The Evolution of Female Readership

The comic book industry is currently experiencing a renaissance of female readers across all genres, including superhero books. By every conceivable metric, women have engaged in superhero fandom in ever-increasing levels over the past decade. However, historical demographic breakdowns for the readership of superhero comics are essentially non-existent. There is one way to construct our own data, however. In the early 1960s, letter columns became a regular feature in superhero comic books, and remained a constant in the genre through the 1990s. This chapter uses letters pages as a way of estimating the level of, and investigating the nature of, female readership of superhero comics.