Dragon Magazine Covers (2) - Basics
Basic info before we get started:

If you're unfamiliar with Dragon, it is the biggest RPG-related publication in the world. Over the years it has covered a wide variety of RPGs to varying degrees, but mostly it has been devoted to Dungeons & Dragons. It has had, at various times in its history, very wide news-stand distribution throughout North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand. And perhaps elsewhere, I dunno.

In other words, for a very long time, these cover images have been the primary representation of the hobby for countless people who never go into game stores.



I looked at 350 cover images. (The half-dozen Dragon Annuals and Specials didn't get included.) Of those, 261 included depictions of men and/or women; 89 didn't (Fig 1). (The ones that didn't were mostly dragon-only covers, but there were a bunch of covers featuring dwarves, and at least one featuring nothing but, er, winged frogs. Not kidding.)



Of those 261 depicting men or women, 135 feature men alone, 44 feature both men and women, and 82 feature women alone (Fig 2). Not surprisingly, this demonstrates that Dragon covers have featured men more than women.



Breaking the above down across the 350 issues of Dragon (Fig 3), it is clear that women are now claiming a fairer amount of representation than in the early days of the magazine. Across the last 100 issues (roughly 8 years) covers featuring both men and women have gone out of fashion, and women-alone covers have taken up that space.



Next up: Suggestive Depictions