Overview

Women in Comics: Looking Forward and Back takes advantage of the Society’s unique upstairs/downstairs main gallery, On the first floor, we take a look back at the history of women cartoonists with over 90 original artworks, artifacts, and photos on view from the personal collection of the woman that rediscovered them, author and herstorian Trina Robbins. On the second floor, we look forward to current comics with new work by 20 artists selected by Kim Munson, editor of the upcoming anthology Comic Art in Museums (UPM, July 2020). The show was intended to be a key part of MOCCA Fest, the Society’s yearly festival of independent comics, which was postponed.

Trina’s collection is deep in many important phases in the history of women cartoonists: The Flapper era, the WW2 era when women drew action comics while the men were fighting, 1950’s Romance comics, and the underground comics of the 1970’s. Many of these women, like Nell Brinkley and Dale Messick were superstars of their era. Along with Brinkley and Messick, Trina’s collection includes work by Fay King, Ethel Hays, Sylvia Sneidman, Gladys Parker, Virginia Krausmann, Martha Orr, Tarpé Mills, Lily Renee, Fran Hopper, Dorthy Hughes, Jill Elgin, Ann Brewster, Odin Burvik, Valerie Barclay, Marcia Snyder, Hilda Terry, Ramona Fradon, Elizabeth Berube, Barbara “Willy” Mendes, Jewelie Goodvibes, Selby Kelly, Marty Links, and Marie Severin.

Trina was also an underground cartoonist in the late 1960s & 1970s. Trina spoke out about the violence and sexism seen in comix by Robert Crumb and his circle, and in response, she was shut out of publishing opportunities in their books. Because of this, Trina produced the first women’s underground comic book, It Ain’t Me Babe published by Ron Turner of Last Gasp Publishing in San Francisco (1970), followed by several one-shots. Joyce Farmer and Lyn Chevli began the series Tits & Clits in 1972. The Wimmen’s Comix collective formed the same year and continued publication of Wimmen’s Comix through 1992. In the show, we have a display of work by Trina, Barbara “Willy” Mendes, and Jewelie Goodvibes for All Girl Thrills #1 (1971).

The contemporary show builds on this history, as many modern women cartoonists either got their start in these books, were directly inspired by them or they were able to succeed because the gains made by these foremothers in terms of content and audience. The artists are Lynda Barry, Gabrielle Bell, Colleen Doran, Trinidad Escobar, Joyce Farmer, Margot Ferrick, Emil Ferris, Mary Fleener, Ebony Flowers, the late Noel Franklin, Lee Marrs, Alitha Martinez, Barbara Mendes, Summer Pierre, Afua Richardson, Fiona Smyth, Ann Telnaes, Carol Tyler, Jen Wang, Tillie Walden, and Kriota Willberg. The contemporary show is not meant to be a survey of every women doing great work in comics (I would need a wing of the Met!), but instead is a representation of the wide range and diversity of women working in comics and of the many genres of comics women are working in such as personal memoir, children’s stories, superheroes, epic fantasy, graphic medicine, and editorial cartooning. I made a curatorial decision that I would show at least 4 pieces by each artist so we could have whole short stories or narrative arcs, which limited us to 20 artists in that space. The Society has actually had many comics shows, so I had to avoid women who had been shown recently (like Women of the New Yorker) and also include the generational story of women that started in the 70s, 80s, or were newer on the scene.

Press about Women in Comics

The Guardian: They Were Forgotten | BBC Radio Four Women’s Hour: conversation with Trina Robbins, UK Comics Laureate Hannah Berry, and illustrator Charlotte Mei (starts at 32:00) | Publica (Portugal): Women Looking for Freedom in Comics (in Portuguese, see English version here) | Bado Blog: Women in Comics Looking Forward & Back exhibition.

Artist Bios

Below are bios for Trina Robbins and for the artists included in the lower gallery show. If you are looking for bios for women featured in Trina’s collection, I recommend the Women in Comics Wiki. There are some samples from Trina’s collection in the grid of exhibition photos.

Lynda Barry

Lynda Barry has worked as a painter, cartoonist, writer, illustrator, playwright, editor, commentator, and teacher and found that they are very much alike. She lives in Wisconsin, where she is associate professor of art and Discovery Fellow at University of Wisconsin Madison.

Barry is the inimitable creator behind the seminal comic strip that was syndicated across North America in alternative weeklies for two decades, Ernie Pook’s Comeek, featuring the incomparable Marlys and Freddy. She is the author of The Freddie Stories, One! Hundred! Demons!, The! Greatest! of! Marlys!, Cruddy: An Illustrated Novel, Naked Ladies! Naked Ladies! Naked Ladies!, and The Good Times are Killing Me which was adapted into a Broadway play.

