A Better World for Girls and Boys One Graphic Novel at a Time
/Ben interviewed John Marcotte, the founder of Heroic Girls, a charitable 501c3 organization, based in Sacramento, CA. They talk about the reason the organization came into existence, some of its accomplishments to date, and an exciting program they’re rolling out—The Heroic Academy.
Heroic Girls is “dedicated to empowering girls by advocating for strong role models in alternative media — particularly comics. It aims to get more girls and women involved in the creation and consumption of comic books as a tool to increase assertiveness and self-esteem, and to help them to dream big.”
Enjoy the interview replay or the edited transcription of the interview below.
Community Spotlight: Heroic Girls
0:10: Ben: Good morning, everyone. Welcome to another live interview here at Empire's Comics Vault. We have something very special for you today. There are big things happening here in Sacramento. Most of you will know about this organization and the man behind it. We're talking with John Marcotte of Heroic Girls. So welcome to the show, John.
John: Ben, thank you for having me.
Ben: Yes, most definitely. I'm actually really excited about this. This has been an organization that we have got to see grow, starting from the ground up to become something that is really becoming something, so why don't you tell us just a little bit about what Heroic Girls is?
John: Sure. As you know, I'm a huge nerd. That's how I met you. I come in to buy my comics every week. I have two daughters, and as they were growing up, they started picking up my love of superheroes. They like watching the old Bruce Timm Justice League cartoon and Batman and all those types of things.
I started to notice that I thought superheroes were good for girls. It was a good contrast to Princess culture, which is what they're given a lot of the time. The heroes are more active, you know. I thought there were benefits to superheroes for girls.
“What if we did an online book club for kids, and it was graphic-novel themed, and it was focused on equality?”
So I started writing about that on Tumblr, where people go to express their feelings. Then I was picked up by a feminist website in New York, Women You Should Know. They liked what I was writing and asked me to write for them. So I wrote for them for a little bit.
Then I became a Huffington Post blogger. The Huffington Post picked me up, and so you know, just kind of stair-stepped up for me, just writing kind of a journal on Tumblr to the Huffington Post. I wrote for them for a very brief period of time before I realized they're never going to pay me.
I decided that I was going to, you know, kind of strike out on my own. So I bought the domain HeroicGirls, and I started putting the pictures of the girls cosplaying and some of the essays I'd written. From there, I did a TED talk on why superheroes are good for girls.
We started a Facebook group, which just has grown over time, and we just passed, I think, 80,000 people following us on Facebook right now. So we started looking at it more as a way to talk about feminism and pop culture in general--not just my kids.
We've now formed a 501c3 nonprofit. We’re a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting gender equality through the use of pop culture and other media.
2:40 Ben: That's absolutely fantastic. It has come so far. This was your spare time. You're doing this in your spare time where it was just absolutely taxing, but it would pay off.
3:00 John: Yeah, it's paid off. I've always been passionate about the work. It's just hard when you’re trying to, you know, eat.
The big dream is that we are organized as a nonprofit, that we manage to be established well enough that I can do this full time. We're not there yet, but we've made huge strides just in the past few months. We’re looking forward to the day when that might happen.
Ben: That's perfect. You had a lot of notice early on even because of the cosplay they were into. Did that help drive the people to the site?
4:00 John: Absolutely. It was the instigation of everything really.
Why Does Spider-Girl Have a TuTu?
Because they liked the Justice League cartoon, they wanted to dress as superheroes. That was one of the first essays. We went to the Spirit Superstore and Target. It's different today, but going back in time five or six years ago, we went looking for a girl superhero costume.
There was a Batgirl costume. It was nothing but hot pink. There was a Spider-Girl costume which had a tutu and a fairy wand. It was a wand with a Spider-Man head on top of it.
The girls were like, "well, that isn't what Wonder Woman's costume looks like. Those aren't the right colors. Why does Spider-Girl have a tutu?" There's no good answer to those things.
So, I wrote a thing about 'why does every girl's costume have to be cute?'
We started a campaign called #MoreThanCute and it went viral. We were on the BBC about that. Headline News, the cable channel, interviewed Stella and me live from Wondercon.
