We Can't March

As an indeterminate number of protesters took to the streets on May 9th (the precise figure apparently depends on how right-wing the paper you're reading is), disabled activists took to Twitter under the hashtag #WeCantMarch to make their voices heard. The hashtag was started by Twitter user @hnahhnah, who is organising further actions with other activists, and others.

Tory austerity measures have been particularly harsh on vulnerable groups, with disabled people bearing the brunt of an onslaught of cuts to social welfare. It's harder than ever for many of us to access the financial support we need in order to survive. Those of us who have suffered - some disproportionately - under the Conservative-led government may want to show our opposition in some way, but the standard method of attending rallies is inaccessible to many of us for all sorts of reasons.

How does EDS prevent me, personally, from attending marches?

- I can't walk the kinds of distances usually covered by protest rallies.

- I can't remain on my feet for longer than about 10 minutes without severe pain.
- Were I to use a wheelchair on a march, I would risk being tipped out of it.

- If I am kettled, I will not be allowed to take the measures - sitting, lying down, stretching - that will keep my pain levels at least bearable.

- If I fall while marching I am at disproportionate risk of injury, either by being trampled or by being helped to my feet (thanks to joint laxity in my elbows, wrists, and shoulders).

- If I am arrested, I risk injury when being manhandled by police and may be denied access to essential medication. This might sound like an exaggeration, but it's happened to a lot of people.

- If I am injured in a kettle, I may be denied access to medical treatment.

- Large crowds carry a disproportionate risk of personal injury and excessive amounts of stimulus, which in turn gives me panic attacks.

- If I do attend a march and nothing bad happens, it will still take me at least two days to recover to the point where I can do basic daily tasks again.

Does this mean people with EDS and other disabilities should be locked out of protest, when austerity measures are causing us so much suffering? Of course not. And this is why #WeCantMarch is so important. We can't march, but we can organise. We can help produce information pamphlets and make signs. We can provide food and water for protesters, and catering for after marches. We can provide telephone and Internet based support to arrestees. We can lobby the media to provide honest, unbiased, and accurate coverage of rallies. We can boost your voices while adding our own. The hashtag lists a wealth of other ways in which we can support people at rallies 

I have these words on this page. I cannot march, but I can still shout. Let me in. If you're organising, take some time to think about how you can include people who can't march - not just people with disabilities, but people who are at greater risk of violence (such as ethnic minorities, immigrants awaiting asylum decisions, and people who are visibly queer or trans), and people who can't afford to travel to major cities, and people whose caring obligations or professions take priority over risking arrest, and countless others too.

We'll be over here, organising and doing what we can. Join us, and let us join you.

Recommended reading:
Caroline Lucas writes in the Independent about the likely impact of cuts to the Independent Living Fund.
[Trigger warning - suicide] Investigations of suicides linked to benefit sanctions are ongoing.
Report on the case of David Clapson, who was found dead in his home after benefits sanctions.
[Trigger warning - suicide] Black Triangle lists benefit claimants who died after sanctions between February and October 2014.

I welcome suggestions for other resources, particularly on barriers to protest for people who are nondisabled but belong to other vulnerable groups. Comment, or tweet me @theviciouspixie, and let's get a conversation going.

EDS Awareness Month

As many of my followers know, I live with Joint Hypermobility Syndrome, or Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (hypermobility type). As many as 1 in 20 people have some form of hypermobility - if you were double-jointed as a child, or you used to be really good at ballet or gymnastics, that's you - but for a minority of us, this becomes a disabling illness later on in life. The laxity of our joints leads to frequent dislocations (or partial dislocations, known as subluxations), near constant muscle pain, low energy, and fatigue. Many of us need to walk using a stick or crutches, or to use a wheelchair all or part of the time.

EDS is primarily a disorder of the collagen, meaning that it can also affect the digestive, circulatory, urinary, and autonomic nervous systems. This produces a laundry list of painful and debilitating symptoms and partner illnesses. EDS has also been linked to dyspraxia and a number of autistic spectrum conditions, as well as fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome. Between the pain, the frustration, and the stigma we face as people with visible or invisible disabilities, many of us also live with mood disorders or other forms of mental illness.

