Grassroots Origins and Network Building

Since the runaway success of Fun Home (2006), which Time named the best book of 2006, comics artist Alison Bechdel’s renown has been growing, culminating in Guggenheim (2012) and MacArthur (2014) Fellowships and the creation of a Fun Home musical, which won five Tony Awards in 2015.1 Though these recent accolades foreground the growing appreciation for Fun Home—a graphic memoir that details her childhood and coming out in the shadow of a closeted father who ultimately dies by suicide—relatively little attention has been paid to Bechdel’s origins decades earlier as a cartoonist, which are sometimes left deliberately vague in her own retrospective accounts. Rather than her singular genius, her beginnings emphasize the collectivity of her work and how her deep understanding of queer life that she documents in her long-running Dykes to Watch Out For (1983–2008) comic strip comes from her participation in grassroots periodical networks. Whereas the previous chapter showed how Lee Marrs and Roberta Gregory used comics to represent and critique the feminist movement, this chapter examines how Bechdel embraced the print culture of the feminist movement as a place to publish explicitly feminist comics and other image–text. Together, the chapters demonstrate how these cartoonists developed their artistic visions through connecting to the collectivity of the feminist movement and documenting it in their comics.

Alison Bechdel first began publishing comics after failing to get into graduate school to study art following her graduation from Oberlin College in 1981.2 After doodling numerous “dykes to watch out for” in correspondence to friends, one of these close friends encouraged Bechdel to submit her work to the New York City feminist newspaper WomaNews, where they both volunteered as part of the collective. Her New Yorker–esque one-panel Dykes to Watch Out For (DTWOF) were first published in the periodical in the summer of 1983.3 For the next two years, Bechdel became more involved with the WomaNews collective and continued to publish her cartoons in the pages of the periodical, evolving her DTWOF comic into multi-panel thematic takes that humorously weighed in on lesbians’ everyday lives, as they dealt with intimate relationships with roommates and partners and also negotiated lesbian subcultures and the experience of being an out lesbian in a straight world. The pages of WomaNews evidence Bechdel’s growth as an artist not just in her comics but also in advertisements and other graphics she created for the WomaNews collective. Following her departure from WomaNews upon her move to Northampton, Massachusetts, in the summer of 1985, she began to self-syndicate DTWOF in additional grassroots periodicals and published her first collection of comics with independent feminist publisher Firebrand Books in the fall of 1986.4

Despite how formative these early years and this grassroots publishing experience were for Bechdel’s career, most readers and critics do not know much about them. While some early iterations of her DTWOF comic appear in her first two Firebrand Books collections, many, including her single-panel works, do not.5 Because she transitioned her strip to focus on the lives of a recurring cast of characters in episodic rather than one-off thematic strips in early 1987, none of these early comics is included in The Essential “Dykes to Watch Out For” (2008), a seemingly definitive collection of her strips that is now the means through which most fans and scholars access and write about the series.6 In an introduction to the volume, Bechdel discusses her career and reduces WomaNews to an unnamed “local feminist newspaper,” further obscuring her early work that is not included in the collection.7

These hidden production histories underscore how much Bechdel was in dialogue with and participated directly in the creation of grassroots newspapers. Such activity is not exceptional; indeed, all the artists in this book participated in such networks in ways that have not been fully acknowledged. For Bechdel, that linking of activism to artistic production started at WomaNews, but that was just the beginning of her involvement in grassroots networks. In addition to her work on WomaNews (1983–85), she served as the production coordinator for the Minneapolis–Saint Paul gay and lesbian newspaper Equal Time for four years (1986–90) before she was able to make a living from her comics and associated work.8 Bechdel also self-syndicated her strip in roughly two hundred periodicals over the course of two decades, which put her finger on the pulse of local social movement politics nationally and internationally over a decade before the Internet digitally networked people together. She chronicled this experience in a short-lived strip, Servants to the Cause (1989–90), which appeared in the pages of national gay magazine The Advocate.9 This strip followed a diverse cast of characters who worked together on a fictitious queer periodical, and the plot intersected generational debates and identity politics.

Bechdel, like the artists discussed in this book’s other chapters, derived her highly innovative depictions of queer visual politics from her closeness to grassroots networks. The evidence of this history can be found in archives containing Bechdel’s comics and other media, including her own papers in the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College; the records of her longtime publisher, Firebrand Books, held in the Human Sexuality Collection at Cornell University; and the Newsprint Collection at the Lesbian Herstory Archives, which maintains a full run of WomaNews. In general, scholars working in comics studies do not make substantial use of non-comics archives when studying cartoonists. This oversight leads to a glossing over or ignoring of specific contexts where comics were prominent—like in grassroots publications, as this chapter shows. As I argued in the previous chapter, it is important to work across archives to uncover new histories and artists. These contexts, especially considering works like queer comics or others with clearly political and discursive objectives, show a rich world of collective engagement where embedded cartoonists were connected to readers and other activists and influenced by the social movements around them.

Bechdel and other cartoonists used grassroots publications to express their politics in varied image–text considerations that were not always explicitly comics, but that benefit from comicitous analysis. As one can tell from a glance at the archives noted above, Bechdel’s publications are not kept within archival comics collections, but instead are held within queer-adjacent and queer grassroots archives.10 Analyzing comics through these kind of archives—which I further theorize as queer comics archives in the following section—make visible the communities and collective practices that shape the production and circulation of queer comics art—unlike more traditional comics archives that focus on preserving the comics of individual cartoonists.