She has written three bestselling and acclaimed creative how-to graphic novels for Drawn & Quarterly, What It Is, which won the Eisner Award for Best Reality-Based Graphic Novel and R.R. Donnelly Award ; Picture This; and Syllabus: Notes From an Accidental Professor, and In 2019 she received a MacArthur Genius Grant. On display are five pages from What It Is, see more at Adam Baumgold Fine Art.

Colleen Doran

Colleen Doran is the New York Times bestselling artist for the Neil Gaiman graphic novels Troll Bridge, Snow, Glass, Apples, Sandman, American Gods, and Stan Lee’s autobiography Amazing, Fantastic, Incredible Stan Lee. Books she has illustrated have won Eisner, Harvey, and International Horror Guild Awards. Vector: The Journal of the British Science Fiction Association declared Doran’s A Distant Soil, which she created at age twelve, “…groundbreaking science fiction comics… ahead of its time.”

Projects include Amazing Spider-Man, The Teen Titans, Wonder Woman, Captain America, Guardians of the Galaxy, Finality with Warren Ellis, and Alan Moore’s experimental animated webcomic Big Nemo based on the Winsor McCay strip.

Joyce Farmer

Joyce Farmer has been creating comics since 1972. The series Tits and Clits (1972-1987) explored women’s adventures regarding sex and cultural expectations. Controversial at the time, Joyce is now recognized as a pioneer in underground comix.

Her graphic memoir Special Exits (2010) depicts the universal problems of the elderly and treatment of the extremely vulnerable by the medical community. She won a Reuben and was nominated for an Eisner the same year. The book has been translated into five languages. Each summer, Joyce travels to Greece to work, swim and practice the language. We are showing Joyce’s entire five page story Antique Restoration.

Gabrielle Bell

Gabrielle Bell’s work has been selected for the 2007, 2009, 2010 and 2011 Best American Comics and the Yale Anthology of Graphic Fiction. She has contributed to The New Yorker, The Paris Review, McSweeneys, The Believer, and Vice Magazine. The title story of Bell’s book, Cecil and Jordan in New York, has been adapted for the film anthology Tokyo! by Michel Gondry. Her first graphic full-length memoir, Everything is Flammable, was named one of the best graphic novels of 2017 by Entertainment Weekly, Paste Magazine and Publisher’s Weekly. Her most recent book, Inappropriate, is a collection of humorous and weird short comics, usually involving animals. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

We are showing black and white originals of Gabrielle’s four page story My Prince. It can be seen in color at medium.com.

Trinidad Escobar

Trinidad Escobar is a Filipina poet and cartoonist from the San Francisco Bay Area, California. She is a fellow of the MFA Comics program at CCA as well as the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. Her forthcoming graphic novel is Of Sea and Venom, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

We are showing Trinidad’s entire four page story All These Years from the anthology Drawing Power: Women’s Stories of Sexual Violence, Harassment, and Survival. She has allowed us to show her process, so we are showing the four pages of her story from Drawing Power from blue pencil though the full color version.

Margot Ferrick

Margot Ferrick was born in 1988 on Long Island and now lives in Chicago. Their published work includes Yours and Dognurse. Both were included in Best American Comics and were nominated for Ignatz Awards. Petso appeared as a webcomic on Vice.com in 2018 and will soon be expanded into a longer book. It depicts the lives of two creatures-- one desperate to become a submissive, pampered pet, the other desperate for freedom. We are showing Margot’s entire four page Petso story.

Mary Fleener

Mary Fleener was born in Los Angeles and attended Cal State University at Long Beach as a printmaking major but dropped out to pursue her interest in music. She started self publishing her own mini comics in 1984. Her first solo book was Hoodoo, a comic about Zora Neale Hurston, who inspired her to do her own autobiographical comics, and many of these were collected in her book, Life of the Party. In 2018, she finished Billie the Bee, and is currently working on a memoir of her bar band days called The Happy Hour.

Emil Ferris

Emil Ferris is a graphic novelist whose first book My Favorite Thing Is Monsters has been praised by critics since its publication in 2017. Her book - which presents itself as the lined notebook diary of a pre-teen self-avowed werewolf who questions her sexual identity - is set in Chicago in the 1960’s. The book is autobiographically infused as Emil - like her protagonist Karen Reyes - was witness to the highly charged political and social climate of that time.

In 2002 at 40 years of age Emil was bitten by a mosquito and infected with West Nile Virus. She suffered lower body paralysis as well as the substantially diminished use of her dominant drawing hand. Consequently, Emil enrolled at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and while studying, Emil recovered much of her mobility. She left SAIC with a Bachelor’s in Art, a Graduate degree from The Writing Program, as well as the first 24 pages of what would become My Favorite Thing is Monsters.