May is EDS Awareness Month, so I'll be making an effort to revive this blog to talk a little about it. I write this post just after a UK general election where the Conservative Party - who have made no secret of their contempt and hostility towards people with disabilities - have won a parliamentary majority. I write in the face of fear and dread for the future, knowing that many people out there would gloat at the discomfort, disbelief, pain and stigma I, along with hundreds of thousands of others like me, face on a daily basis. But these words on this page are one of the few ways I can fight ignorance and prejudice, and maybe a few people will read them and take them to heart. So here we are.

Welcome, friends. It's going to be a bumpy ride, so get as comfortable as you can.

On Anger

[Content warning: this article contains references to depression, anxiety, and self-harm.]

Sometimes I will make little quips about how angry I get. They vary, but the gist of them tends to be the same: I have to be angry, or I will just stop. I say it with a smile and a shake of the head, but it's not a joke. Not really. My anger powers me. If I wasn't angry, I don't know what or how I'd be.

Anger is an energy. Sometimes this energy manifests in me another way. I have a lot of feelings, and I feel them strongly. They could be excitement, or joy, or crushing depression, or unbearable anxiety, or something else entirely, but they are coins. If you turn them over, anger is most often the queen's head you'll find underneath.

I don't know when it started. My parents insist I was a happy child, though that's not what I remember at all. All through school I was an outsider, and it didn't take long for my misery at this to turn into resentment, which turned into rage. It was worst when I was a teenager - a simmering pot of sadness and fury that could bubble over at the slightest provocation.

Back then, and for a long time afterwards, I would send my anger outwards and hurt the people close to me, or I would turn it inwards and hurt myself. With the benefit of life experience (and no small amount of psychotherapy), I have gradually learned that it's best to express it - to channel it in ways where it targets no-one, but floats into the atmosphere and disappears. That, for me, is the only way to deal with it without harming anyone. If I keep it inside, it becomes depression and anxiety and threatens to explode out of me, burning anyone it touches.

So I talk, and I write. Sometimes I'll turn it into acerbic wit, and sometimes I'll leave it as it is, incandescent and untouchable. Bright flames are hard to look at, I know. Many people accept my anger happily. Some even love it. But other people tell me that it's too much - that I feel too much and they cannot bear it.

That's what they tell me, anyway. What they mean is that I say too much, and they will not tolerate it.

Often it is to do with the things I am angry about. Usually, it's some form of injustice. I hesitate to call myself an activist - I feel this term makes my actions sound more meaningful than they are - but I talk freely and openly about the injustice I have experienced, and I freely and openly express how much I deplore injustice against others. I am not one to mince my words. I swear, I use strong phrases, and I avoid euphemism. Some people find this intimidating. Some simply find it objectionable - often, I suspect, because they perceive me as a woman, and women should not be as strident and forthright as I am. Women should bear injustice against themselves with good grace, and be calm and measured in their defence of others. Emotion is weakness. Robotic logic is strength.

Fuck that.

If I become aware that I am harming someone, I will stop and moderate my tone, because the entire reason why I express my anger the way I do is to stop it from hurting anyone. But if it is the strength or the existence of my feeling that offends you - if your eyes are sore from staring at the fire - then I have nothing further to do or to say for you. My feelings are mine. They are valid, and a lot of the time they are worth hearing. By silencing me, you are telling me that your comfort is more important than my well-being, and I will not stand for that. Not any more.

My voice is my healing, and I will wear my words like armour to protect myself and the people I love most. You will not buy your comfort with my silence.

In with the new

For the last couple of weeks, I've been blogging over at Halfway Out of the Dark, which I set up as a support blog for people who - like me - find the winter holidays challenging. And I remembered that I quite like writing. And I'm quite good at writing. And it was nice posting to a schedule of sorts. So this, the new year, seems like a good time to revive a blog.

I've never really been that good at sticking to a theme, or a specific schedule, so I'm not going to try. I'll be aiming to post roughly once a week, on the topic of whatever has intrigued me or made me cross in the last 24 hours or so. Maybe that'll build into a schedule and a theme, and maybe it won't. It's an adventure!

Expect to see posts about subjects including, but not limited to:

- Mental health

- Disability

- Music

- UK politics

- Italian politics

- Makeup

- Football

- Slice of life

Since I can't really be bothered to plumb the depths of human existence at gone midnight on a Tuesday, let's talk about new year's resolutions. I've just done a post on HOotD about this, but HOotD isn't about me, and this blog is.

