Women and the Comics


Book Description

Women and the Comics is the first attempt to document the careers of the hundreds of women who have created and worked in the field of comic strips, comic book and cartooning. The women whose work is showcased in this book have been long overlooked or ignored by most other histories of comics. In this volume you'll encounter the art of Rose O'Neill, whose Kewpies popularity spans over 70 years; Nell Brinkley, whose "Brinkley Girl" was just as famous in her day as Gibson's; Grace Drayton, whose lovely drawings gave the Campbell Kids life; the "flapper" artists of the 1920s; Dale Messick, creator of Brenda Starr; Martha Orr, who originated Mary Worth; the once anonymous female comic book artists of the 1940s; newspaper strip creators Marty Links (Bobby Sox), Cathy Guisewite (Cathy) and Lynn Johnston (For Better or For Worse); and the many women who write and draw today's most popular comic books. A special chapter surveying female cartoonists in Europe, Japan, and Australia is also included. Women and the Comics is a landmark book, the result of four years of research by Catherine Yronwode and Trina Robbins. It is a reference source designed to serve future generations interested in discovering the contributions women have made to America's most popular art form.




Women and the Comics


Book Description

Women and the Comics is the first attempt to document the careers of the hundreds of women who have created and worked in the field of comic strips, comic book and cartooning. The women whose work is showcased in this book have been long overlooked or ignored by most other histories of comics. In this volume you'll encounter the art of Rose O'Neill, whose Kewpies popularity spans over 70 years; Nell Brinkley, whose "Brinkley Girl" was just as famous in her day as Gibson's; Grace Drayton, whose lovely drawings gave the Campbell Kids life; the "flapper" artists of the 1920s; Dale Messick, creator of Brenda Starr; Martha Orr, who originated Mary Worth; the once anonymous female comic book artists of the 1940s; newspaper strip creators Marty Links (Bobby Sox), Cathy Guisewite (Cathy) and Lynn Johnston (For Better or For Worse); and the many women who write and draw today's most popular comic books. A special chapter surveying female cartoonists in Europe, Japan, and Australia is also included. Women and the Comics is a landmark book, the result of four years of research by Catherine Yronwode and Trina Robbins. It is a reference source designed to serve future generations interested in discovering the contributions women have made to America's most popular art form.




Monstrous Women in Comics


Book Description

Contributions by Novia Shih-Shan Chen, Elizabeth Rae Coody, Keri Crist-Wagner, Sara Durazo-DeMoss, Charlotte Johanne Fabricius, Ayanni C. Hanna, Christina M. Knopf, Tomoko Kuribayashi, Samantha Langsdale, Jeannie Ludlow, Marcela Murillo, Sho Ogawa, Pauline J. Reynolds, Stefanie Snider, J. Richard Stevens, Justin Wigard, Daniel F. Yezbick, and Jing Zhang Monsters seem to be everywhere these days, in popular shows on television, in award-winning novels, and again and again in Hollywood blockbusters. They are figures that lurk in the margins and so, by contrast, help to illuminate the center—the embodiment of abnormality that summons the definition of normalcy by virtue of everything they are not. Samantha Langsdale and Elizabeth Rae Coody’s edited volume explores the coding of woman as monstrous and how the monster as dangerously evocative of women/femininity/the female is exacerbated by the intersection of gender with sexuality, race, nationality, and disability. To analyze monstrous women is not only to examine comics, but also to witness how those constructions correspond to women’s real material experiences. Each section takes a critical look at the cultural context surrounding varied monstrous voices: embodiment, maternity, childhood, power, and performance. Featured are essays on such comics as Faith, Monstress, Bitch Planet, and Batgirl and such characters as Harley Quinn and Wonder Woman. This volume probes into the patriarchal contexts wherein men are assumed to be representative of the normative, universal subject, such that women frequently become monsters.




Babes in Arms


Book Description

During the Golden Age of comics, publishers offered titles supporting the war effort -- presenting fighting men and their feminine counterparts -- babes in arms! Comic books during this period featured US service-women fighting all of the axis bad guys and gave several of the most noteworthy women artists of the era opportunities to create action-packed, adventure-filled, four-color stories. Now for the first time renowned pop-culture historian Trina Robbins assembles comic book stories by artists Barbara Hall, Jill Elgin, Lilly Renee, and Fran Hopper together with insightful commentary and loads of documentary extras to create the definitive book chronicling the work of these important Golden Age artists. This magnificent art book offers page-after-page of good girl action!




