Children's comics

As I've decided I want to write some kind of story to go with the activity pack, I was thinking about different ways of story-telling. I don't really want to write and illustrate a whole book because that could potentially be 30 to 40 pages, which would take my focus off my main objective: to educate a younger audience on the importance of choice within gender. 

Creating a comic might be a faster way to communicate my idea using characters. They tend to be more fast paced than storybooks and in-between pages or panels there could be little activities or facts.

I was thinking about the comics I read as a child (there weren't many!) and I distinctly remember Dennis the Menace & Beryl The Peril. 

Dennis the Menace got into lots of trouble and got up to stuff that is generally considered quite typical of a young mischievous boy. 

Beryl the Peril definitely strays away from what would you would expect from a young female character. Her actions are much like Dennis the Menace's so she is considered to be pretty 'masculine' - even the way she is drawn suggests so. I really like that there are female characters that stray outside of their gender boundaries - it's also great considering it was written in the 50s, which was arguably when the female gender role was reinforced most in the last 100 years. 

After a brief look at what The Works had listed under their 'children's comics' section, I was quite shocked at the amount of content that ultimately reinforces gender stereotypes. A lot of the covers feature big muscly men and perhaps a few scantily clad women. Gender roles and representation in comics is a pretty big issue on it's own and I'm not looking to investigate it too much, but if this is what children are being shown, then no wonder they grow up with the notion that men should be big and muscly and it's okay to objectify women. Although this is only a small representation of comics available to children, perhaps there ought to be more characters featured that don't conform to the usual gender stereotypes.