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Grrrlz' Comix
The 1990s
In 1992, Wimmen's
Comix finally removed the word men from its name and became
Wimmin's Comix. By then, though, it no longer mattered. Young women
had started to reclaim the word girl, just as the gay movement
had reclaimed the word queer, and they were using the previously
forbidden word in the titles of their comics: Real Girl, Action Girl,
Deep Girl, Girl Hero, Girl Talk, Girl Jock, Rude Girls and Dangerous Women.
(It's interesting to note here that throughout the 1990s, "bad girl" comics
- the kind produced for adolescent and teenaged boys, and starring hypersexualized
women with large breasts and little clothing --- are often preceded by
the word lady, as in Lady Death, Lady Justice, and Lady
Rawhide, while the feminist comics thave the word girl in their
titles.)
Real Girl,
the first of the "girl" comics, started with the new decade, in 1990.
Editor Angela Bocage subtitled it "The Sex Comik for All Genders and Orientations
by Artists Who Are Good in Bed". True to its title, Real Girl features
artists of both genders, and emphasizes comics that deal with every variation
of sex, positive and negative: abortion, harassment, AIDS, lesbians, cross-dressers,
and paper dolls of people like Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas or Valerie
Solanis, author of the SCUM Manifesto and would-be assassin of
Andy Warhol.
In an article
in Real Girl no. 1, Rebecka Wright defines girl as opposed to woman:
"Perhaps you're
wondering why Real Girl? Why not Real Woman? Isn't "girl"
a patronizing term for an adult female? Listen, junior, while it's true
that this form of address is best reserved for intimates, some of the
best people around call themselves girls. Quite a few call themselves
women. The twain often meet, even in the same person, but there are
some philosophical differences.
"Sex, just to
choose an example at random, has certain, well, serious and lasting connotations
for women that just don't apply to girls. A "fallen woman" is ruined;
a "bad girl" is only naughty . . .
". . . Not that
it's all a game for girls, but there don't seem to be quite so many lurking
consequences for them. There is a certain amount of freedom of action
accorded adult girls, as succinctly put by this popular bumpersticker:
Good girls go to heaven. Bad girls go everywhere."
Times had
changed, and that feminist warhorse Wimmen's Comix, after going
through three publishers and twenty years, put out its last issue in 1992.
Past issues had highlighted such themes as men, little girls, and work
--- there had even been a 3D issue --- but this last one was the "kvetch
issue." In her editorial kvetch, Caryn Leschen echoed the frustrations
of too many women cartoonists while explaining why there would be no more
issues of the longest-lasting women's anthology comic:
"This book has
been printed on cheap paper which will turn yellow in a few years. The
print run was too small and all the stores, as usual, will sell out, but
they won't reorder because 'Women don't buy comix.' Bullshit. How did
they sell out in the first place? It's always like that. What a waste
of time and energy. Forget it."
After the close
of their longtime home at Wimmen's Comix, some cartoonists moved
on to Twisted Sisters, under the editorship of Diane Noomin. Twisted
Sisters, which began as a two-issue comic book in the 1970s, was revived
in 1991 as a book, collecting earlier work by fourteen women cartoonists,
much of it from Wimmen's Comix. After that, Noomin edited four
more issues as a comic book, expanded to include the work of newer, younger
women cartoonists. And there were definitely enough to choose from; throughout
the 1990s, scads of women cartoonists emerged on the pages of anthologies
and their own comic books. Twisted Sisters exemplifies the tendencies
of contemporary women cartoonists to produce autobiographical stories.
Issue no. 3, from 1994, is typical; of four stories in the book, three
are literally "true confessions". The main difference between these and
the earlier love comics is that Twisted Sisters' confessions all
deal with sex: the high school girl protagonist of Debbie Drechsler's
"Sixteen" is raped; in Caryn Leschen's "Dutch Treat", a bride honeymooning
in Europe sleeps with an old boyfriend; and Phoebe Gloeckner spins the
unsettling tale of a fifteen- year-old runaway in a world of bad drugs
and worse sex.