My Favorite Thing is Monsters has now been published in nine languages and has been honored with numerous awards, among them: The Lambda Literary Award, the Eisner, the Ignatz and the Fauve d’or at the Angouleme Festival, France.

Ebony Flowers

Ebony Flowers is a cartoonist and an ethnographer. She was born and raised in Maryland. She holds a BA in Biological Anthropology from the University of Maryland College Park and a PhD in Curriculum and Instruction from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Ebony is a 2017 Rona Jaffe Award recipient, a 2020 Ignatz Award recipient for Outstanding Graphic Novel, a 2020 Eisner Award recipient for Best Short Story and a 2020 Believer Award recipient for Fiction. She was also nominated for a 2020 NAACP Image Award for Literacy (Young Adult Fiction). She lives in Denver, CO.

Lee Marrs

Lee Marrs was the first woman to work for both DC Comics AND Marvel simultaneously, Lee Mars was one of the founding mommies of Wimmen’s Comix. A 1982 Inkpot Award winner and 2016 Eisner Award nominee, Lee’s wide-spectrum art styles have ranged from illustrative (Heavy Metal magazine, Epic Illustrated, Star*Reach, Prince Valiant, Lil’ Orphan Annie) to humorous (DC’s Plop, Weird Mystery and House of Secrets, Marvel’s Crazy Lady and all of her underground comics. She’s best known for her book The Further Fattening Adventures of Pudge, Girl Blimp, and her most recent work is in Drawing Power, edited by Diane Noomin, Abrams Comicarts.

Drawing Power has many mothers: some of the stories of Wimmen’s Comix and Tits N’ Clits covered this horrifying, traumatic subject matter. But each new generation has its own stories. With the #MeToo movement, these personal experiences can be told to an even broader audience. We are showing Lee’s entire four page story from Drawing Power.

Barbara "Willy" Mendes

Barbara “Willy” Mendes began doing underground comics as “Willy Mendes” in New York, with back covers for Gothic Blimp Works. In San Francisco, she collaborated with Trina Robbins on the first feminist comix and edited her own book, Illuminations. Ms. Mendes has shown epic narrative paintings in the U.S. and Israel. Her Biblical murals are on display in Jerusalem, Florida, and Los Angeles.

In 2016, the corner featuring her “Angel Wall” outdoor mural was designated “Barbara Mendes Square” and Ms. Mendes a Los Angeles Cultural Treasure. Her new Queen of Cosmos Comix is coming soon from Red 5 Comics! We are showing 3 drawings from All Girl Thrills (1971), The cover painting and Barbara’s feminist version of the creation story from the opening pages of Queen of the Cosmos Comix, and the cover painting for A Minyen Yidn (A Bunch of Jews (and other stuff), a book of stories written by Trina Robbin’s father which hangs over the first floor stairs to welcome visitors to the lower gallery.

Afua Richardson

Afua Richardson [ Pronounced Uh-FOO-wah] is an American illustrator best known for her work on the Eisner winning series Black Panther World of Wakanda. Her works influenced the CG team working on the film Black Panther. Her Other works include the reader’s choice award mini-series Genius written by Marc Bernardin and Adam Freeman and the American anthology for Attack on Titan for Kodansha. Afua has done various cover work on X-Men 92, Captain Marvel, Captain America and the Mighty Avengers for Marvel Comics, All-Star Batman, Wildstorm for DC Comics and Mad Max.

Ann Telnaes

Ann Telnaes creates editorial cartoons in various mediums- animation, visual essays, live sketches, and traditional print- for The Washington Post. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 2001 for her print cartoons and the National Cartoonists Society’s Reuben for Outstanding Cartoonist of the Year in 2017. We are showing several of her cartoons for the post, as well as samples of her comic strip Mo.

Jen Wang

Jen Wang is a NYT Bestselling author and illustrator of several graphic novels for young readers including Stargazing, winner of the 2020 Asian/Pacific Award for Children’s Literature, The Prince and The Dressmaker, winner of the 2019 Eisner Award for Best Publication for Teens, In Real Life (co-written with Cory Doctorow), and Koko Be Good. She is also a co-founder and organizer for Comic Arts LA. She lives in Los Angeles. We are showing four pages from The Prince and the Dressmaker.

Tillie Walden

Tillie Walden is a cartoonist and illustrator from Austin, TX. She is the creator of the Eisner Award winning graphic memoir Spinning as well as the sci-fi graphic novel On a Sunbeam, which was an LA Times Book Prize winner and recent Top 10 title on the ALA Rainbow List. Her most recent graphic novel, Are You Listening? came out in 2019 from First Second Books.

