Kelly Sue DeConnick and the Milkfed team will host the 13th #VisibleWomen event. The event is held to get women in the comic industry more work.

Taking place March 27, DeConnick will host the event on Twitter to help raise the profile of women in the comic industry. These self submissions will then be added to the Visible Women spreadsheet, made available for free to hiring professionals in comics and related industries. To date, the spreadsheet has grown to include over 2,400 submissions, and requested by over 300 companies and hiring professionals.

Creators looking to submit can do so with the following, preferred formats.

Example submission for artists: I’m [full name]. [A couple words about your style/genre or titles you’ve worked on] & my portfolio is at [link/links]. I also [color/letter/flat/write]. #VisibleWomen

Example submission for writers: I’m [full name], I wrote/write [title of book(s)]. Samples of my work can be found [LINK.] #VisibleWomen

The first #VisibleWomen event was held on Twitter in 2016. Frustrated at the perception that it was difficult to find women to draw mainstream comics, writer Kelly Sue DeConnick opted to spend a Monday leveraging her Twitter platform to spotlight women comic book artists by retweeting links to their portfolios with the hashtag #VisibleWomen, a cheeky nod to Marvel’s first superheroine, the Invisible Woman.

The response was such that DeConnick and her team decided to repeat the event every six months, collecting submissions from the hashtag into a spreadsheet and distributing it free of charge to any hiring professional in the publishing industry, on request.

#VisibleWomen Twitter event welcomes (and has always welcomed) all marginalized genders. They understand and respect that some folks are not comfortable under the banner of “women.” They therefore mean to call attention to hashtag initiatives such as #IAmNonbinary, #VisibleNBs and #transmascartists. Marginalization of course extends beyond the boundaries of gender-identity, and #VisibleWomen is committed to sharing whatever platform they are able to construct by taking every opportunity to promote and foreground other initiatives such as #drawingwhileblack, #AsAmCreatorRollCall, #indigenousartists, #bipocartists and #artistswithdisabilities.

Future plans for #VisibleWomen include launching a website with a searchable database, resources for both comic creators and readers, and even incorporation as a non-profit.

The group thinks it’s vitally important to acknowledge and celebrate the work of cartoonist MariNaomi, whose databases- Cartoonists of Color, Queer Cartoonists, and Disabled Cartoonists– predate the #VisibleWomen project and remain invaluable resources for our industry.