Ladies Making Comics

Sunday Comics: Best Song Ever #3 by Suzy X. via Rookie.

My friend Cathy Leamy reminds us all to find ways to handle holiday stress!

Belated #CosplayAppreciationDay Entry!

This classic Red Sonja cosplayer is none other than ElfQuest co-creator Wendy Pini.

A fantastic photo from the Wimmen’s Comix 40th Anniversary Retrospective opening this past weekend.

(Left to right: Lee Binswanger, Nancy Husari, Caryn Louise Leschen, Sharon Rudahl, Trina Robbins, Terre Richards, Ron Turner, Rebecka Wright, Lee Mars, Rebecca Wilson)

And it reminds me of this picture from 1975:

(Left to right: Standing: Rebecca Wilson, Trina Robbins, Shelby Sampson, Ron Turner (publisher), Barb Brown, Dot Bucher. Sitting: Melinda Gebbie, Lee Marrs.)

Remember, these women broke ground in bringing women’s voices to comics.  Before 1970, the closest comics got to presenting women’s life experiences was the few—and uncredited—women writers of romance comics. Even the counterculture underground scene was unwelcoming to women cartoonists and their points of view at the time.  As Shary Flenniken once said

“Women would submit things to the underground publishers and they’d be rejected because men were grossed out by what women had to say.”

Without Wimmen’s Comix, there would likely be no Fun Home. And given Wimmen’s Comix’s impact in France (inspiring the short-lived magazine Ah! Nana from the publishers of Heavy Metal), probably no Persepolis or Aya either.

Looking at both of these pictures reminds me why I’ve dedicated two years of my life to this blog and the Women in Comics Wiki and spent more money than I’d like to think about collecting Wimmen’s Comix issues and other all-women comics publications (even in languages I don’t speak!)  We as women have a heritage in this medium, and we owe it to these “Godmothers of Awesome,” as Leschen styled this picture on her Facebook page, to remember them and honor their contributions to comics.

Welcome to the clubhouse, girls.  It’s been well broken in for you by these funny, smart, and talented women.

Webcomics Wednesday

Under the Apple Tree by Sarah Winifred Searle

Rosie is forlorn when she and her mother leave the suburbs of Boston for Maine, uprooting her social life and disrupting her last year of high school. Understandably, she believes it is the end of the world and she is doomed to waste away in the boondocks.

But, unfortunately for her, small town life isn’t nearly as dull as she feared.

Rosie finds herself facing a fate forced upon her by events long past: she must discover the truth behind tragic events buried in the history of her new home and bring a man’s spirit to rest. She digs into the past to uncover secrets about her town, all the while handling the trials and tribulations of being an idealistic young woman growing up in an era of great change.

It is October of 1943. World War II looms darkly over the nation’s head, and like many families, Rosie and her mother are left to fend for themselves while her father and brother are away in the military. Rosie is making plans to attend nursing school after graduation, determined to pull her own weight, and even in the little town of Kennebunk, the enemy isn’t as far away as one might think.

(For more insight into Searle’s inspirations and such, check out this interview she did with Seacoast Online, a Kennebunk paper)

Check out the cover to Pretty in Ink, Trina Robbins’s new updated and expanded history of American women cartoonists (the one I sort of helped with by finding out that Golden Age artist Fran Hopper is still alive! As well as introducing her to the work of Eva Mirabal, the Taos Pueblo cartoonist from WWII.) It doesn’t come out until next August, but you can pre-order it from Amazon.

With the 1896 publication of Rose O’Neill’s comic strip The Old Subscriber Calls, in Truth Magazine, American women entered the field of comics, and they never left it. But, you might not know that reading most of the comics histories out there. Trina Robbins has spent the last thirty years recording the accomplishments of a century of women cartoonists, and Pretty in Ink is her ultimate book, a revised, updated and rewritten history of women cartoonists, with more color illustrations than ever before, and with some startling new discoveries (such as a Native American woman cartoonist from the 1940s who was also a Corporal in the women’s army, and the revelation that a cartoonist included in all of Robbins’s previous histories was a man!) In the pages of Pretty in Ink you’ll find new photos and correspondence from cartoonists Ethel Hays and Edwina Dumm, and the true story of Golden Age comic book star Lily Renee, as intriguing as the comics she drew. Although the comics profession was dominated by men, there were far more women working in the profession throughout the 20th century than other histories indicate, and they have flourished in the 21st. Robbins not only documents the increasing relevance of women throughout the 20th century, with mainstream creators such as Ramona Fradon and Dale Messick and alternative cartoonists such as Lynda Barry, Carol Tyler, and Phoebe Gloeckner, but the latest generation of women cartoonists—Megan Kelso, Cathy Malkasian, Linda Medley, and Lilli Carré, among many others. Robbins is the preeminent historian of women comic artists; forget her previous histories: Pretty in Ink is her most comprehensive volume to date.

“What’s Wrong with this Picture?” by Anne Mergen

Down with voter apathy!  Go vote, Americans!