The Complete Wimmen's Comix by Trina Robbins

Phoebe Gloeckner, c/o Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum, Scott Jonas Collection. And into that gap between Spiegelman and Crumb (and Steinberg and Frank Miller and Watchmen and…) over two decades of women’s work in comics has fallen and continues to fall.

It is Spiegelman’s teeter-totter at such great heights – between “the dirty vulgarity of Crumb and the respectable, and exceptional, legitimacy of Steinberg” – that captivates Pizzino and shapes his understanding of just what happens to comics during the growing-pain moments of the 1980s and 1990s from which they emerge Graphic Novels in the mid-2000s. In his recent analysis of how comics grew up into the graphic novel, Arresting Development: Comics at the Boundaries of Literature, Christopher Pizzino halts on a sketch by Spiegelman in which Spiegelman envisions himself walking a tightrope between pillars Crumb, whose name is stylized in paunchy, unruly lettering (that includes at least one nipple and one yonic slit), and Saul Steinberg, whose literary-minded doodles and covers defined the style of The New Yorker for six decades. And, it seems, women cartoonists all but evacuate the comics scene at the critical moment in 1980s when Art Spiegelman starts to spin comics into literature in his Raw magazine, which infamously serialized Maus and a Lynda Barry strip or two. Crumb and company’s misogyny, racism and homophobia. The Wimmen’s Comix movement during the 1970s underground too often serves as an apologetic corrective for R. Strip queens Edwina Dumm, Jackie Ormes and Rose O’Neill footnote the newspaper legacies of Winsor McCay and George Herriman. The Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum Acquires Original Works from Wimmen’s Cartoonists Caryn Leschen, c/o Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum, Scott Jonas Collection.Ĭomics by women have a hard time breaking into comics history.

The Complete Wimmen's Comix by Trina Robbins