Comics Isn't a Boys' Club Anymore

Drawing from "Chicken with Plums" by Marjane Satrapi (Pantheon, 2006).

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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

The early comics industry, described so lovingly in Kavalier & Clay, 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.

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.)

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.”