Whilst searching the net for articles on racism in old Warner Brother and Disney cartoons (of which I found precious few; my Google-fu is shamefully weak) I did come across the website of Genevieve Petty. Genevieve is a Grad student who written several papers on her various interests, including Japanese and American comicbooks. One article of hers is called Sexuality in American and Japanese Comic Books, and it takes a look at, well, sex in the two country's comicbooks.

Now, I'll be the first to admit: women in just about every superhero comic published by American's get the Playboy-treatment. They're idealized, two-dimensional parody's of real women, and very much inline with your average 15-year-old male's sexual fantasy of what a woman should look and behave like. So her examples are certainly indefensible proof of the seixst attitudes you find in many comics.

The problem I have with this is that Genevieve's paper gives the impression that all male comicbooks are like this, when in fact all she talks about are super-heo comics. She completely avoids or ignores A) the small-press/independent titles out there that are either far fairer in their treamtent of women ( Terry Moore's Strangers in Paradise, for example, and Jason Lute's Berlin is another, not to mention almost all of Andi Watson's work.) or B) the growing number of women creators such as Carla Speed McNeil, Lea Hernandez, or Jessica Abel, just to name a few.

In academia, comics generally get a fairer shake than they do with your average joe. It's a shame to see that even in academia there are people who are too short-sighted.