NYCC: Liu, Whitley, Watters & More on the Importance of Pushing Comics' Boundaries; ComicBookResources.com, 10/11/15

Ben Kaye, ComicBookResources.com; NYCC: Liu, Whitley, Watters & More on the Importance of Pushing Comics' Boundaries:

"The Push Boundaries Forward: Gender, Diversity, and Representation in Comic Books panel at New York Comic-Con opened with a quick but illuminating crowd poll. Moderator David Brothers asked how long people had been reading comics, and the loudest response was for only five years, an answer that spoke to how the market's current wide-range of comics is attracting new readers.

"I don't know what we're going to talk about exactly because there are so many things that we can cover," Brothers said as he introduced the panel of Darryl Ayo, Jeremy Whitley, Marjorie Liu, Amber Garza, Joey Stern and Shannon Watters. To open, he shared a scene from Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely's "New X-Men" in which Emma Frost says, "The whole world is watching us now. We must be nothing less than fabulous," a quote Brothers feels well-represents diversity in comics. "Diversity is fundamentally about including everyone and everything, but because we're having this conversation, we're trying to actively include people as opposed to having included them from the beginning… Diversity in the industry comes from the top down, but in the culture, diversity comes from us.""