Like the old love
comics, these stories are narrated in first person, but in the case of
Twisted Sisters, we believe them to be true. Unlike the old love
comics, with their tacked-on happy endings, many of the newer women's
comic autobiographies range from mildly to extremely depressing.
But it's not all
true confessions for the women who produce girl comics; they share a strong
political and feminist awareness that they're not ashamed to talk about,
and none of them are likely to boast of being politically incorrect. Many
of the women in Girl Talk also contributed to World War 3,
an unapologetically radical comic book put together by a collective of
both male and female New York artists. In their 1992 special issue on
sexism, Sabrina Jones wrote:
"Today most women
expect to enjoy certain hard-won rights of the feminist movement, while
disavowing feminism itself. They're afraid to alienate the men in their
lives, who still hold most of the power. The male-dominated editorial
board of World War 3 considers itself variously leftist/radical/progressive/anarchist
. . . and therefore open to feminism. In spite of these good intentions,
the few feminist pieces we accepted just didn't seem to fit in."
The editorial
board's answer, Jones continues, was to produce a special issue on sexism,
but she has her doubts: "The material will be ghettoized --- men won't
read it, and then when we get more work on the topic, you'll say, 'We
already covered that.'" Girl Talk, which started three years later,
would seem to have been the answer to Jones's problem. The editors define
girl talk as ". . . a safer haven that can handle anything from delirium
to despair". But not all the contributors are women. One of the more powerful
pieces in issue no. 2 is "Six Single Mothers", by Lance Tooks. His grim
parody of a child's rhyme starts: "One single mother/ Rougher side of
town/ had to take a second job/ To keep expenses down/ Can't afford a
safer street/ Living in a dive/ Came home late one Friday night/ Then
there were five." The last verse is the most tragic: "One forgotten mother/
Bare and callused feet/ Paid her taxes regular/ And wound up on the street/
Fought so hard to fix her life/ Until they took her son/ Strain turned
out to be too much/ Then there were none."
Some of the girl
heroes in Megan Kelso's comic book, Girl Hero, are Animata, Bottlecap,
and Yolanda, three superpowered factory workers fomenting revolution against
the corporate rulers of a near-future dystopia. But despite the often
grim messages in her book, Kelso includes paper dolls of her characters,
a tradition left over from the girl comics of the forties.
Paper dolls are
also a regular feature of Action Girl, an anthology comic book
that combines feminism with an upbeat girls-just-wanna-have-fun attitude.
In her editorials for Action Girl comics, Sarah Dyer describes
her book's upbeat philosophy ("girl-positive and female-friendly --- never
anti-boy"), and proceeds to give the reader a political pep talk:
"Remember ---
ACTION IS EVERYTHING! Our society, even when it's trying to be 'alternative'
usually just promotes a consumerist mentality. Buying things isn't evil,
but if that's all you do, your life is pretty pointless. Be an ACTION
GIRL (or boy)! . . . go out and do something with all that positive energy!"
Merely reclaiming
the word girl was not enough for some women cartoonists, who went
still further, following the tradition of Tits 'n' Clits. These
women reclaim some seriously objectionable words in comics like Mary Fleener's
Slutburger, Molly Kiely's Saucy Little Tart, the anthology
On Our Butts, Roberta Gregory's Naughty Bits (starring Bitchy
Bitch), and Julie Doucet's Dirty Plotte (plotte is French
Canadian slang for a woman's naughty bits). Such in-your-face titles are
a symbolic bird defiantly flipped at the reader. "Sure," says the artist,
"I'm a slut, a bitch. Je suis une plotte. You got a problem with
that?"
Other women cartoonists
go to the opposite extreme and turn sweetness inside out. Dame Darcy (Meatcake)
and Christine Shields (Blue Hole) might well be the love children
of Edward Gory and Drusilla, the vampire from the television cult favorite
Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Their comic books are 100 percent girl,
but with a dark twist; sugar and spice and arsenic, and antique dolls
in bloodstained lace bonnets. On the pages of both books, girls in thrift
shop dresses ( I, for one, strongly suspect resemble the artists), drift
through disturbing, dreamlike Victorian universes. Darcy's main character
is a girl named Richard Dirt, who, with her long blond hair and high granny
boots, looks like a warped Alice in Wonderland. She and her Siamese-twin
girlfriends Hindrance and Perfidia look like little darlings from some
fin de siecle photo album, but they guzzle their booze right from the
bottle. In Blue Hole, Shields relates the true story of a tragic
San Francisco double murder, carried out Romeo and Juliet style. Her heroine,
Ruby, also takes her rotgut straight, and in the company of pirates, no
less. Yet both comics are so darn cute! Except for the aforementioned
Edward Gory, it would be hard to imagine any man drawing comics like these.
