New female superheroes brought to life in collection by Toronto artist

Jenn Woodall grew up playing video games, but even as a child she noticed a distinct lack of female characters she could relate to. This is part of the inspiration behind Fight!, a new zine to hit the Toronto art scene this weekend at Toronto Comic Arts Festival (TCAF).

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Curated by Woodall, a Toronto artist, the female fighter zine is a collaboration of 36 international artists who submitted original characters to fill the pages of this colourful book. Each character holds a left or right facing fighting stance, so that they appear to be squaring off with their opponent on the facing page. Each artist submitted a background story for their character on Tumblr as the book came together, making this a unique and creative initiative.

“I originally did a zine that was a fan zine of Sailor Moon art and I decided that for my next project I didn’t want to do an already established property,” says Woodall about Fight!, which she started creating in 2013.

“I wanted to do something new and original. I grew up playing video games and I especially love female fighting game characters. I remember distinctly that there weren’t as many growing up and I just thought it’d be a great idea to create a zine that collects all these hypothetical female fighting characters.”

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Zines are limited edition, independent publications that are typically created by a collective of artists or writers. Woodall says that Toronto has a very active zine culture with several festivals, including TCAF, where they are distributed.

Woodall chose TCAF to launch Fight! because of its broad reach and dedicated audience.

“TCAF is an amazing event because it brings creators from all over the world to one place and it’s all about comic art and zine culture,” she says.

“You know that everyone who comes to TCAF is either curious about it or they’re already really, really into it. So it’s just the perfect place to have it (the launch) because you already know there’s a huge market of people who will be interested in this. There’s a huge cross-section of people who love comics, zines, video games, and art anime in general, so it’s just the perfect audience to have this book on display.”

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Fight! has already been receiving a positive response from its readers across the zine world and Woodall plans to expand the book into a trilogy.

“I think people really respond to it positively because, especially women similar to me, they grew up playing video games and there are a lot of strong female characters represented in video games, but there’s a lot of them that are very sexual in a way that is not empowering, but more tantalizing,” she says.

“It can be frustrating growing up playing these games when you only have a few characters to select and play from. These kind of female characters that aren’t really there to relate to when you play. People can relate to the book as it’s identifying a need, and video games now are heading in a much better direction when it comes to female representation.“

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Woodall may have waited for the perfect time to launch Fight! as Kyrstle Tabujara, TCAF’s Logistics Manager, says this is their biggest festival yet.

“Last year we had over 20,000 people,” says Tabujara. “We’re expecting that and more, this is our biggest festival yet. We have the most amount of creators we’ve ever had and we’ve utilized more space in the library than we’ve ever had, as well as a lot of space in satellite venues.”

Tabujara credits the popularity of TCAF to its free entrance fee and the fact the festival supports independent publications, such as Fight!

“We celebrate comics as a legit literary art form,” she says. “People like the diversity of the art we show where a lot of other shows are very superhero orientated and mainstream. We celebrate and give focus to a lot of independent creators and independent publishers, that aren’t necessarily known to the superhero crowd.”

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