inspired my love for drawing and creating stories through comics. Disclaimer: All of the images below were obtained from the artists’ websites in the past and do not belong to me.

When I moved to the United States in the summer of 2002, it was my first time having unlimited access to the internet. I’m almost embarrassed to say nobody saw me for days on end. I was surfing the web faster than the speed of dial-up and suddenly, I could look up every little thing I was curious about (Planets! Anime! What is Labor Day?)  This period opened up all  new worlds for me and I started joining growing communities at Deviantart and Livejournal.  Among my favorite discoveries  were original webcomics!

Like myself at the time, Dylan Meconis was in college when she started sharing pages of Bite Me online. Her hilarious and irreverent take on vampires was one of the first webcomics I regularly read and showed me how much fun sharing comics online could be. After graduating high school and leaving my friends behind in the Philippines, I had lost my primary “audience” for my comics and it took some time before I was creating original work again. Reading works like Bite Me helped fuel my drive to draw comics again and made me realize I could draw for other people, too. For this and for all the comics I may not get to mention here, I will always be grateful.

•  You can purchase the collected Bite Me as a beautiful paperback graphic novel here on Dylan’s store. She’s also serializing her new graphic novel Family Man online.

Left to right:  No Rest for the Wicked (Andrea Peterson),  Saturnalia (Nina Matsumoto),  Seal of the Devil (Maaria Laurinen), Cascadia (Clio Chiang)

I’ve been very lucky to have met some of my online friends through webcomics, shared interests and love for good stories. The internet really has made the world smaller for me to handle. As I’ve mentioned in previous blog posts, I would never have had the chance to interact with these prolific comic creators from all over the world if it hadn’t been for technology. I also never would have been exposed to as variety of creator-owned sequential art as I have without it. I’m not used to reading a lot of print comics since these were not available in bookstores and I had no idea where comic book shops in Manila were. Today, I keep up with these talented artists and even more on twitter. It’s really been a great experience reading their insight on projects, learning about works that inspire and excite them and gleaning their frustrations and hopes for the comic industry. I highly recommend doing the same if you’re an aspiring comic artist.

• Andrea recently brought No Rest for the Wicked out of its hiatus and is continuing the first and best fairy tale crossover on the web. (Way before Hollywood started jumping in on the trend!)
  
• Nina is currently a freelance artist for for Bongo Comics on The Simpsons and designs wicked videogame T-shirts on the side.
• Maaria was recently featured on Vulture and i09 for her genderbent Harry Potter series. She is currently serializing her self-published series Phantomland online which you can read here.
• Clio is a story artist for Walt Disney animation and recently worked on the traditionally-animated Winnie the Pooh movie.

Left to Right: Demonology 101 (Faith Erin Hicks), Return to Sender (Vera Brosgol), Strings of Fate (Jen Wang) and Reman Mythology (Amy Kim Kibuishi)

Now, I didn’t seek out these comics because they were created by female artists but it just so happens that their work appealed to me. These ladies made funny, moving character-driven stories told in expressive styles with great confidence. Since then, a handful of them have had their work published in print anthologies and have published their own books. It has been a personal pleasure and incredibly motivating to see these ladies grow in their artistic journeys and I look forward to seeing their future works.

• Faith just published her latest book Friends with Boys after briefly serializing it online earlier this year. She is currently self-publishing a weekly comic strip called The Adventures of Superhero Girl.
• Vera Brosgol is a storyboard artist for Laika and published the award-winning Anya’s Ghost.
• Jen Wang is a prolific illustrator and published the exquisitely rendered Koko Be Good.
• Amy Kim Kibuishi has had her work published in several Flight volumes and is working on a young adult fantasy novel.

Support these artists and buy their books!