If Christine Shields
and Dame Darcy turn sweetness inside out, Linda Medley stands the Brothers
Grimm on their heads with her self-published book, Castle Waiting.
Drawing in the style of a classic fairy-tale illustrator, Medley interweaves
the frog prince, Rumplestiltskin, the Brementown musicians, and every
other fairy-tale our mothers lulled us to sleep with. The castle itself
is Sleeping Beauty's old home, still surrounded by its brambly fence years
after the princess departed with her prince, leaving the other inhabitants
(including a curious bird-headed creature called Rackham, named after
the great fantasy artist Arthur Rackham) waiting for travelers who have
stories of their own.
Still other women
cartoonists use the word girl, but spell it with three Rs.
In the summer
of 1991 a girls' movement was created in America with the odd merging
of two Washingtons, D.C. and Washington State. That was when two all-girl
punk bands, Bikini Kill and Bratmobile, both from Olympia, Washington,
came to D.C. for an extended stay. Our nation's capital had long been
the scene of a flourishing punk movement, which was predominantly male.
The few women in the punk scene were angry at the increasingly macho violence
of the male punkers, which kept them out of the scene, sometimes with
real physical threats. The result of their anger was a revival of feminism---
1990s-style "third wave feminism".
Many of the young
women, most in their teens and twenties, had been brought up in nonsexist
and nontraditional ways by mothers who had themselves been part of the
"second wave feminism" of the 1970s. (The first wave is considered to
be the early suffragettes.) The daughters of these women grew up understanding
the concept of sexism, and taking for granted many of the gains made by
that earlier movement. Along came the backlash, and young women found
their security rudely shattered by threats to their reproductive rights,
and by a new wave of sexism and homophobia. They were still not free to
walk down the street without being harassed. They were mad as hell and
they weren't going to take it.
The girls of
Bikini Kill and Bratmobile got together, coming up with such slogans as
"Revolution girls style now," and the term Riot Grrrl. Two of them,
Allison Wolte and Molly Neuman, put together the first Riot Grrrl zine,
using that name, and the movement was born. "Grrrl" combined that reclaimed
word girl with a defiant growl - these were no well-mannered, pink-ribboned
"nice girls."
Within a year,
the first Riot Grrrl convention took place in D.C., and chapters formed
all over the country. As with the "Women's Lib" movement twenty years
earlier, the national media was quick to cover it and slow to understand
it. Riot Grrrlz were stereotyped as lesbians and/or violent man-haters.
Actually, one of the first Riot Grrrl actions was to protest violence
in a traditionally feminist collective way, by reclaiming the mosh pit,
that crushing and frightening all-male area in front of the band at concerts.
To make a space for themselves, the girls formed packs and forced their
way to the front en masse, each protecting the other.
As much as the
Riot Grrrl movement was about music, it was also about zines, self-published
photocopied mini-magazines with print runs ranging anywhere from thirty
to five hundred copies. Riot Grrrlz didn't invent fanzines, nor did the
punk movement. The fanzine goes as far back as the early 1930s, when young
science-fiction fans reproduced their own small magazines on messy mimeographs
and even messier hectographs, crude precursors to today's more accessible
photocopy machines. Many of the young fans who produced them eventually
became professional writers and editors. The early zines, much as their
later counterparts, were often letters in mini-magazine form, illustrated
or not, featuring news and reviews of the latest science fiction book
or chatty personal information. And like today's zines, they could be
traded for other zines or they were available through the mail for anything
from a postage stamp to a couple of quarters.
