December 7th, 2015: Female Cartoonists

[xoxoxoBruce]

I know it's "A day which will live in infamy", so I'll address that. You shouldn't have started it, fuck you.

Now, Female Cartoonists and Illustrators have been at it forever. But unless you noticed who was creating your comics, whether the daily strips, the Sunday Funnies, or full blown Comic Books, only a few cartoonists like Stan Lee, Charles Shultz, and Bill Watterson, got famous.

Women have been involved in cartoons and comics from their beginning, although much of their work has languished in the greater story of graphic narratives. And it’s not for the reasons you might think. They weren’t hiding behind pseudonyms or being cut out of the field; it’s that later when the history was chronicled, their names just weren’t included.

Trina Robbins, an influential comics creator herself particularly in the underground comix of the 1970s and 80s, has dedicated herself as a historian of this overlooked story. The research culminated in Pretty In Ink: North American Women Cartoonists 1896-2013 published last December by Fantagraphics.

At Trina Robbin's site there's a picture of her looking exactly what I think a lady cartoonist should look like.

Trina Robbins has been writing comics and books for over thirty years. She lives in San Francisco, and loves cats and vintage clothing.

Trina says her favorite female cartoonist is Lily Renée, and has put together a FREE download of a short interview and all Renée's comic book stories from the Golden Age of Comics. It's downloadable in pdf, Kindle and ePub, but I'll warn you, the pdf is 238 megabytes, 225 pages. The first 14 pages are pictures and interview, then the next 210 pages are full comic book pages.

This is the intro/foreword.

I love it, no mushy love stories, all these heroines are kickass role models.

[DanaC]

Awesome.

[Snakeadelic]

While the slight to the history of women in comics is inexcusable, I love that the playing field is so much more level now with webcomics so easy to produce. Male-female teams are becoming common, like the couple who create Two Lumps (hilarious if you know what housecats are REALLY like). Multi-artist teams like the creators of Menage A 3 now seem to routinely include at least 1 female artist and/or writer. Girls with Slingshots, a spinoff from Something Positive, was entirely produced by a woman for 10 solid years, and is now in reruns with the original black-and-white strips colored. Maybe soon women in webcomics will be able to stand up and demand that their artistic sisters' contributions to print comics and history be portrayed openly and accurately.