Female Force: Women in the Media

This comic combines the individual comics for Oprah Winfrey, Barbara Walters, Meredith Vieria, and Ellen DeGeneres.  Like the Clinton comic it really doesn’t add anything new to the other comics, but just combines the four comics together with a new cover and one easy to carry format.  It is however a chance to highlight four successful and powerful women in the media and I was really interested to read it, because I don’t know much about any of the four women being highlighted.

If all you know about Oprah, Barbara, Meredith, or Ellen is what you see on TV then you are really missing out on four exception women.  Never mind the fact that they’re great reporters or run media empires or are just funny comedians.  The obstacles these women have overcome and the journeys they have taken to get where they are will blow your minds away.  Who can forget when Ellen came out on national TV as being gay?  But how many people realize just how much criticism she came under and the abuse that was hurled at her for it?  But she keeps dancing.  Barbara Walters is known today as one of the top interviewers in the world.  But did you know that some of her early partners refused to work or acknowledge her because she was a woman?  And the story doesn’t end there.  Read the issue to learn more!

Overall the writing in the issues is solid.  They clearly present the facts and they don’t trivialize the women they’re discussing, but instead show them as people to admire for the obstacles they overcame in their lives to get to where they were.  This especially noticeable in the Barbara Walters and Oprah Winfrey issue, which highlight the trials and tribulations both of these women endured, not only in the workplace but in their personal lives as well.  I especially like the writing in the Barbara Walters issue and I had no idea the obstacles that she overcame.  There are a couple of issues with this comic.  The first one is relatively minor, but I think the author for the Ellen issue was a bit too close to the subject material.  She talks about how she relates to Ellen, which is nice, but she keeps inserting herself into the storyline to agree or sympathize with points of the story instead of just letting the issue flow.  It still has good information it just becomes a bit annoying.  I don’t really care much for the Meredith Vierira issue though.  The writing is ok, but the story itself just really doesn’t work.  Instead of presenting a straightforward biography of Meredith like the other issues do, the author instead tells it as a story of two young girls doing a report for school on Vierira.  And while it isn’t bad it just doesn’t contain a lot of information about Vierira and instead we see more of the two young girls.  If it had been a longer issue it wouldn’t have been too bad, but as it was it was information was just crammed in which made the story not good.

There is a wide variety of different art styles within this issue, which is really quite nice to see and be exposed to.  I especially like the Barbara Walters issue which has the artwork done in a style that is reminiscent of how newspapers used to put photographs into newspapers back in the early part of the 20th century and then they added color to it.  So it has an almost richer quality to it with the heavy dark lines to illustrate the characters.  It’s probably the best done of the issues, but it also has my biggest gripe.  At the end of the issue where the writer says that other women owe a debt of gratitude to Barbara the artist chooses to depict the women as big-breasted superheroes.  I mean seriously?  I was offended by the depiction and it didn’t fit with how the rest of the comic was done.  I could probably continue psychoanalyze this depiction for the next 20 pages, but I won’t.  The rest of the artwork in the issue is decent enough, but most of the characters are drawn flat without much depth to them.  It isn’t bad, but there’s nothing that really stands out and makes the comic feel different.  I will say that Bluewater did an excellent job of picking the artists for the issue though, as the style of art seemed to work well with the story.  For example, the art for Ellen has a light, airy, humorous quality to it.

As long as you don’t already own the individual issues, this collection does have a good value and is worth buying as a whole, unlike the First Family comic.  The issues are fairly well written and give good biographical information on women that most people only recognize by name and don’t really know who they are.  I’d recommend this comic to anyone that’s interested in learning more about these four women or anyone interested in media in general.