We speak to Team Girl Comic, a collective of women who make comics in Glasgow. Their frontwoman, Gillian Hatcher, has just been nominated for an Eagle Award for best new writer.

Hatcher first had the idea for Team Girl in 2009, she tells us, when it dawned on her that she didn’t have any female friends who made comics. She’d been making her own small press comics for a couple of years, but didn’t feel that her work really fitted in with that of her male peers in Glasgow.

She began to investigate, and discovered that quite a few of her friends did like drawing comics and illustrations in their spare time; they just never showed their work to anyone. So a small group of them started work on the first issue, which was released in May 2010. There are now about 25 artists in the loop and it's continuously growing. Hatcher sees that an advantage of this is that people can come and go as they please: not every artist will be in every issue, and each issue has featured several new artists each time.

Who are Team Girl?

Members found Team Girl in a variety of ways.

Claire Stewart joined a studio in Glasgow in order to start producing her own work again after graduating, and there she met Hatcher. She then went along to some of the Team Girl public talks – which were in conjunction with the Glasgow Comic Con at the time – and then to the Team Girl meetings, describing them as “a one-of-a-kind group”.

 “I always found it so hard because it was thought of as a typically male thing to do. Other girls thought it was a bit odd, so it's nice to know we have a nice little group of enthusiastic, cool girls.”

What are the advantages?

Coleen Campbell, who told us she got involved by “drinking cider in the park and talking about comics”, finds Team Girl useful for the opportutnity to put her work into context. “I have piles of doodles, comic strips, scripts and everything else in any number of sketchbooks and on scrap paper, so to be able to have a handful of things actually published really brings meaning to all that work. It's a great boost to see your name in print amongst others that you know and admire.”

Karena Moore-Millar says she is part of something unique, and that Team Girl members make her believe in herself and her artistic abilities. “TGC is a vehicle to express myself and learn something valuable through friendship.”

Hatcher herself sees the collective as a way to be able to get her comics out to a wider audience than she could otherwise have done on her own, feeling more confident about promoting herself and others under the Team Girl name. She’s proud of what they’ve achieved as a group, but the best thing for her is having a big group of female friends to make comics with.

No boys allowed?

Given the sense of security the Team Girl enclave engenders in its members, we have to ask if they’ll ever let boys in. Hatcher says the reason that Team Girl Comic is all female is because they wanted to raise the profile of women making comics in Glasgow.

“From my experience I would say that women and girls in particular lack confidence when it comes to showing off their creations. There are loads of comics being made by guys out there and they don’t always have female appeal; we wanted to create an environment that was both female-friendly and non-intimidating to young or beginner artists. And to be honest, there isn’t really any space for men; we’re a pretty big group as it is! We’d prefer to keep TGC all female for now but we work closely with and support all our male friends in the scene.”

Visit the Team Girl website 

Do women need extra support when it comes to making comics? Why are there so few female creators? Or are girls just whiny? Let us know what you think below.