Comics Isn't a Boys' Club Anymore

In 1971, there were very few women interested in drawing comics and very few skilled women cartoonists. […] In the '60s and '70s , cartooning was not an obvious career choice for a woman. It’s hard to imagine now, because there have been so many great women cartoonists since then—Diane Noomin, Phoebe Gloeckner, Julie Doucet, Carol Tyler, Lauren Weinstein, Dori Seda, Debbie Dreschler, Penny Moran, and Sophie Crumb, to name a few. —Aline Kominsky Crumb, Need More Love: A Graphic Memoir [2]

The early comics industry, described so lovingly in Kavalier & Clay [3], was a boys’ club if ever there was one. In the assembly-line model of commercial comics that began in the late 1930s, men hunched over tables, drawing, inking, coloring, and writing the action, crime, and superhero comics that flew off the shelves and into the hot little hands of adolescent males. Women portrayed in these comics and in those that followed were not always, well, accurately represented. “They all had breasts bigger than their heads!” says Trina Robbins, self-titled comics “herstorian,” cartoonist, and author of From Girls to Grrrlz: A History of Comics from Teens to Zines [4].

From the '50s through the '70s, the options for girls were pretty much limited to Archie and romance comics. “The [romance] stories, no matter how well-drawn, read as though they were written by clueless forty-five-year-old men, which they were,” writes Robbins. These clueless men included Jack Kirby and Stan Lee, legendary creators of Captain America, Spider Man, the Fantastic Four, and X-Men, among others. Robbins laughs at their efforts, particularly one titled No Man Is My Master, which ends with the female protagonist happily abandoning “female freedom” for the domineering boyfriend she really loves.

(View a slideshow of some of the best comics by women here [5].)

It was, of course, in the 1970s that things started to change. Underground papers like the East Village Other, Open City, and the L.A. Free Press started publishing cartoonists like R. Crumb, Bill Griffith, and Art Spiegelman, and soon after, groups of women began to create their own comics. Robbins was a founding editor of Wimmen’s Comix and It Ain’t Me, Babe, both of which collected work with a feminist message, while Kominsky started Twisted Sisters with Diane Noomin. Two decades later, Kominsky and Noomin put together two Twisted Sisters anthologies, including some of those early female cartoonists as well as women newer to the scene. Carol Tyler, whose work appeared in the anthologies, says, “There was a shift from women who did real feminist-type comics to those who were just telling stories. I was always one who didn’t want to do feminist politics—I just wanted to tell about what happened yesterday.”

Twisted Sisters published groundbreaking work by Kominsky, who drew comics about her childhood on Long Island, her sexual adventures as a hippie chick in San Francisco, and her relationship with R. Crumb; by Phoebe Gloeckner, whose work frankly portrays her stand-in character, Minnie, doing heroin, sleeping with her mother’s boyfriend, and flirting with prostitution; and by Tyler, who used a painterly style to tell stories about life as artist and mother. “When I was young,” Tyler says, “having a career, being a cartoonist, was just not envisioned for me. There had to be a political response to that, and that’s what Trina and the others did. After that, Aline and Diane were able to open the door wider for women doing damn great comics that weren’t politicized.”

A forthcoming anthology—the provisional title of which, The Big Feminist BUT, refers to the phrase, “I’m not a feminist, but …”—will include an equal number of contributions from women and men. “No one can come to an agreement about gender roles these days, and we’re more interested in examining the ambiguities than in making a point about women’s rights,” says editor Shannon O’Leary. “The trailblazers like Aline Kominsky, Trina Robbins, and Lynda Barry really made way for the cartoonists of my generation and younger, and it seems pretty equal now,” she adds.

Dean Haspiel, a cartoonist who collaborated with Jonathan Ames on The Alcoholic [6] and who curates the web comics collective ACT-I-VATE, is one of the slated contributors. “When they first approached me, I said, ‘Feminism, huh,’ ” he says. “The way I approach writing women is the same way I approach writing men: as people,” he adds. If the concept of feminism didn’t feel all that inspirational, Haspiel says he realized that “I’d love to do a story that acknowledges and celebrates my mother and all the work she did in the arts.” Haspiel’s mother served for many years as deputy director of the New York State Council of the Arts.

Certainly, then, the kinds of women being portrayed in comics by both women and men, the ways gender issues are approached in the form, and the playing field for female and male creators have all changed drastically since the early days of comics. But has everything really changed? Maybe not. A case in point was the 2006 “Masters of American Comics” touring exhibition, which featured 15 artists, none of them women.

“What still needs to be accounted for is the long history of women,” says Anne Elizabeth Moore, formerly an editor of the Comics Journal and Punk Planet, and co-founder of the Best American Comics [7] series. “Because there are still people working today who don't notice, when they look at a list of masters, that there are no women on the list, and that’s a problem.” Moore is currently at work on a book of in-depth interviews that examines the ways in which women and transgender people are marginalized in contemporary comics culture. In talking with women like Julie Doucet, an award-winning cartoonist who chose to leave comics in the late ‘90s because, as Moore says, “she just couldn’t make it work,” Moore sees trends in comics that mirror the history of early feminism. “After the early consciousness-raising, people started asking, why can't I make it work? Women aren't the property of men anymore, so why is it so hard to make it work? Well, it's because it takes a lot longer to change the culture than you might expect.”

What’s undeniable is the abundance of great work that women cartoonists are producing, and the recognition that work is receiving. Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis [8], which tells the story of the author’s childhood in Iran and subsequent young adulthood in Europe, won awards in Europe and the United States before Satrapi herself collaborated on the film, which won the Oscar for best animated feature in 2008. Alison Bechdel, whose Dykes to Watch Out For strip ran from 1983 to 2008, won the Eisner Award for best reality-based work in 2007 for her bestselling and utterly brilliant Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic [9]. Jessica Abel’s La Perdida [10], a crime-tale set in Mexico City, was called “graphic novel poetry” by Sherman Alexie. This kind of success exists not only at the top tier but at every level of the industry. “I got lucky,” says Lisa Hanawalt, a 26-year-old cartoonist who lives in New York, “because this is a really good time to be my age and a woman in comics. I don’t really see any marginalizing of women at all.”

The images in this slideshow [11] come from books that have been released in the past few years. They should be seen not as a best-of, but as a small window onto the amazing and varied work being done by female cartoonists right now.