NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH

Typically, people read comics as a form of escapist entertainment, in much the same way as others may prefer television, movies, or novels. The market for non-fiction in comics is very limited, with only a very few people gaining any reasonable amount of success from it. Harvey Pekar and Joe Sacco seem to be the only names that the average comic fan can think of immediately.
Add to this another niche genre, comics for girls, and you probably have the ultimate formula for a comic that's absolutely unsellable. The success of recent works like PERSEPOLIS may be changing the tide, however.
You might start to believe these are new trends in comics, but as we'll see here, the ground work was laid out as far back as the WWII era.




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From the same comic, here's an example of what the typical male cartoonist did (and still does) with female characters:



from CALLING ALL GIRLS #31, July 1944
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