In a 1984 interview with the Atlantic, Walker told Cullen Murphy..about his ongoing battles with newspapers over the depiction of belly buttons, male and female, which were routinely excised with a razor blade. Behind the scenes, he drew much more racy Beetle Bailey strips, featuring full-on nudity — which ended up being sent to Sweden, where they found a more receptive audience.

Visiting museums while growing up, Zolzoya Bakthuyag, a 34-year-old lawyer, always wondered why the places that depicted the history of her country always exhibited men’s photos and paintings so prominently. “Mongolian women played a great role building the country too, but museums only hang men’s photos. It was confusing,” she said, sitting in her office in a high-rise building huddled by snow-peaked green hills in the Mongolian capital Ulaanbaatar.

This photo is especially telling when you remember that earlier this year, Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige said he was approached by most of the women from the Marvel Cinematic Universe who asked him when they’d get their own team-up movie. Several people wondered when and where that conversation could have happened—now it seems pretty likely that this is where Feige was approached. And, either way, you have to admit that’s a very intimidating line up.

"But I’d say almost every female comic could name a comedy club she can’t walk into, a booker she can’t email or an agent she can’t pursue because of the presence of a problematic guy. We are all avoiding someone who could help us make money. Female comics do a lot of calculating, finding alternate routes to a career."

There's a subset of small publishers that has succeeded in representing women in ways the mainstream comic market hasn't. Some have achieved near-gender parity among creators or readers; or published best-selling female-driven books; or contributed to the growth of the community of women in comics. In the process they are making the comic medium—and industry—more hospitable to all.

The creator of the comic, Hassan Siddiqui created Pakistan Girl in the hopes that Sarah’s self-reliance and power will inspire teenage girls in Pakistan to fight corruption and to stand up for themselves.

“The universe was created for all women, but there is a clear emphasis on women of color because I wanted women from all over the world to be able to see themselves empowered through Aza’s characters. The characters were created in a way that women could see themselves living without limitations.”

"Often the concern isn’t about the quantity of characters, but the quality of their representation, and now a new study is taking a hard look at that representation to find out how the comic book industry really views women."