Last summer, I did a couple of Q&As with some of my favorite web comics artists, Danielle Corsetto of Girls With Slingshots and Jeph Jacques of Questionable Content. Specifically, I was interested in how both of them planned to handle the somewhat arrested developments of their main characters, writer-cum-liquor-store employee Hazel in Girls With Slingshots, and low-level librarian Marten Reed in Questionable Content.

At the time, Corsetto said that “Most of the horrible things that happen to my characters are a means of developing themselves for their audience. I mean, I’m sure that in their off-panel lives they’re laughing, crying, getting into trouble, and having life-changing moments, but those moments aren’t disclosed in the comic until you’ve been thoroughly acquainted with the characters. When you meet someone for the first time, you generally don’t know much about them until they’re made vulnerable in a situation.” And Jeph explained that:

A lot of it is based on who I was in my twenties, and the Northampton folks I know who are that age now. When you’re living in a college town and all you’ve got is a liberal arts degree, you’re pretty much gonna take whatever job you can get that pays the bills and isn’t too demanding. I think the philosophy is that working a job that is relatively low-responsibility and low-committment gives you more time and energy to focus on the stuff you REALLY care about. That’s certainly how I felt about it when I was 23! But I also think that is a bit of an illusion and a trap that you can get caught in. Even if it’s a low commitment job, you’re still giving it hours and days and months and years of your time — suddenly you’re 25, or 29, and you haven’t really “done anything” with your life, and you’re not entirely sure how that happened. And that’s something I’m planning on exploring more in the relatively near future, with Marten in particular.

I bring this up now because I think both comics have done a particularly impressive job moving their characters forward in the past year. In Girls With Slingshots, Hazel’s come up against one of the most common and painful dilemmas of your twenties: the end stages of a relationship where the parties love each other deeply but are fundamentally incompatible. Corsetto’s done a lovely job of inverting the standard emotional lineup here (and to a certain extent, upending the Judd Apatovian vision of dude slackers), making Hazel the irresponsible, undirected, uncommunicative half of the couple. Zach knows he wants to get married, he’s moved into a place he’d like to share with Hazel but only if she’s willing to accept the emotional attachment that, for Zach, comes with that step. He may not have a fancy career plan, but he has a solid one, building up revenue from his taxi business and considering expanding it. Hazel, by contrast, is letting her writing talent languish, whether out of fear or laziness. She’s not contributing much to her site with Thea, working instead at a liquor store, a dead-end choice that fuels her increasingly worrisome drinking habit. I’ve been impressed with how unlikable Corsetto’s been willing to make Hazel, and how painful she’s managed to make Hazel and Zach’s breakup within the context of a fundamentally funny, warm comic. Hazel is someone who doesn’t absorb new information or change easily, and it takes confidence in the comic to upend its tone and dynamics to make the prospect of Hazel’s evolution feel realistic and deeply necessary.

Jacques has taken a somewhat lighter hand with Marten, whose flaws are perhaps less pronounced than Hazel’s, but whose inertia is impressive. A recent arc in which Marten is forced to give the Smif library’s new interns an orientation tour revealed, in a funny and sympathetic way, how much he’s learned, and how much he doesn’t actually know about what he’s doing. While Corsetto’s tackled a well-documented facet of a lot of people’s twenties, Jacques is taking on one of the big secrets: that it can take a really long time to figure out what you like doing, what you’re good at, and the even narrower subset of things that overlap those two disparate categories. It’s a process that often involves compromise, and definitely involves courage when you decide to change course.

To a certain extent, I’ve grown up with Hazel and Marten—I started out younger than both of them, and have grown past them as time moves faster in the real world than in the strips. It’s been a real privilege to have Corsetto and Jacques tell stories about people my age that are as good as these. And television networks looking for the next great show about twenty-somethings could do worse than to consider adapting these wonderful, evolving stories.

Six months ago, it seemed like we were at the verge of a promising new age in female comedy (at least, if you’re a white lady). Bridesmaids was a big, and unexpected, hit. And it was the beginning of a television season in which the hottest trend was sitcoms created by women. As much as I would have wished for a string of hits, the results have been more predictable. The shows have ranged from the toxic Are You There, Chelsea? and 2 Broke Girls, to the increasingly-tolerable New Girl, to the outright winning Up All Night. And despite the boom in shows created by women, the episodes of these programs have been overwhelmingly directed by men. And men have written slightly more than half the episodes in six shows I examined. If a revolution for women in entertainment is under way, this fall may have been the vanguard, but in both employment of women and depictions of them on television, we’re a long way from victory.

