Confessions of a Liberal Puritan

Boys in contemporary American culture want to identify with powerful characters, it seems, but they also want those powerful characters to be able to express a wider range of emotion than Batman or Superman were ever allowed.

This certainly makes sense, although I'd also say that it may reflect a generation who feel that they are allowed to identify with women as fellow human beings, rather than decrying such identification as unmanly.

I wonder if anyone has compiled any statistics on, say, the proportion of English language comics titles with female leads. I know my own reading is highly skewed, so I have a poor perspective of trends as a whole, although I can think of a number of instances were very strong female characters have been written by men (or by male-dominated groups, as in television writing).

One example that comes to mind is manga -- almost all the male manga readers I know read "female" titles almost exclusively. "Male" titles are often rejected as unpleasantly violent.