The next group
to utilize zines were comic fans in the early 1960s. Some of the earliest
underground comix were hardly more than zines produced with only slightly
more sophisticated printing equipment, and some of today's well-known
comics professionals started in their pages. The advent of cheap photocopying
in the 1980s liberated the zine. Anyone with something to say could afford
to self-publish. By the 1990s, women, feeling the need to communicate
with each other and empowered by Riot Grrrlz, adopted the zine as the
perfect medium in which to share their personal life stories, rants, philosophies,
humor, poetry - and comics.
Like the early
science-fiction and comic fans, some of today's well known women cartoonists,
like Diane DiMassa, Mary Fleener, Ariel Bordeaux and Jessica Abel, started
by publishing their own zines. Although their drawing styles are miles
apart, both Abel's Artbabe and Bordeaux's No Love Lost (her
zine was called Deep Girl) typify the mildly depressing autobiographical
genre so often found in women's and grrrlz' zines and comics. Not much
happens, and what does, happens in "real time." Girls agonize over boys,
attend concerts, sit in cafes, discuss their relationships with their
girlfriends. No real conclusions have been reached by the end of the book.
So many women's
autobiographical comics are depressing, and so many are about dysfunctional
families, that it becomes tempting to believe that dysfunctional families
breed women cartoonists. Luckily, there is Ellen Forney. In her self-published
comic, I Was Seven in '75, Forney tells a warm, upbeat story about
growing up in the 1970s with hippie parents. Not that bad things don't
happen in the stories--- Forney's brother gets five stitches when he hits
his head on a chair, the kids manage to set fire to their new microwave,
and her parents survive a pot bust when the baby-sitter turns them in
to the cops --- but these are your average everyday bad things. No one
gets abused, raped, or permanently robbed of their self-esteem by rotten
parents. Forney's parents are, in fact, terrific; she and her brother
are normal, happy kids. Her book is sweet, funny, and refreshing.
Diane DiMassa's
Hothead Paisan, Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist, the angriest woman
in comics since Bitchy Bitch, doesn't get depressed, either - she acts,
and acts violently. While Roberta Gregory's Bitchy Bitch (and her lesbian
counterpart, Butchy Butch) is guaranteed to go postal several times in
each issue of Naughty Bits, once the fit passes she's left as wretched
as before. Hothead's rage, on the other hand, is cathartic --- for the
reader as well --- and makes for some of the happiest violence you ever
saw.
Hothead and Daphne,
the girl she's madly in love with, sit on a park bench, happy together
in the sunshine, when a huge man sits down next to them, spreading out
his legs and invading their space the way huge men who spread their legs
and invade your space have a way of doing. You gotta hand it to her, Hothead
gives him a chance. She stares at the leg and says, "Uh, pardon me . .
.," but the guy mutters, "Whatcher problem?" With a demonic grin, Hothead
produces a hatchet out of nowhere, chops off the offending leg, and hands
it to him. "This!" she announces. "This is my problem! Does this belong
to you? Because if it does, I found it way over here in my space!"
Hothead and Daphne
go to the movies and a seriously tall dude, wearing a baseball cap, sits
right in front of Hothead. Again, she gives him a chance first. "Yoo-hoo,
Mr. Total eclipse of the sun . . ." she says. "You're twelve feet tall
and you wear a hat to the movies? And ya sit in front? Why didn't
ya wear a cowboy hat??? Whatta gonna do next? Open up an umbrella??"
Naturally, the tall guy ignores her and continues to sit, his legs spread
apart (of course), revealing the sentences, "Me a big boy, me have special
rights" written on the crotch of his jeans. Again, Hothead grins maniacally
and while Daphne applauds, produces a chain saw from thin air and saws
the guy in half. "He was in my way," she explains, "I couldn't accept
that."
Besides, Hothead
has a really cute cat named Chicken, who wears a fez.
Zine art ranges
from amazingly excellent to mondo scratcho, but the not-very-good artists
don't care if their work is crude. They're simply following the advice
Sarah Dyer gives in Action Girl: "Don't think you can do comics?
Try anyway, even if it's just for yourself!" They're producing illustrated
letters, not art galleries to be sent through the mail. As with letters,
they share their days, their friends, and their fun with the reader.
