Archiving Wimmen: Collectives, Networks, and Comix

Wimmen’s Comix, an underground comix series, featured the contributions of roughly 100 women in its two decades of existence: 1972–1992. Its preservation in physical and digital archives often prioritises prolific creators, effectively erasing the contributions of a majority of the women, nearly half of whom contributed just once to the series. Through an analysis of this series and its status in archives, this essay examines how archival practices bury visual media. Through studying how this series is organised across a number of archives, I suggest better ways to archive these works that echo their collective politics and honour women’s hybrid media forms. In critiquing physical and digital archives, I argue that a feminist politic must govern the structuring of such spaces. To represent this media better, I propose that we embrace the idea of the network as a method for organising these materials in archives.