Of Whitney‘s 20 episodes, just 7 were written by women, and of those seven, only three were written by women other than show creator Whitney Cummings. The other show Cummings created, 2 Broke Girls, has been influenced much more by showrunner Michael Patrick King than by Cummings (she wrote just one episode of the show), though it’s actually doing better than Whitney at getting episodes written by women on the air: women have written 9 of the show’s 20 episodes, while men have written 11. On New Girl, almost twice as many episodes were written by men (11) as by women (6). Liz Merriweather, the show’s creator, wrote two out of those 17 episodes. It might be hard to imagine, given how much the show seems like a Female Chauvinist Pig archetype, but a majority of Are You There, Chelsea? episodes are written by women—6 out of 10. And it’s the only show on this list where every episode is directed by a woman, Gail Mancuso, who’s also directed an episode of Suburgatory, and is reteaming with Roseanne Barr on her new NBC sitcom Downwardly Mobile. Suburgatory also has a narrow majority of its episodes scripted by women, including series creator Emily Kapnek, 10 out of 19. And Up All Night is the undisputed champion—in a world where having 13 of a show’s 20 episodes written by women counts as an overwhelming victory.

These numbers are a striking reminder that we can’t count on female showrunners and show creators to do all the work of getting more women working on television programs. And we shouldn’t ask them to. Being a woman doesn’t mean you don’t enjoy working with men, or that you can’t learn from men’s perspectives. And we shouldn’t ask women to deny themselves those pleasures and those insights just to make up the gaps created by men who aren’t curious enough to want to work with women, and as a result are missing out on fresh and exciting perspectives, as well as potential friendships and working partnerships. If women creators or showrunners are solely responsible for getting more women writing for television, then the cancellation of a single show or a mass decision by studios that lady-run or lady-created shows are no longer a trend they want to ride could create a massive dropoff in the number of women writers. Until men and women are equally invested in getting more women’s voices in writers’ rooms, those numbers won’t improve in a permanent way.
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I’ve written in the past, and some of you have agreed in comments, that it’s been interesting to observe the developments of webcomics like Questionable Content and Girls with Slightshots. Unlike comics like Doonesbury, where the characters age and experience current events at roughly the same rate as readers, time is moving much more slowly for Jeph Jacques’ Marten Reed or Danielle Corsetto’s Hazel. I started reading both comics while I was in college, at a time when Marten and Hazel’s struggles to figure out what they wanted to do were things I knew were in my immediate future.

But as the years have gone by, Hazel’s been laid off, and Marten’s moved from one dead-end job to another, I’ve wondered how these characters — and how these comics — are going to move forward. Danielle Corsetto, who has been drawing Girls With Slingshots since 2004, was kind enough to answer some of my questions about what’s next for Hazel, who lost her newspaper job in a recession, her other characters’ hopes and dreams, and who her influences are in the world of webcomics.

As a young journalist, I’ve spent a lot of time sympathizing with Hazel and Thea. Any plans to get either of them back into the profession? Have Hazel start a partying and drinking blog? Have Thea start her local Patch site? And if so, why not? Did you want to get the two characters beyond journalism? Or was having them be unemployed simply a convenient way to do some character development?

Ooooh, damn you for figuring out my ploy!

Most of the horrible things that happen to my characters are a means of developing themselves for their audience. I mean, I’m sure that in their off-panel lives they’re laughing, crying, getting into trouble, and having life-changing moments, but those moments aren’t disclosed in the comic until you’ve been thoroughly acquainted with the characters.

When you meet someone for the first time, you generally don’t know much about them until they’re made vulnerable in a situation. I can attest, as I’ve watched my own friends go through breakups, layoffs, and deaths of loved ones. People don’t open themselves up until they feel it’s safe. I tend to think that, if you’ve been reading Girls With Slingshots long enough, it’s safe to share their struggles.

To answer your question, though, I’m not entirely sure what’s going to happen to Hazel or Thea! Originally I wanted them to develop an website/blog called “Girls With Slingshots,” but now I’m not so sure. It’s a little too close to Danielle’s Life Story, and this isn’t an autobiography.

Guess you’ll have to keep reading. ;)
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