20100108195021First off, thanks to everyone who voted. Its nice to get a general idea of your audience, because you never know who is silently reading and loving your comic, but doesn’t feel right leaving comments.

As for the age breakdown, it’s basically about what I thought, and I fit right into the demographic age-wise. I am not surprised the majority of my readers are male, I knew from the get-go that webcomics.. and well, comics in general.. are a male-dominated industry. It’s cool, I’m used to being “one of the guys”. But I was expecting a slightly bigger turn-out from the gals than I got. Maybe… um, like 40% or so? I mean, almost 75% of the readership is male.

This makes me contemplate what makes a webcomic “guy-friendly” or “girl-friendly”… and what about Z&F turns off (most) women (or doesn’t attract them)? I mean sure, I would figure there’s more male webcomic readers than female. So, already, the scale is probably tilted. An interesting side note is that often new readers figure I’m a guy off the bat. I wonder if that’s a “male-until-prove-female” assumption that is applied to every webcomic author anyway, or if the writing and/or art in Z&F somehow exudes testosterone, LOL.

I could get totally, insultingly, stereotypical here and figure that most women would prefer sappy romantic manga type webcomics, that’s why they wouldn’t give a rat’s @$$ about 2 alien-dogs. But the other side of that stereotype is that men only prefer to read superhero action blood-and-guts type stuff. Which leaves goofy little humor strips like mine somewhere in the middle. Maybe the sci-fi element is way more masculine that I had thought. Maybe my social networking activity (that gets me new readers) tends to draw in more males. Maybe women don’t like to take polls. Who the heck knows.

I wonder what the demographic of other female cartoonists (who do a unique type of comic) is like. Does Danielle of “Girls With Slingshots” have more female readers than male, overpowering the general demographic? What about Jennie Breeden of “Devil’s Panties”? Now, those are two comics centered around an atypical heroine (or multiple ones)… a bit different than androgynous alien-dogs. Maybe in there lies the reason.

So, faithful readers, what do you think? Is Z&F a more male-oriented comic? Or is the discrepancy due to the demographic being already skewed?

P.S. my apologies for using the stereotypical “pink for girls” and “blue for guys” on the chart. Oh, the irony! Or is it hypocrisy?