Chapter 4 from the book by Trina Robbins
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.
