The Lobster Dance

HT to Bitch Media! This article is just too good for a social-media shout-out.

Lisa Hix interviews Trina Robbins and Steve Leialoha about the history of women comic artists, comics about women, and women comic-readers in regards to Robbins’ 2013 book Pretty in Ink: North American Women Cartoonists, 1896-2013 (Fantagraphic, which also published No Straight Lines).

Trina Robbins’ cover for “It Ain’t Me, Babe” the first women’s liberation comic anthology, first published by Last Gasp in 1970. (Via “Pretty in Ink”, via Collectors Weekly)

The history of US comics by/for/about women is more than just Wonder Woman (not that we don’t love her, too!), and Hix focuses a on the near-systematic misogynistic exclusion of women, including extremely successful artists, from the National Cartoonist Society as well as in alternative/underground “comix” circles. Hix and Robbins also discuss the changing genres and narratives of comics by and for women; shifts in comic-book-store culture, like actually stocking titles by women and about women; the progress of the last 5-10 years; and what still needs to be done.

“The Gibson Girls are stationary; they sit on the beach in their cute, ancient swim costumes, smiling like Mona Lisa, and the men just all flock around them,” Robbins says. “Nell Brinkley’s women are extremely active. They surf, sled, and ski, with hair flying in the wind. A favorite subject for Gibson was showing these beautiful society girls being married off to ugly, old counts and dukes. Brinkley’s women never let people marry them off to nobility. They fell in love. It was a whole new generation. She didn’t create the New Woman, but she mirrored her.

Read the full article on Collectors Weekly.