I've quite a variable attitude on new year's resolutions. I very rarely keep them, so some years I make them (thereby setting myself up to fail, because I go in with the mindset that I'm not going to keep them) and some years I rebel and don't bother. I think I made resolutions at the start of 2014. but I can't for the life of me remember what they were.

The other thing is that I tend to decide I am going to Overhaul My Life and Make Everything Better on a semi-regular basis - usually when I'm entering a hypomanic phase - so the only thing that distinguishes new year's resolutions from any other kind is the timing. And it just so happens that I'm skirting around a hypomanic phase at the moment, so I threw out a bunch of stuff I was no longer using over the weekend and have been desperately trying to force myself to use my paper diary. Every year I buy a paper diary and every year I leave it mostly unused. I don't know why I keep beating this particular dead horse, especially since Google Calendar runs my life and helpfully beeps at me so I don't forget things. I guess I'm just a sucker for stationery. My 2015 diary is bright orange and I've been colour coding everything I write in it, because my inner 12-year-old insists on that sort of thing.

I've also made some tentative resolutions. You're reading one of them right now, and the others are divided into categories, because I'm a grown-up now and grown-ups organise everything, including their new year's resolutions.

Work:

I spent most of 2014 as a support worker in sheltered housing. When I say this is how I spent most of 2014, I mean that upsettingly literally: when I looked over last year's Google Calendar trying to remember how I'd spent my time and what I'd been up to, I realised that I had spent most of it at work. Whilst I was a bank worker, and thus technically free to take up as few or as many shifts as I wanted, I am a workaholic and terrible at saying no, so I ended up working 50-60 hour weeks on a semi-regular basis. This would be punishing enough for someone who does not live with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome and an as yet nebulous long term mental illness; I live with both. I left my job in November before it could kill me.

In 2015, I am looking for a job with regular hours that I can stick with for a good couple of years. I don't know for sure what that's going to be just yet, but I have a few ideas, and it should be interesting to find out.

Music:

For those who might not know, I'm a classically trained singer and a depressingly amateur pianist. I sing with a semi-professional choir, which I love, and I've taken up piano lessons after a seven-odd year hiatus. My musical goals are to continue to sing with the choir, to sing solo in public at least once, and to play piano at a jam night.

I also write my own music, which I'm hoping to record in the next month or so and to perform live in the first half of the year.

Adulting:

At the ripe old age of twenty[mumble], I live with my parents. In 2015, I am hoping to not live with my parents any more. I also hope to get my driving licence, and to be Financially Solvent and self-sufficient.

My biggest Adulting challenge is trying to establish a routine. Since I am currently not in work, and my Nebulous Mental Illness makes habit-forming something of a challenge, I find it exceptionally difficult to find a routine and make it stick. So this is going to involve trial and error, a lot of patience, and being much kinder to myself than I'm used to. Bring it on.

Health:

My health is not an easy thing to plan for. Around this time of year, most people seem to be talking about making changes to their eating or exercise habits. For me, this is tricky. I already eat reasonably well most of the time, so aside from making more of an effort to eat three meals at more or less the same times each day there's not much to say on that score. Exercise? This morning I did two loads of laundry and changed my bedding, which put me out of action for the rest of the day. After a three hour nap I was just about able to cook dinner for myself and two other people. This, incidentally, is by no means a particularly bad day. In theory, regular exercise will help manage my fatigue and increase my strength and stamina. However, when you know that exercise will probably be the last thing you can do in a day, it's much easier said than done.

With this in mind, I'm taking a "what I can, when I can" approach to exercise - aiming for once a week to begin with - and resolving to learn to pace myself better (which is tricky with my mental health condition, but I'll persevere) and to be assertive in demanding the right treatment and care from relevant health professionals.

Hobbies:

With my work schedule, I seriously neglected my hobbies in 2014. Even music was difficult to fit in - I was so drained that I missed a lot of choir rehearsals, and it was rare that I found the energy to do a useful amount of piano practice. Social events often got cancelled due to illness. However, some of my fondest memories of last year were plays and concerts I went to, so this year I intend to do lots more of that. And there's this here blog, of course.

Why is music separate from hobbies? Music isn't a hobby. It's much more integral to my life than that.

