| When it came to describing myself, I was always at a loss. That is to say, no single generic term easily summed up my existence. Which, really, isn’t a bad thing, but it presents a challenge. I grew up devouring comics, watching cartoons, playing with Transformers, engrossed in Star Trek, reading fantasy novels, and loving video games. In short, I had the interests of a stereotypical nerd, but I was a girl. I would’ve called myself a “tomboy”… but that implied that I thought baseball caps were all the rage and wanted to be outside playing sports all the time, shunning my fellow females for the company of boys. Such was not the case. In fact, I hate sports. And I’m not ashamed of being a girl. Quite proud of it to be quite honest, and “tomboys” aren’t. Thus the term “tomgeek” was born. It encompassed all that I wanted to say about myself in one simple word. Mission accomplished.
But when the term was coined, so was another idea. I had noticed when I entered into the wild and wooly world of webcomics that there were a lot of women doing their own comics. In fact, most of the strongest written, beautifully drawn fantasy webcomics were done by women. There were even women doing humourous gaming comics! There were other tomgeeks like me! I started plotting immediately to build a female comic collective. But, like great many other things, it got put on the backburner as my own comic took off. The url has sat stagnant for three years, but now I’m pulling up my socks and getting it going. It’s time for tomgeeks.com to see the light of day.
The notion of a women webcomic collective isn’t a new one. Well, not entirely new. Girlamatic, Sequential Tart, and others have certainly paved the way for women in the webcomic community, true enough. But talking about it like that makes it sound like we ladies are fighting to survive in a a male-dominated comic world, and while maybe on the print side of things that is the case … out there on the internets, it doesn’t matter so much. We aren’t held back by our gender, because, well… there isn’t anyone to hold us back in the first place! The only people we answer to are our fans, and they certainly don’t seem to mind that we’re women. Tomgeeks is about enjoying being a girl geek! We’re not fighting a losing battle here, we’re thriving!
So get yer comic on, ladies! There's a whole internet out there just waiting to read what you've got.
~LadyYates, November 2007
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~To provide a positive environment for females of the geeky persuasion, via our forums and links to other useful sites, regardless of whether they are a comic creator or not.
~To help aspiring women webcomic creators gain exposure via the Tomgeeks Member List, where they are afforded a banner ad for their comic.
~To provide quality reviews of quality webcomics, games, sites, and more.
~To rock your socks off.
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