Something I noticed a while back is that all the main anthropomorphized animals in comic strips are male. Comic strips from newspapers, that is. I’m sure there’s some webcomics that have female main characters. Note I said “main characters”. There’s often a female or two in strips with main males, but they’re always minor.
OK, I’m sure there are exceptions. There may even be one in a new strip in the local paper. It’s called Phoebe and her Unicorn. The unicorn is named Marigold Heavenly Nostrils and so far it’s been impossible to tell their gender. It hasn’t made any difference to the comic, so far anyway.
Anyway, think about it: Snoopy, Heathcliff, Marmaduke, Opus, Garfield and Odie. the two animals from “Get Fuzzy”, the three from “Over the Hedge”, Pogo, Grim and his friends from “Mother Goose and Grim” (Mother Goose is actually a minor character, despite being in the strip title), Pig and Rat from “Pearls Before Swine”, Earl and Mooch from “Muts” – all male. And I’m sure there’s a whole bunch more that I can’t think of off-hand.
So the question is: Why? Why are anthropomorphized animals so overwhelmingly male?
I think it’s that. If you look at comic strips in general, with the notable exception of Blondie and a few story strips (Apartment 3G, Mary Worth, and so on), most comic book characters are male. Sure, Hagar the Horrible has Hagar’s wife and daughter, but Hagar is the protagonist, not his wife and daughter.
Plus, the few comics I can think of that were made by women seem want to be about the lives of real women and the humor in everyday life. But there are enough men in comics that comics about normal men are already taken, so they get more creative.
Plus there’s just that general rule that women can connect with both men and women, but men connect better with men. It’s less true now than it used to be, but remember that the newspaper comic audience is typically more conservative–they like things the way they used to be.
I’ve never seen any indication that Mooch was male or female. And of course all the pet animals (as opposed to the wild ones like Crabby) are presumably neutered.
And while comic-strip humans are also biased male, the bias doesn’t seem nearly so great as with the animals: Sally Forth and The Pajama Diaries focus mostly on the female characters, Jump Start seems to be split about equally between Joe and Marcy, Dagwood gets more screen time but the strip is still named after Blondie, the female recurring characters in Non Sequitur seem to get more time than the males… But I can’t think of any comic-strip animal that’s definitely female, other than love interests for the male animals.
There are female characters in most of the strips the OP mentions, usually as quasi-love interests for the male characters.
Pogo had Miz Ma’m’selle Hepzibah and Miz Beaver along with Mrs. Rackety Coon and Miss Sis Boombah.
Heathcliff has a female cat that sits on the fence with him.
Pearls Before Swine has Pigita and Patty Crocodile.
In Peanuts, a girl Freida had a girl cat Faron.
Comic strips work like comic books and tv shows and video games and entertainment of every kind. Until extremely recently women were underrepresented, mimimized, stereotyped as mothers or love interests or helpless beings to be saved, and generally not depicted as equally human. I’ve been reading a lot of 40s mysteries because I’m collecting old paperbacks. Even in books where there is an approximately equal mix of characters the men, even the minor characters, are people, distinct and different, while the women are types, cardboard cutouts to mouth dialog.
That’s why women have been screaming so loudly in recent years that they need to see realistic role models in popular culture. Men take for granted that the complex powerful world will be mirrored in entertainment with male heroes. Women and other minorities could never hope to get more than crumbs. It’s way past time that changed.
Are either of those newspaper strips. Like the OP specifies. In the sentence immediately after the one you quoted.
[QUOTE=The OP]
Something I noticed a while back is that all the main anthropomorphized animals in comic strips are male. Comic strips from newspapers, that is. I’m sure there’s some webcomics that have female main characters.
[/QUOTE]
ETA: Huh, I see K&K is published in one newspaper. I’d still call it a webcomic, though.
I don’t know, it seems to me there’s a bigger difference between being published in zero papers and being published in one than there is between being published in one and being published in two hundred. The moment you’re published in even one paper, you lose most of the independence that webcomic authors have.
AFAIK, that one paper is in the author’s hometown and the only change he’s had to make is the format of the Sunday strip so it fits in the available space.
They actually made an effort to focus the strip on Blondie around 10-15 years ago, when she first set up her catering business. Since then, there has been an emphatic shift back not only to focusing on Dagwood almost exclusively, but to placing a heavy emphasis on the rather tiresome hook of his food obsession.
Should have known there was a previous thread on the topic. Someday, we’re going to get to the point where all legitimate questions have been asked at least once.
Looks like an early ambiguously-gendered character. Unless someone knows about that unicorn I mentioned in the OP, I think we may have another.
I figured there was a distinct possibility I was. The selection would be by the people who run the local papers I’ve read over the years, though.