4:55: So, yes, basically the cosplay was the center of it all. We got lots of attention from creators. Kelly Sue DeConnick was a big booster because Stella makes an awesome Captain Marvel. Gail Simone retweeted them when they were the Birds of Prey.
Cosplay was a huge part of the early genesis of the site and is what started me thinking about some of these issues.
The Toy Aisle Has Radically Changed When It Comes to Girl’s Action Figures
5:18 Ben: In mentioning that, one of my favorite videos that you guys did was the one where you three were running around Toys R Us looking for superhero toys for the girls, and you couldn't find anything.
5:31 John: No, it was Target. It wasn’t us three, because I don't appear on camera unless I have to--and you made me this time.
We videotaped them because the girls were big into Guardians of the Galaxy. They wanted a Gamora action figure. They had made an action figure for every single character in that movie, including some of the grunts, but they didn't make a Gamora action figure.
We thought that was a good place to start. We went to Target. We said 'let's make a video about trying to find a Gamora action figure.' So we went to Target and we looked for Gamora.
6:00: I couldn't find Gamora, and I said 'let's keep going,' because they had a Justice League set out.
Where's Wonder Woman? Well, they didn't have Wonder Woman.
Where's Black Widow? They had the Avengers out. They didn't make a Black Widow. They had them in the Legends line, the big $20 ones. Those aren't really the toys that are made for kids. Whenever something talks about how many points of articulation it has, that's not a toy for kids anymore.
We found one, actually. There was one Wonder Woman action figure in the entire toy aisle at Toys’R’Us. It was the only female superhero. It was part of a set where you bought the entire Justice League. It cost $50 to get it.
You had to buy eight male heroes to get one Wonder Woman. That was the only way you could get it at all.
It’s weird to think that it was just a few years ago, you know? It was just five or six years ago. Things have radically changed.
Since then we've had Wonder Woman come out. We've had Captain Marvel come out. A lot of these issues were brought up at the time. We were part of that. We actually talked to Disney about the fact that 'hey, why can’t we find any Gomorrah or Black Widow merchandise?’
And you know, they did better the next time. Every iteration they're doing better and now you can find some of those action figures. They're coming out with things like DC Superhero Girls, which are superheroes aimed right at girls. Marvel Rising is Marvel's answer to that. There's a Star Wars line of The Force Rising or something. It's the Star Wars line of dolls like Leia and Ray and all the female characters from Star Wars.
They went from thinking of girls as an afterthought--if they thought of them at all--to directly marketing this type of material to girls because they realize that girls will buy it. Before, they just assumed the girls wouldn't be interested and they never made it for him.
7:50 Ben: Nice. Didn't you actually get pulled in at one point to talk about this with Heroic Girls?
John: Yes. Some of those companies have requested anonymity. They didn't want to be known. And there are different companies that have consulted with us and asked us to come and talk about how we think we should market to girls, what girls might be interested in. We advocate very strongly that girls would be interested in this type of material.
I think DC Superhero Girls really kind of proved the market for this. It was a line of action figure dolls that are the female superheroes in DC that are aimed at girls. They were only available at Target and it wasn't because Target shelled out a bunch of money. It's because nobody else wanted them.
Within one year of them being released, they went from 'they weren't sure if anybody wanted it,' to being a billion-dollar franchise. They made a billion dollars selling DC Superhero Girls, because there was nothing else. There was all this pent up demand. There were all sorts of girls and adult women that were just waiting for something like this. So once they knew there was money involved, all the companies really got on board with equality. So...
9:09 Ben: Imagine that.
John: Imagine that, yes. It's hard to make them altruistic, but you can certainly dangle dollars in front of them, and they'll do the right thing. That kind of opened the floodgates where all of a sudden you saw all these other attempts and opportunities to market to girls and women.
Ben: What's interesting about that is--from my perspective as a retailer--the vast majority of young adults to children readers of the comics here are young girls. The boy markets love video games. But especially here, with DC Superhero Girls and such, it's all young girls who are picking this stuff up.
10:00 John: Girls in general at a young age, in particular, are more likely to read for pleasure than boys. It's more of a hobby that girls pick up. I think a lot of that is socialization--what boys are taught they’re supposed to be like and what kind of activities that we think boys should be engaged in. I don't think that boys are inherently not readers. For whatever reason, girls do it more often than boys do. If they're given the opportunity, they will definitely latch on to this stuff.
