The Dreaming is at 5226 University Way N.E.; it’s a small shop that isn’t all that easy to see. Look for the big white boards in the windows with comic strip characters on them — not so much the caped crusaders, but Spider Jerusalem, Milk and Cheese, etc.

In general I find Warren Ellis’ creations are very well-balanced. For example, Planetary, although lacking female characters as front-and-center as Transmet, shows women as their own bosses, equal partners, and co-conspirators.

In the same vein, Robert Kirkman, writing Invincible and The Walking Dead, has many of the same sensibilities. Although ‘page-time’ is biased towards the central male character in each, I don’t find that the female characters are window dressing; they are complex people who refuse to hang around just waiting for something to happen to them. Admittedly, one’s angsty teen-superhero, and the other is post-zombie apocalypse, so YMMV.

And, of course there’s Moore’s Promethea. Admittedly, he uses it as a platform for his discourse on the tradition of Western magic, but the characters are very strong. The issues where he dissects the roles of the sexes (both traditional and real) in such practice, are illuminating, to say the least. That, and the comic’s just gorgeous (jaw-droppingly so at times).

Oh, and Goth House? Have you heard of that?

But thank you for recommending them! I recommend them too!

Friends of Lulu was actually of two minds about the first Girl Genius graphic novel, quite honestly, as the story pretty much starts on the worst day of the heroine’s life; she doesn’t spring fully formed from Zeus’s thigh and they were impatient.