10 Major Milestones In Comic Book History

3. Women In Refrigerators Is Founded

green lantern kyle rayner women in refrigerators
DC Comics

When Ron Marz axed off Alexandra DeWitt and stuffed her into a fridge, little could he have known that it would spawn a massive online movement regarding the treatment of women in comics. Said movement took the form of the website 'Women in Refrigerators', which was founded by Gail Simone and others to collate and document the number of women killed off/maimed/tortured/de-powered in the medium and dissect what the implications of the trend actually meant.

Simone received numerous responses from writers in the industry, including Marz, and many themselves admitted that it had given them pause for thought in regards to their own plotting techniques in respect to women. Simone would later (awesomely) go on to write comic books full time, kicking things off with a stint on Deadpool before going on to write acclaimed stints on Birds of Prey and Secret Six. Today, the phrase is commonly used in online circles, and other movements like The Hawkeye Initiative have also targeted the industry's often bizarre attitude towards women in comics.

While the medium is still relatively light on women-led books, there are far more women working in the industry than there were in 1994. Simone and the others behind WIR played a massive role in forcing a conversation on the issue, and though it may not be cited at such, the site had a massive role to play in the development of the medium as we currently see it.

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Content Producer/Presenter

WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.