The comic book market for girls is enormous. It was a lot of curmudgeons or maybe misogynists who would tell you girls don't like comics, comics aren't for girls, but they're buying more than boys are. It's just they're buying different stuff.
“When a boy can read a story where the girl is the protagonist, it allows them to empathize with girls in a way that we don’t ask boys to empathize with girls very much at all.”
11:00: If you look at who has sold more graphic novels than anybody on the planet over the past decade, it is not Matt Fraction or Kelly Sue DeConnick. It's Raina Telgemeier and her series of novels of graphic novels for teenage girls. They're brilliant books, but they're not something that people who read comics with people wearing their underwear on the outside and punching each other might have heard of—unless you have a little girl.
Girls are devouring comic material. It's just that sometimes they didn't feel welcome in the traditional comics market. So they're getting it in different ways. They're going through Scholastic. They're going to regular bookstores. They weren't invited to the party, I guess a few years ago by the major superhero comic companies, so they went and made their own party. They figured out how to get this stuff on their own.
Introducing Heroic Girls' Heroic Academy for Girls and Boys
Ben: That's perfect. Speaking of graphic novels and young girls reading, Heroic Girls is launching their Heroic Academy. Can you tell us about that?
12:00 John: This is the first thing that we did after we became a 501c3 nonprofit. We applied for a grant from the city. They have money that they've dedicated to offsetting the effects of COVID. They said put a proposal out there--how you would help with society in general and the arts, in particular, to offset the effects of COVID-19?
Our proposal was that we have all these kids stuck at home and they're not able to get a normal school experience. They're not able to socialize normally.
What if we did an online book club for kids, and it was graphic-novel themed, and it was focused on equality? Half the books would feature male protagonists. Half the books would feature female protagonists. We would try to get racial diversity in there. We would try to get sexuality diversity or maybe have some LGBTQ+ content in there—things to broaden people's horizons.
12:43: All the books would be acclaimed and award-winning. The city went for it. We got a grant--a fairly sizable grant--to establish a graphic novel book club.
We're buying the books for the kids because we're targeting economically disadvantaged kids who couldn't normally afford them. Graphic novels can be kind of pricey. We're giving them each six graphic novels. We're going to meet every couple of weeks and talk about graphic novels, go over them.
I have teachers that I've recruited to help me lead Zoom classes. We have this whole program laid out. We're going to give them a “Reading Is Fun" kit, where they have a comics bag that says, "This is my comics bag" on the side, a little tote bag with the Heroic Girls logo.
We're minimizing the girl part just slightly for this one because we are trying to attract both boys and girls.
When you're talking about equality, it's not an issue that can be solved just by talking to girls and women. You have to include boys and men in the conversation because it doesn't matter how much girls and women want to be treated as equal if the boys and men decide not to, it's not going to happen.
There are basically two reasons to read a story. One is because you see yourself on the page and you go, 'that can be me.' That's why it's important for girls to see themselves on the page. That's really important. They can see themselves as the hero of the story.
14:00: But equally important--and something that doesn't get talked about as much--is seeing people that are not you on the page. When a boy can read a story where the girl is the protagonist, it allows them to empathize with girls in a way that we don't ask boys to empathize with girls very much at all.
Most children's literature has male protagonists. It's very unusual to have female protagonists. So by kind of forcing it a little bit and just saying, 'Hey, read some books that have female protagonists,' we're hoping that if that idea spreads a little more, that boys at a young age will learn a little bit more on how to empathize with girls, and how to socialize better with girls.
It will have benefits for society further down the road. We think we have to start foundationally when they're kids and talk about it then because, by the time they're teenagers or something, it might be a little too late.
Ben: No, that's fair. Do you know any of the books that you're going to be including in this?
15:00 John: Oh, yeah, I'm trying to think of all the ones… We're breaking it into four reading groups, all the way from kindergarten to all the way through high school. We have things like El Deafo. We're doing Miss Marvel’s No Normal, the first Miss Marvel volume. I think we're gonna do The Hiketeia by Greg Rucka and J.G. Jones.
