At the Comic Festival in Bristol in 2002, we launched our ongoing anthology title The Girly Comic, edited by Selina Lock. It was originally conceived as a vehicle for her own writing and that of other women, and aimed at a female audience (primarily the comics widows who are dragged kicking and screaming by their boyfriends to comic conventions) As submissions started to roll in, it was clear that a rethink was in order, as most submissions were from men!

I suppose that we shouldn’t have been surprised, given the ratio of male to female comic readers, but it left us with a dilemma. Should we reject an otherwise stonkingly good comic strip, just because the creator has a Y chromosome? And if we did adopt this policy, as an unknown quantity, would we be able to attract enough quality material to fill each issue? Would we need some kind of test to prove that our creators were indeed female?

And yet, if we opted for an open submission policy, where’s the hook? What’s so Girly about it? In the end, we settled on a compromise: Anyone can submit story ideas/scripts for consideration, regardless of gender or genre, as long as there’s a female protagonist, and the editor likes it. As simple as that.

It seems to work, and has led to an eclectic mix of styles in any given issue - oh, and although we have a handful of recurring characters, every story is complete in each issue, so readers can feel safe in picking up any issue at random without fear of missing out on half the story. Though, of course, we hope that they’ll want to buy all the other issues anyway! Plus, over time, we’ve uncovered a whole assortment of immensely talented women creators, so mission accomplished, I’d say!

Fast forward a year, and British comics readers voted The Girly Comic 4th Best Small Press/Indy Comic in the National Comic Awards 2003, behind the likes of Fred The Clown by Roger Langridge and Jack Staff by Paul Grist.

Fast forward another year, and we placed 2nd, ahead of both the aforementioned gentlemen! Unfortunately, that was the final year of the National Comic Awards, so we were unable to conclude our meteoric rise to glory!

In 2006, both The Girly Comic and Violent! were nominated for the Comic Creators Guild Award for Best Small Press Title.

Here and now in 2008, we have decided that the best way to bring The Girly Comic to the attention of a much wider audience is via the web. We won’t be abandoning the medium of print altogether, but that comes later.

So, The Girly Comic is going electronic, and will henceforth be a webcomic anthology. We will be bringing you a mixture of strips from the  Girly archives, and brand new strips commissioned for the webcomic. A little further down the line, we intend to publish a range of Print On Demand book editions.

And that’s the story so far. We hope you join us for the ride…

Luv & Jellybabies

Selina Lock