Noel Franklin

Noel Franklin was a Seattle cartoonist known for her short-form comics journalism and autobiographical work. Both her past employment as an arc welder and her degree in printmaking informs her style: tight black-and-white work done with a Micron .005 that cartoonist David Lasky deemed “scribble noir.”

Noel first published in 2014, with her stories soon exploding onto pages of international anthologies. She’s secured grants from Seattle’s major arts funders and was awarded a 2017 Cartoonist Northwest Toonie award. Her recent work can be seen online (Hollow Kingdom Trailer) and in print (Drawing Power, Not My Small Diary and Raven Chronicles). We are showing her entire four page Night of the Crow story.

Alitha Martinez

Alitha Martinez started working in the comics industry in the 1990s as an assistant to Joe Quesada on Azrael & Ash and Daredevil, then as an inker’s assistant on Aquaman. She got her first headlining role as artist on Iron Man, then moved on to X-men: Black Sun, Marvel Age Fantastic Four, Black Panther, World of Wakanda, Batgirl, and Voltron.

In addition to her creator-owned work Yume and Ever, she illustrated three graphic novels for younger readers and teens for Graphic Universe: Kung Fu Masters, written by Evonne Tsang; The Quest for Dragon Mountain, written by Robin Mayhall; and My Boyfriend is a Monster #3: My Boyfriend Bites, written by Dan Jolley. We are showing a selection of four pages from Lazarus-x-66-4 (Image Comics).

Summer Pierre

Summer Pierre was born and raised in the Bay Area of California. She is the author of the autobiographical comic series, Paper Pencil Life, and the 2018 memoir, All the Sad Songs, which was nominated for an Eisner Award in 2019. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, newyorker.com, and Pen America among other places. She lives with her family in the Hudson Valley of New York.

Trina Robbins

Trina’s author page at Fantagraphics says “Retired underground cartoonist and current comics herstorian Trina Robbins has been writing graphic novels, comics, and books for almost half a century. Her subjects have ranged from Wonder Woman and the Powerpuff Girls to her own teenage superheroine, GoGirl!, and from women cartoonists and superheroines to women who kill. She's won an Inkpot Award and was inducted in the Will Eisner Hall of Fame at Comic-Con International: San Diego. She lives in a moldering, 100-ish-year-old house in San Francisco with her cats, shoes, and dust bunnies.” Fantagraphics published her autobiography Last Girl Standing in 2017. We are showing over 80 pieces from Trina’s collection of art by women cartoonists.

Fiona Smyth

Toronto feminist painter/illustrator/cartoonist/educator Fiona Smyth collaborated with sex educator Cory Silverberg on the kids’ books What Makes A Baby and Sex Is A Funny Word (Seven Stories Press), 2016 ALA Stonewall Book Award Honor book and 2016 Norma Fleck Award for Canadian Children’s Non-Fiction winner. She’s in Resist #1 and 2, a thirty-year collection of her comics Somnambulance (Koyama Press), and the anthology Theater of Terror- Revenge of the Queers with Mariko Tamaki. Fiona was inducted into the Doug Wright Awards’ Giants of The North Canadian Cartoonist Hall Of Fame alongside Alootook Ipellie in 2019. 

Carol Tyler

Ink Farm proprietor Carol Tyler is a cartoonist who also makes sculptural comics. “I like the physicalness of stuff, But comics have flat surfaces. So along with making comics pages for print, I've been making stories that are not meant to be reproduced. I'm striving to get to a more focused, intimate feel. Seen here are 3 examples of this kind of work as well as 2 traditional format printable pages. Generally, when I display my work, it's a combination of sculptural comics with page art."

On display in the show are two drawings, a story etched on saw blades, Sit on It, a piece featuring wood cut-outs of chairs (next to the lower gallery display case) and Ma’s Table a comic drawn on strips of wood (in the first floor display case).

Kriota Willberg

Kriota Willberg makes comics, illustration, and needlework investigating the body sciences, medical history, and bioethics. Her book, Draw Stronger: Self-Care for Cartoonists and Visual Artists, is published by Uncivilized Books. Her drawn and/or embroidered comics have appeared in: 4PANEL.ca, Spiral Bound (medium.com) SubCultures, Comics for Choice, The Graphic Canon, Intima: Journal of Narrative Medicine, and Strumpet 5, among others. Willberg writes a self-care column for the Comics Beat called Get A Grip!, teaches graphic medicine at NYU, and in 2017 was the inaugural Artist in Residence at the New York Academy of Medicine Library.

We are showing five of Kriota’s comics, plus 3 of her needlepoint works in the lower gallery display case.

She Makes Comics Documentary