15:22: We were trying to do a breadth of diversity in the types of books so that everybody gets at least one superhero book or two. We’re also reading things like March, about the civil rights march on Selma. We're trying to find regular dramas and things about day-to-day life to seed in there. All of it is good. All of it is engaging.
16:00: It's not just superhero books, which I absolutely love. We’re also trying to show that comics as a medium is capable of more than just superheroes—not that there's anything wrong with superheroes, but you can do other things too. You don't have to just do comics, just do superheroes. There are all these other genres that comics are capable of conveying. People should take a look.
16:14 Ben: That's great. How do people get involved in something like this?
John: Email or message me on Facebook.
Our Facebook group is really kind of the heart of the organization. I wish it were the website, but with a full-time job and everything, it's hard for me to write content for the website as often as I should. The Facebook group is an ongoing conversation. We post there every day. Everything that's going on in our world gets posted to Facebook at some point.
So just message me on Facebook. We're @HeroicGirls. If you go facebook.com/heroicgirls, that's us. You can also go to our website, HeroicGirls.com. Email is john@heroicgirls. Any of those will work.
We'd love to have more people involved. Our goal right now is to try to come up with more ways to have real-world impact, not just talk about things on the internet, but to figure out ways that we can go out and engage in the world and make the world a better place. That's the new goal.
Ben: That is amazing. We have a comment from @MDK1011. She says that Amethyst is the first one [comic book character] that attracted her as a young girl.
John: Yes, the new Amethyst is quite good.
Ben: Amy Reeder, baby!
John: Amy Reeder! We're including Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur, speaking of Amy Reeder.
What was the other one that I just thought of? We're including Bone.
It's easy to say you want diversity and then when you get down to it, you realize, 'Boy, there just aren't a lot of comics that feature people of color as the protagonist, and things like that. It gets difficult to find. There are some, but when you're looking for a specific age category, and you also want it to be highly acclaimed—and, you know, have some sort of basis to say, "this is why I picked it,”--it can get a little more difficult, which is kind of an indictment of the industry more than anything. Not that there aren't examples of it, but it's harder than you would think when you actually sit down and try to come up with these different diverse comics to find one in every age category. It was more challenging than I thought it was going to be when I started.
Ben: Do you have Cleopatra in space on that list? Because you should.
18:48 John: I know we have some Ben Hatke. I don't think it's Cleopatra In Space. But, of course, we have Ben Hatke. He's a great graphic novelist for kids. If you haven't read him and you have kids, you should get he's wonderful.
Ben: Yes, he is.
The Grant Process
Ben: You got the grant. You spent so much time on this grant. Rewrites. Getting it perfect. Then, when you got before the council, they literally were just like, 'Yeah, let's do it!'?
19:20 John: We didn't know. This is the first grant. I thought of this as a learning experience. But you know, you don't expect to hit the home run on your first time out!
We could watch it by Zoom. It was a committee that recommended this to City Council. It's an Arts Commission and they were recommending all these grants. We figured out we were asking for way too little money. There were people who were asking for a quarter-million dollars. I'm sitting there thinking, 'I should have asked for a free comic for every child in the city!’ But I'm fine with it. I think we kept it within our means to accomplish. I'm glad the size we picked.
When they got to ours, they were just really, really excited about it. They loved the idea, the whole idea, of trying to promote gender and racial equality through media and talking to kids about these issues. They just thought it was wonderful.
We were just nervous. We were wondering what they were going to say because they trashed a couple of the proposals. Then, they had a person who was in charge of reading our grant, who was going to present it to everyone else. She was the one that had to talk everyone through it.
She read it, and she said, 'this one's my favorite.’
I went, 'Oh my God.'
20:44: They were really excited and supportive. They've helped us through the entire process. When we went to the city council, they rubber-stamped us pretty quickly. We went through three stages of that before we got approved. At every stage, I'm thinking, “Oh, the shoe is going to fall at some point.' They're gonna say, ‘Oh, you're too new' or ‘What are you doing with comic books? Why is this a thing?' But it never happened. Everybody was really on board and supportive. Now, we're just in hurry-up mode.