The Trojan Women: A Comic


Book Description

A fantastic comic-book collaboration between the artist Rosanna Bruno and the poet Anne Carson, based on Euripides’s famous tragedy A NEW YORK TIMES BEST GRAPHIC NOVEL OF 2021 Here is a new comic-book version of Euripides’s classic The Trojan Women, which follows the fates of Hekabe, Andromache, and Kassandra after Troy has been sacked and all its men killed. This collaboration between the visual artist Rosanna Bruno and the poet and classicist Anne Carson attempts to give a genuine representation of how human beings are affected by warfare. Therefore, all the characters take the form of animals (except Kassandra, whose mind is in another world).




Girls and Their Comics


Book Description

In America, comics and comic books have often been associated with adolescent male fantasy--muscle-bound superheroes and scantily clad women. Nonetheless, comics have also been read and enjoyed by girls. While there have been many strong representations of women throughout their history, the comics of today have evolved and matured, becoming a potent medium in which to explore the female experience, particularly that of girlhood and adolescence. In Girls and Their Comics: Finding a Female Voice in Comic Book Narrative, Jacqueline Danziger-Russell contends that comics have a unique place in the representation of female characters. She discusses the overall history of the comic book, paying special attention to girls' comics, showing how such works relate to a female point of view. While examining the concept of visual literacy, Danziger-Russell asserts that comics are an excellent space in which the marginalized voices of girls may be expressed. This volume also includes a chapter on manga (Japanese comics), which explains the genesis of girls' comics in Japan and their popularity with girls in the United States. Including interviews with librarians, comic creators, and girls who read comics and manga, Girls and Their Comics is an important examination of the growing interest in comic books among young females and will appeal to a wide audience, including literary theorists, teachers, librarians, popular culture and women's studies scholars, and comic book historians.




Graphic Women


Book Description

Some of the most acclaimed books of the twenty-first century are autobiographical comics by women. Aline Kominsky-Crumb is a pioneer of the autobiographical form, showing women's everyday lives, especially through the lens of the body. Phoebe Gloeckner places teenage sexuality at the center of her work, while Lynda Barry uses collage and the empty spaces between frames to capture the process of memory. Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis experiments with visual witness to frame her personal and historical narrative, and Alison Bechdel's Fun Home meticulously incorporates family documents by hand to re-present the author's past. These five cartoonists move the art of autobiography and graphic storytelling in new directions, particularly through the depiction of sex, gender, and lived experience. Hillary L. Chute explores their verbal and visual techniques, which have transformed autobiographical narrative and contemporary comics. Through the interplay of words and images, and the counterpoint of presence and absence, they express difficult, even traumatic stories while engaging with the workings of memory. Intertwining aesthetics and politics, these women both rewrite and redesign the parameters of acceptable discourse.




Pretty in Ink


Book Description

Trina Robbins has spent the last thirty years recording the accomplishments of a century of women cartoonists, and Pretty in Ink is her ultimate book, a revised, updated and rewritten history of women cartoonists, with more color illustrations than ever before, and with some startling new discoveries (such as a Native American woman cartoonist from the 1940s who was also a Corporal in the women’s army, and the revelation that a cartoonist included in all of Robbins’s previous histories was a man!) In the pages of Pretty in Ink you’ll find new photos and correspondence from cartoonists Ethel Hays and Edwina Dumm, and the true story of Golden Age comic book star Lily Renee, as intriguing as the comics she drew. Although the comics profession was dominated by men, there were far more women working in the profession throughout the 20th century than other histories indicate, and they have flourished in the 21st. Robbins not only documents the increasing relevance of women throughout the 20th century, with mainstream creators such as Ramona Fradon and Dale Messick and alternative cartoonists such as Lynda Barry, Carol Tyler, and Phoebe Gloeckner, but the latest generation of women cartoonists―Megan Kelso, Cathy Malkasian, Linda Medley, and Lilli Carré, among many others. Robbins is the preeminent historian of women comic artists; forget her previous histories: Pretty in Ink is her most comprehensive volume to date.




Growing Up with Girl Power


Book Description

Growing Up With Girl Power considers how real girls who grew up with girl power interpreted its messages about empowerment, girlhood, strength, femininity, race, and more, and suggests that for young girls, commercialized girl power had real strengths and limitations - sometimes in fascinating, unexpected ways.




Chicks Dig Comics


Book Description

A collection of essays by award-winning women writers and artists celebrating the comics medium and its creators.