Relationships:

This has actually been one of my biggest success stories of the last year. In 2014 I met a ton of delightful and interesting new people, made new friends, and started a relationship. I couldn't be happier with how that went - especially in the last two months - so my resolution for this year is simply to build on that. I want to develop my existing friendships, make more exciting new friends, and enjoy my relationships.

Wish me luck, friends. I've got a lot to do!

To My Partner's Ex: Butt Out

This was written in response to Kirsten Corley's piece, "To The Girl Who Replaced Me, Please Take Care Of Him", published on Elite Daily.

Dear Ex,

You approached me in a spirit of giving advice, so it seems only fair that I extend you the same courtesy.

I’m not here to tell you how or where or why your ex and I got together, because I doubt you want to hear that. I am here to tell you that what’s happening is between me and him, and that I’m deeply uncomfortable with the way you’re projecting.

Ex, I am not a “replacement” for you. To call me that is to assume that he thinks of both of us as objects with a more or less analogous function, which doesn’t chime at all well with your claim that he falls for a person’s self rather than their appearance.

Whilst your letter hasn’t exactly filled me with warm fuzzy feelings in your direction, prior to reading it I had no particular feelings about you at all. Like you say, he’s not a big talker. I know you exist. I know what you look like from the pictures. I know you had a few shared interests. I assume from the tenor of your writing that you file romantic comedies in the 'Documentaries' section of your media library, and that you have replaced your DVD of The Notebook at least once due to wear and tear. That’s it.

I will never understand why people love this film so much.

He can text you and talk to you on Facebook if he damn well wants to, because he’s an independent adult human being and can make his own choices and form his own boundaries. Actually, let’s talk about that for a second. You assure me - I imagine with a knowing and mystical smile, because that’s how the text reads - that there are reasons why he won’t always say and do what I want him to. You’re right, but they’re a lot simpler than you’re making out. It’s because he’s an independent adult human being. If I wanted something to look cute and repeat stock phrases at me, I wouldn’t get a partner, I’d get a Furby.

It’s early days. He might not fall in love with me, and I might not fall in love with him. That’s OK. Please don’t presume to tell me how I’ll feel if those things happen, or how he’ll feel and how I should react. I’m not you. It might not occur to me to be scared when he cries. Humans do that, even male ones.

We might not do the same things together that the two of you did, because you and I have different interests and different approaches to life. Don’t write your narrative onto our relationship. It’s not good for you. Clearly you still have feelings for him, and imagining him doing all the things with me that he used to do with you is only going to make you sad. Take a bit of time to yourself to grieve it, and then let it go. Write it down, but maybe don’t share it on the Internet while the feelings are still raw.

I’m also a little concerned about the things you think are “my job”. I am dating this man. I am not his mother, or his life coach, or his therapist. These expectations you seem to have of me on his behalf are ill-conceived and not terribly healthy, and if he expects the same things of me as you do then this relationship is going to be short. I’ll support him and be kind, like I would with anyone I love, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to tolerate his drunken outbursts or shrug my shoulders in the face of his emotional repression.

I will never love this man the way you do. You have him on some kind of a pedestal, and that scares me. If I fall in love with him, I will love the human he is and love him in spite of certain things he does. If he treats me badly - as it sounds like he did you, to be honest - I will leave him, because do you know what? I want to be loved the way I deserve, too. We’re not NPCs in the video game of this man’s life; we’re player characters in the grand MMORPG of the universe.

Though maybe we should keep to different servers for the time being.

For all that I found your letter intrusive and more than a little bit creepy, I do wish you well. Please love yourself more than this. And please, in future, learn when to keep your thoughts to yourself.

Sincerely,

Not a Spare Part

Fractured politics in a fragmented nation: on the Italian general election

In 1976, director Sidney Lumet and writer Paddy Chayefsky released a film called Network.

Ten years later, as the tendrils of corruption spread through the Italian political system and the rot began to show through in the media, Federico Fellini released a film called Ginger e Fred. Berlusconi was already a public figure then - not yet a politician, but a media magnate.

Now, as the battle for hearts and minds in Italy rages between Beppe Grillo, economist turned political satirist turned politician, and Silvio Berlusconi, whose media empire Fellini had already begun to critique nearly thirty years ago, it is hard not to think of both of these films as prophecies.