In Ducks in
a Row, Bonni Moeller fits lists of her friends' one hundred favorite
things ("1.Beer, 2.The Ramones, 3.Good shoes, 4.Burritos . . .") between
pages of delicately crosshatched comics. Carrie McNinch's art style is
the complete opposite of Moellers; she uses heavy, solid blacks and strong,
woodcut-like outlines. But she's just as chatty. On the first page of
The Assassin and the Whiner she shares with the reader her delight
at finding the original ship used in Gilligan's Island, her favorite
cooking show on PBS, her grandfather's funeral, her family's reaction
to her coming out as a lesbian, her enjoyment of Ellen DeGeneres's "coming
out episode," and her appreciation of the guy in her local comic-book
store, who gives her discounts. In Cone of Silence, Kelly Renee
shares with her readers "Men That Have Made Me Feel Wanton," a list that
includes her high school crush, her grade school dream boy, and The Fonz.
Tina, one of three grrrlz who produce Buffy and Jody's Guide to the
Galaxy, tells us about the best friends she had in school, and in
another issue the girls (Tina, Ami,and Alexis; no last names supplied)
supply the recipe for deep-fried spaghetti ("serve with garlic bread and
cherry kool aide"). Beth Templeton plays on the 1970s desire to "share".
She produces postcards that read, "Sure, I'll share", and her zines ask,
"Want Some of My Insomnia?", "Want Some of the Crap I Carry Around?"
After all this
cheerful sharing, the bite in the zines comes as a shock, until we remember
that grrrl is part growl. Canadian zine artist Patti Kim writes letters
on Hello Kitty stationary and peppers her zines with cute Japanese cartoon
characters, but when you turn a page, you come to this declaration:
"First Mourn
. . . Then Work For Change . . . On December 6, 1989, 14 women were
murdered in Montreal. Women of every race and class are abused and killed
by men they know. We mourn, and work for change . . ."
One topic dealt
with in a majority of zines is women's bodies, and our obsession with
weight. Beth Templeton draws a comic about her breast reduction operation,
commenting, "Why couldn't I be satisfied with my body? Why did one asshole
doctor's controlled and surgically accepted violence on my body make such
a difference?"
In Cone of
Silence, Kelly Renee draws a disturbing comic about bulimia, "Living
On Empty." As the bulimic waits in line at the supermarket to buy the
junk food she'll devour, then throw up, "An image of the sainted Princess
Diana sticking a lovely, manicured finger down her royal throat comes
to mind. It is comforting. She would know. She would understand."
Following the
comic is a parody of all those "Now You Are a Woman" pamphlets our mothers
gave us, but instead of instructions on the use of sanitary napkins, it's
a manual on how to be a bulimic. Some helpful tips: "Running water is
an effective way to disguise sounds of gagging or retching.", "Remember:
you can learn to purge quietly!"
"My Amazing Secret,"
in Buffy and Jody's Guide to the Galaxy, provides another parody
on weight loss, using copy from real ads: "Suddenly --- for the first
time in my life --- I started to lose weight!!!! It was a miracle!
The fat seemed to just melt-away. I finally discovered the Secret
to losing weight! It was all so simple . . . so easy! So I just kept doing
it. And I kept getting thinner and thinner." In Tina's accompanying art,
the protagonist becomes a living skeleton. Finally, in the last panel,
she reveals "the Secret" --- a crack pipe, a lighter, and rocks of crack,
with accompanying directions, "1. Put rock in pipe. 2. Light the pipe.
3. Smoke pipe."
Madison Clell
and Kim Hecht put out the most serious zine of all, but even here, there's
room for humor. Cuckoo is subtitled "One Woman's True Stories of
Living with Multiple Personality Disorder". Madison Clell draws a delighted
psychology major, pointing with pride at the "multiple" she's discovered
--- Clell herself, turned into a giant furry guinea pig. She calls this
"Guinea Pig Syndrome." Sometimes ironic, sometimes dead serious, sometimes
with rage, Clell, using an expressionistic brush style, introduces us
to the different people, whom she calls "alters", sharing her body. One
is eight-year-old Melanie, who was raped as a child. "There's a technical
term for what was inflicted on Melanie", Clell writes, "Phrases for clarity
in courtrooms and doctor's notes. Names to tame monstrous actions. Sodomy.