Ben, did you ever see the movie Brewster's Millions with Richard Pryor? His grandfather dies, and he inherits a bunch of money. The deal is that his grandfather wants to make sure that he doesn't spend it frivolously. So he has two options: either he can have $30 million right now and that's all he gets. Or secondly, he can make a deal where he has to spend $30 million in 30 days and not have anything left at the end of it. If he does that, he gets $300 million.
Because of the deals of this grant and where it's coming from--the federal government—, we have to spend all the money and get the program finished by the end of the year. But we haven't got the check yet. So that's why we're in this hurry-up mode.
22:00: We're going to get the check. Then we're going to be talking immediately to you about helping us order some graphic novels from Diamond [comics distributor]. So we're in this insane hurry-up period where we have to plan the program, execute it and hit the ground running. We barely have enough time to get everything in. It's making us focus, I'll tell you that.
22:27: We're on top of it. We're trying to pre-plan as much as possible. We've already identified schools we're going to be working with and we've got them on board. We’re working on how we're going to get the books to the kids and whether teachers can help us select kids that would be good for the program rather than just, you know, sticking a note on the bulletin board and hoping that the right kids apply.
We told them 'let's look for kids that either would get a lot out of this program because they're looking for more ways to challenge themselves and more opportunities to advance themselves academically or reluctant readers--kids that have had a hard time getting into reading because graphic novels are so good at getting young kids, or adults for that matter, who are a little bit reluctant to read.' It gets some started down the path of reading. Those are the two groups that we're focused on.
We want a mix because if we get too many of the reluctant readers, the book club will be a bunch of people staring at each other. We think that having a mix of those two groups together in a fun format would be a way to help out both groups.
Ben: Okay, well, two things: number one, with the zoom meetings, is it going to be open? Or is it just going to be for the people who are part of this program?
John: Right now we're going to limit it to the people who are part of the program only because we're at max capacity with how many kids we think we can have on a Zoom call at one time. They will be available online afterward, so you can look at them. If you've read the book and want to hear the discussion, that's certainly possible.
For those who want an open graphic novel discussion, they can always come to our book club, or Empire's Comics Vault has an online book club that they're doing right now. [Editor’s note: check our calendar]. Those are two great groups that will take all comers.
We're reading Red Sonia: Queen of Plagues this month because I love that book. It's the one that really sold me on Red Sonia, in a way that I wasn't fully sold on before, because Gail Simone's just a wonderful writer.
Heroic Academy is really just for the kids that are in the program, mainly because there's limited bandwidth to how many people we can have in the Zoom call and really serve them well. We want to make sure we do right by the kids who have been selected for the program.
If you're looking for other opportunities, there are book clubs in town. I would suggest you either talk to Ben or talk to me or talk to both of us because we're reading books every month.
Ben: Yes, most definitely. We have another question from viewer MDK: 'If you were to get more kids involved in this than you had the money for, is there a way for people to donate, for example, to sponsor a kid?’
25:00 John: Right now, the bottom line wouldn't be money for the kids. It would be teachers and instructors that are qualified and prepared to lead a conversation with a group of kids.
We're still scrambling to make sure we have enough coverage because we have four reading groups and we're reading six books for each group. We're running 24 Zoom meetings in the space of a few months. We want to make sure that we're not just throwing any “Tom, Dick, or Harry" up there. It's somebody that has the tools able to talk about graphic novels and to talk about the structure of the story and/or people who are teachers who are good with working with kids and getting the most out of them and instructing them.
We're still trying to identify that, so if you're a teacher, please talk to me. If you're a teacher that has an interest in these type of topics, please talk to me because that's one of the areas that we're still working on. If you're really interested in the program, just message me afterward. Find me on Facebook or something.
Ben: That is amazing. If you're interested in the program, contact John. If you're a teacher, contact John. Congratulations on everything, John. It has been amazing watching this evolve. I'm really excited to see where you go with this in the future.
John: Thank you so much, Ben and I want to really extend my thanks. You've been a huge supporter of everything that we've done. Ever since we started, we were at the first Creative Women Mini-Con, even though I am clearly not a woman. We've done a couple of those. We've enjoyed your support over the years.
Ben: Well, thank you, sir. I appreciate it. I'm looking forward to many more years. I know this program is going to be an amazing success.