Having thought of Berlusconi as a harmless buffoon for most of the last twenty years, the rest of Europe seems to have finally woken up to the chaos he has caused. The most obvious parallel would be if an English-speaking country were to elect Rupert Murdoch as its prime minister, and all mainstream and publicly-owned TV channels came under his control. That’s missing a couple of puzzle pieces, though. Before Berlusconi was a media tycoon, he was a property tycoon. His alleged ties with the mafia are well documented in the international press.

I probably don’t need to talk about the prostitutes, about the women linked to him sexually who then rose to posts in local government and even his cabinet, about the orgies, the casual racism and homophobia. You’ll have heard that already. People had taken an interest by then - people besides writers at The Economist, who have been among his most prominent critics for the last five years.

This time yesterday, I was ready to write a lengthy diatribe about how Silvio Berlusconi is a  symbol of everything that is wrong with Italy. Now, these things are still true, but we’re not looking at him any more. He’s being usurped by a man who occupies the other side of his same coin; a man who - like Howard Beale in Network - has made his fame by urging the voting public to stick their heads out of the window and shout “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it any more!” A man who, like Howard Beale in Network, has been completely consumed by his own Messiah complex, and is now as dangerous as the people he is seeking to oust.

In a turn of events no-one would have predicted a year ago, his Movimento Cinque Stelle (M5S) holds 25% of the vote, and is the largest single party in either house. There is no majority - the Democratic Party (PD) is the winning coalition by a single percentage point in the Senate - and, to complicate matters further, Grillo himself never ran for election. Like Berlusconi, who had hinted that he was angling for the post of Minister of Economics in the event of a win for his party, he is simply a figurehead for mass public discontent.

No-one is quite sure who will lead the version of M5S that has won so many parliamentary seats, or whether they will be willing to ally with anyone to form a government. Perhaps the quickest way to turn this shambles into a viable government would be for M5S to ally with PD, but it’s uncertain whether this will happen. Disturbingly, Berlusconi’s Popolo della Libertà (PdL) has made overtures to forming an alliance with PD. PD and M5S could, conceivably, make a positive difference to Italy’s fortunes. Any government where Berlusconi pulls the strings guarantees more of the same for a nation in trouble.

Grillo claims that he’s struck a blow against the political establishment, and for M5S to unite with an established party would be playing into their hands. And he’s right, but only up to a point. The thing is, he is very much a symbol of the only establishment that can really exist when Berlusconi has been in politics for over twenty years. In an era where all politicians are on some kind of stage, he’s a showman. Unlike PD leader Bersani, who had previously been considered Berlusconi’s main opponent, he has the charisma to attract a young and disenfranchised audience. He’s a personality, a talking head. A talking head who happens to know something about economics, granted, but when questioned on his policies, his habit has long been to fall silent or change the subject.

But to focus exclusively on party figureheads is reductive. With most discussions of Italian politics, the elephant in the room is the bloated, overcomplicated system for electing representatives to the Senate. I have frequently struggled (and failed) to explain the Italian electoral system to non-Italians, but this BBC article offers a simple summary. The reforms were cooked up in 2006, when Berlusconi’s government realised they might lose the next election, to make it as difficult as possible for any party to achieve a majority in the Senate, and boy howdy has it worked a treat.

And as the struggle for power goes on, ordinary Italians continue with their day-to-day struggles: the over 36% rate of unemployment among people aged 15-24; the continuing lack of representation and opportunities for women; the lack of rights for LGBT, disabled, black and minority ethnic citizens; the endemic corruption and organised crime that thwarts local government and judicial procedure; the festering north-south divide; a healthcare system that declines in quality as it rises in price. We can only hope that, at some point in the next few days, someone remembers what this election was all about.

Not the only good thing: Clouds reviews My So-Called Secret Identity

A lot of great things are happening in the world of comics lately.

A lot of dismal things are happening as well. Ask a feminist (or, often enough, female) comic fan what they think of DC’s redesigns of characters like Starfire or Harley Quinn in the New 52 franchise reboot and they will probably shake their head sadly and roll their eyes skywards. So far, we’ve seen artists conform disappointingly to a tired set of cliches - I could point to Catwoman having sex with Batman on a rooftop, for example, as a low point, as well as recent portraits of Power Girl.

But even the sphere of comics - populated though it is by white nerdy men, a group notoriously insistent in both its sexism and its denial of its own privilege - isn’t immune to a spirit of inclusion, and with that in mind we have a gay Green Lantern and a mixed-race Spiderman. We have a flowering of queer characters across the genre. We have a series of one of Marvel’s most popular titles, X-Men, devoted entirely to a female task force. The often regressive artistic style is, slowly but surely, starting to change, with no small thanks to the endless source of parody found online.