Rape. Child molestation. Bullshit! Words can never describe the
reality."
Cuckoo
is not for kids or for those looking for a laugh. It's strong stuff, and
it's important stuff.
Not much, actually,
is out there for kids these days in the way of comics. The unsinkable
Archie stands alone. Pep, the comic that started it all
back in 1941, was finally canceled in 1989, but the Archie line
is still going strong. In the 1990s, a new character was added to Archie's
crowd of pals and gals --- Cheryl Blossom, a redhead who's twice as rich
and three times as bitchy as Veronica --- and in 1997, Sabrina the
Teenage Witch became the latest in a long string of hit television
series based on Archie characters. Archie's only competition
during the entire 1990s was Barbie comics, published by Marvel
from 1990 through 1995. Currently, if little girls want to read a comic,
their only choice is the Archie group.
Mainstream love
comics have fared even worse. There are no mainstream love comics.
However, the genre keeps getting revived by smaller publishers. Lea Hernandez
combines romance with manga, the Japanese comic style, and a form
of science fiction known as "steam punk," in her graphic novel, Cathedral
Child. Steam punk stories take place in some alternate past that has
modern technology. Thus, Hernandez's story takes place in 1897; her heroine
wears granny shoes, but she works with an analytical engine ---
their term for a computer.
All those old
"nurses in love" comics are taken one step further by Jimmie Robinson
in his comic-book sendup of the ER -- style soaps, Code Blue.
Jayeen "Chicken" Michaels is head of staff at Highland, a low-end, crumbling
county hospital. In her words, "We handle the homeless, runaways, addicts,
you name it." On an average day, Jayeen deals with emergencies ranging
from a mad bomber to the hunky head doctor of pricey, high-tech Northridge
Hospital on the other side of town. She helps subdue the bomber and saves
the doctor's life when he's brought in after a traffic pileup. But when
he tries to date her, she's too resentful to admit she likes him: "I'd
hate to deprive that fancy chrome building of its head doctor. The thought
of some middle-aged woman missing out on her tummy-tuck and hip-suck .
. . it brings shivers down my spine." Readers wondering when the cute
doctor will conquer Jayeen's foolish pride must wait for the next issue
to find out.
The most traditionally
campy romance comic of the 1990s is Eternal Romance, Janet Hetherington's
blend of Roy Lichtenstein paintings and vampire stories. Perfectly parodying
the traditional love comics style, Hetherington tells true confessions
with a 1990s edge. In the first issue of her book, subtitled "Love! Heartache!
Vampires!", the romantic leads, like the love comics genre, refuse to
stay dead. They are all vampires. In later issues, Hetherington widens
her scope to include anyone good looking and supernatural. The love interest
in "Mummy's Boy" is obvious. In "Once Bitten, Twice Shy", Joey's ex-girlfriend,
Rochelle, suddenly pops back into his life, much to the dismay of his
current girlfriend, Joyce. When the two finally come to blows over him,
Rochelle reveals she's a vampire, but they're evenly matched --- Joyce
is a witch.
"No! sob!
I can never marry you!" sobs Lin, the heroine of "Kiss of Death",
also in the third issue of Eternal Romance. "My family is . . .
cursed!" And indeed, one kiss transforms her into a rather cute werewolf.
But it turns out that her fiancé is a werewolf, too, and the couple
is free to howl at the moon together, happily ever after.
Obviously, men
can create girl comics, too, as they have since the 1940s. Terry Moore's
Strangers in Paradise is probably the best 1990s successor to Love
and Rockets, which is no longer being published. Girls who once graduated
from Betty and Veronica to Maggie and Hopy can now go straight to Francine
and Katchoo. Moore's art is excellent, his stories moving and funny, his
characters real. Like Maggie from Love and Rockets, Moore's pleasingly
plump Francine proves that one doesn't have to be an anorexic supermodel
to be absolutely adorable.
