Fan GREG DEAN SCHMITZ responds

Greg's best known today to the thousands of visitors he gets daily to his site, Upcoming Movies.com as an absolute film nut. But he's also a lapsed comic book reader, and his list-making proclivities (which is putting it mildly) are quite often informative, useful or interesting. Not all three at all times, but list-making's the boy's calling, so what can you do? Greg is also the once and future writer of the Movie Wire at Comic Book Resources. (BY)

This isn't exactly an answer to your question, gail, but your question about how women are treated in comics got me thinking about what the current statistics for women in movies is, since I do so much movie stuff.

Well, I did a quick review of the 154 major films of 1997. The question I posed to each film was "Who's the star/main attraction of this film? Who's the star?"

Here are the sad results:

MEN: 104 films/67.5 percent
WOMEN: 28 films/18.5 percent
BOTH: 22 films/14.3 percent

The "Both" category is primarily star-driven romantic comedies like "Addicted to Love" or a movie like "Mother" with equally matched stars.

The movies that starred women were primarily drama's and quiet little movies few people saw.

Most of the big hits of the year came up under the "MEN" category.

The only actress who stands out in 1997 in this study is Sigourney Weaver, who was really the only woman who starred in a film that was a "hit", which was "Alien: Resurrection."

As I was going through the 154 films of 1997, checking off "MEN" and "WOMEN" on my list, it was almost depressing ... my pen was doing at times like 5 or 6 "MEN" checks for every occasionaly "WOMEN" check.

The funny thing is that 18 percent is probably about how representative women are in the DCU as well, after all... of the 7 "Big Guns" of the JLA, Wonder Woman accounts for 14 percent of that group, which is pretty close to 18 percent. (I'm not inspired enough to apply this excercise to comics right now :)