And in the midst of all this, we have a new title spearheaded by Dr. Will Brooker, a leading academic in the study of comics who has set out to create a woman whose superpower is her intelligence. The resulting comic, entitled My So-Called Secret Identity, stars Catherine Abigail Daniels, an Irish-American PhD scholar in the fictional city of Gloria. Its first issue appeared online this week, and is currently free to view.

It’s certainly started well. In addition to a believable and engaging main character, Brooker and his team have given us some intriguing side characters, a fistful of ‘90s nostalgia (the title’s resemblance to popular TV series My So-Called Life doesn’t seem to be an accident), and some sharp observations on the status of women in academia: at one point, Cat walks into a meeting where she represents the student body only to be told that the meeting already has a secretary.

Almost as prominent a character is the city of Gloria herself. As befits a connoisseur of the Batman comics, Gloria has as much of a presence and personality as Gotham City in the DC Universe, to the point of being run by superheroes. It’s early in the story to analyse this bit much more, but I am really looking forward to seeing where it takes us next.

The only thing I query about the narrative is the rather hasty introduction of a love interest, which I found oddly reminiscent of the playground practice of grabbing a boy’s hand and declaring “you’re my boyfriend now”. And, yes, Cat is white, slim, cis, abled, and ostensibly straight. We’ll come back to that in a moment. On the other hand, the writing team seem in firm agreement that Cat shouldn’t be a sex object, and so far they are doing a sterling job of sticking to the brief.

So, if I liked it, why is this article so long? Well, readers, that is mostly to do with what Dr. Brooker had to say to the press on the day of the comic’s release. Talking to Alison Flood in The Guardian, he made the following statements:

“I walked in[to a comic shop] and I just felt so unwelcome. All the comics on the shelves were featuring women as pin-ups – women with their boobs out, or their clothes falling off … If someone like me feels uncomfortable walking into a comic shop, it's no wonder most teenage girls and adult women wouldn't set foot inside one...” 

and

“I looked around at the [class] room full of young women – so smart, determined, keen and committed – and remembered that in the original comic, Batgirl was meant to be a PhD student. Why do we never see women like this in comics – women who are normal, likeable and just really, really clever?" 

I want to say to Dr. Brooker (and to Ms. Flood, who seems to have been happy to take him at his word), that whilst we appreciate the sentiment, you never see “women who are normal, likeable and just really, really clever” in comic books because you’re not looking hard enough. Because you’re quite possibly only reading a limited selection of titles.


Gail Simone, who is an activist as well as a writer, has written fan-favourite runs of (amongst others) Batgirl, Wonder Woman, and my personal favourite, Birds of Prey. She also founded Women in Refrigerators, coining the term used for violence and violations against women in comics added for no reason other than to enhance a male character’s story. All of Simone’s women are intelligent, believable, well-realised; no small number are also queer, people of colour, disabled - things that Brooker’s hero, for all her excellent qualities, manifestly is not. 

Simone is only one of a growing body of women creators across sequential art. I’ve singled her out here because of her ties to DC Comics: Birds of Prey, Wonder Woman, and Batgirl are all DC titles that frequently guest star Brooker’s beloved Batman. And, yes, because I’m a massive fanboi. Full disclosure and all that.

I am delighted that Brooker has noticed the problems inherent in comics’ relationship with gender, and that he has chosen to do something about it. But in making these statements, I feel he’s acting like that guy who identifies as a feminist and participates in feminist discussions, but mansplains over women when they’re contributing their lived experience. What he’s doing is great, but it’s not unique. Judging by the article, he’s either chosen not to talk about the excellent existing body of work by female creators in favour of promoting his own series, or he’s not searched hard enough in his own back yard to find it there.

I want to say that whilst comic shops very frequently are populated by the assorted cast of Kevin Smith’s films, many of us still go in there and even more of us - gasp! - shop online. There’s a big old Internet out there, and a lot of people are more than happy to give us non-male-identified types our fix.

I want to say that we are thankfully moving out of a period where women have no voice in the world of comic books, but it seems that we have a way to go before anyone’s prepared to hear them when they talk.

What are your favourite inclusive comics?