One of the best
graphic novels of the 1990s, if not of the century, is Bryan Talbot's
The Tale of One Bad Rat, a sensitive, beautifully drawn story of
childhood sexual abuse. Helen, a teenage runaway, has fled from an abusive
father and a cold, uncaring mother. As she begs on the streets of London,
sleeping in alleys and abandoned buildings, her only companions are her
pet rat and the Beatrix Potter books she has loved since childhood. When
a cat kills her rat, Helen begins a pilgrimage to Beatrix Potter's home
which will eventually lead to her own healing. The rat, which has become
a kind of giant spirit guide visible only to her, accompanies Helen on
her odyssey.
With all the wonderful
girl comics out there, one would think that women and girls of all ages
have all the comics they could want, and that the comics creators are
in paradise, expressing themselves on paper and making a decent living
doing so. This could not be further from the truth. The average woman
cartoonist has a day job. Her books are hard to find. Zines, of course,
are usually only available through the mail, but with few exceptions,
even the better-selling girls' comics usually have a small print run compared
to mainstream superhero comics, and very few comic-books stores bother
to carry them. Beth Templeton describes the situation perfectly in Want
Some?:
"These days when
I stake out a comic book store, I'm looking for comics by women, or local
self-published things . . . It's not hard to find stores devoid of both.
No 'Art Babe', 'Hothead Paisan', 'Dirty Plotte' or 'Dykes to Watch Out
For' but, they would be 'happy to order something in for you.' Uh, no
thanks. If I can't browse from a great selection, how will I find anything
new?"
The result, of
course, is that comparatively few women even know these comics exist.
To further compound the irony, self-published or small-press black-and-white
comics are usually priced higher than mainstream, full-color superhero
comics, yet women earn less than men, and have less buying power.
It's a sorry situation,
and in 1993, women decided to do something about it. During the San Diego
comics convention, a group of women who worked in comics met at a coffeehouse
to discuss the problems of working in such a male-dominated industry.
The result of the meeting was the formation of Friends of Lulu,
a national organization named for the plucky little girl who never gave
up on her attempts to crash the boys' club. Their stated purpose is "to
promote and encourage female readership and participation in the comic
book industry." In February, 1997, Friends of Lulu held their first annual
conference, and in August of that year, they honored women creators and
women-friendly comic books at their first annual Lulu awards ceremony.
As we come to
the close of the twentieth century, the comic industry, such a vital art
and communication form for over sixty years, is in real trouble. In fact,
the industry has never been in worse shape.
Comic-book sales
are at their lowest in fifty years. There was a time when one in three
periodicals sold in the United States was a comic book. Walt Disney's
Comics and Stories sold over four million issues every month. Other
titles, including some westerns, crime comics, and the Simon and Kirby
romance comics, sold more than one million copies per issue. Ninety percent
of the nation were regular comics readers. Today that number is less than
one percent. In fact, if one percentof the population read comics today,
the industry would be considered healthy. The average mainstream superhero
comic sells from forty thousand to sixty thousand copies. (And, of course,
the average mainstream comic book is always a superhero comic!)
The average black-and-white, independently published comic book sells
about three thousand copies.
This had all happened
before, although not on such a disastrous scale, when superhero comics,
the biggest sellers during the Second World War, lost their popularity
after the war, and were replaced by other genres, including teen comics
and love comics. Tastes change and pendulums swing. The pendulum, which
swung back to superhero comics in the 1960s, has reversed itself again.
Comic-book editors,
publishers, and retailers like to blame television for the decline in
their field, but people have not stopped reading. A 1998 survey by Publishers
Weekly found that readers were buying three times as many books as
they had bought the year before. The survey also found that they're young,
under thirty-five, and that fifty eight percent of them are women, as
opposed to forty two percent men. Obviously, there are books out there
--- lots of them --- that women want to read. Women make up fifty two
percent of the population, and they like to read. It doesn't take a rocket
scientist to figure out that they would also like to read comics, if publishers
would only produce comics for them to read.
The motto of Friends
of Lulu is "Here To Save Comics." Once upon a time there was a woman named
Ginger Rogers who could dance as well as Fred Astaire, only backwards
and in high heels. If a woman could do that, saving comics ought to be
a snap.
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