To understand not only Bechdel’s queer comics but also those of many of her contemporaries, it is necessary to review the publishing milieux that supported her work. This is particularly important, since many grassroots queer comics have been traditionally overlooked by comics studies because they are often produced outside mainstream comics publishers and not connected to the artists who participate in those communities. Just as there’s been more scholarly attention paid to women’s comics in the last decade, as described in the previous chapter, so, too, has there been an expansion of focus on queer comics, some of which were produced in grassroots networks, and a constellation of what might now be called queer comics studies as I mention in the introduction.11 Still, for many years, cartoonists were at the forefront of bringing queer cartoonists together out of their local grassroots contexts and connecting them into larger communities through the use of anthologies, as the last chapter touches on through the Gay Comix series.12 Throughout the years, books like Gay Comix (1980–98), Strip AIDS (1987), Strip AIDS USA (1988), Gay Comics (1989), Dyke Strippers (1995), Juicy Mother (2005), Juicy Mother 2 (2007), Gay Genius (2011), No Straight Lines (2013), Anything That Loves (2013), QU33R (2014), alphabet (2016), Being True (2018), We’re Still Here (2018), Rainbow Reflections (2019), Be Gay, Do Comics! (2020), and When I Was Me (2021) have been an important means of gathering queer comics and cartoonists from across their disparate publication contexts.13 While these venues make the cartoons more visible, we miss a sense of the local politics that intersect with the comics, as when they appear alongside articles in periodicals.

Featured in many of these anthologies, Bechdel is central to this community of queer cartoonists. Roz Warren dedicates Dyke Strippers to her, and Gay Comix devotes an entire issue to her work.14 In his introduction to No Straight Lines, a collection bringing together four decades of queer comics to chart a shared history among the artists, cartoonist and editor Justin Hall acknowledges both the power of queer periodical comics and the difficulties that have kept them from the recognition they richly deserve: “The weekly strips’ publication in the gay newspapers gave them a timeliness and immediacy that was often used for direct political and social commentary. It also placed them even further outside of the traditional comics industry than the queer comic books and tied them in even more strongly to the LGBTQ community and the queer media ghetto.”15 These circumstances separated queer grassroots comics from the “traditional comics industry” of their time, and these circumstances led to the comics being overlooked and forgotten.

This situation—the separation of queer grassroots comics from the comics industry—neatly characterizes Bechdel’s own career as she published DTWOF over the course of more than two decades from 1983 to 2008. People interviewing Bechdel have pointed to the marginal position of queer comics publishing. Anne Rubenstein opened a 1995 interview with Bechdel with this one-liner: “Alison Bechdel may be the most popular American cartoonist who you’ve never heard of.”16 Six years later, Trina Robbins echoed this sentiment in the introduction to her 2001 interview with Bechdel: “In a better world, she would already be a well-known mainstream creator.”17 In the intervening years, Bechdel self-syndicated her own strip in around fifty periodicals nationally and internationally. Most of these venues were strictly grassroots, but she had more mainstream coverage in a few markets. Her publication list was always in flux, as grassroots periodicals went under with frequency. WomaNews stopped publishing in 1991, and Equal Time folded in 1994. With such losses, Bechdel would seek out new periodicals with similar geographic coverage so that her local readers would still be able to access her strip.

In March 2006, in advance of the release of Fun Home, which rocketed Bechdel to mainstream acclaim, she assessed her national coverage by labeling a map with the names of her publications and marking key cities she was not reaching (Figure 3.1).18 Although she had thirty-five big cities and other environs under her belt, she identified fifteen cities where she wanted her work to be published. Because she previously had coverage in these cities, including Phoenix (Heatstroke), Anchorage (Identity Northview), and Milwaukee (Wisconsin Light), finding new publications in these markets would allow her to reconnect to dedicated readers. More than just a snapshot of her coverage in North America, the map presents a sense of her span across the decades. Granted, it does not show the whole picture—the roughly two hundred periodicals that published her comic over the course of two decades—but it evokes what both Rubenstein and Robbins are getting at when they cite Bechdel’s popularity despite her lack of mainstream renown. When Bechdel ceased publishing DTWOF in May 2008, many periodicals had been publishing her work for nearly two decades, including small outfits like Bryn Mawr College News (Bryn Mawr, Pa.) and Sonoma County Women’s Voices (Sebastopol, Calif.) alongside more prominent and national publications like Lesbian Connection (East Lansing, Mich.), Lesbian News (West Hollywood, Calif.), off our backs (Washington, D.C.), and the Washington Blade (Washington, D.C.). Through her own extensive efforts reaching out to publications and managing her networks, Bechdel had a presence in grassroots publications across the nation, and her books and associated products were sold in an overlapping geography of independent and feminist bookstores.

And yet, this map and those interviews could have been framed very differently, for in 1993 Bechdel turned down an offer to produce a syndicated strip with the Universal Press Syndicate (UPS), which gets strips like Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury and Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes into the funnies pages of thousands of major newspapers. In making her decision, Bechdel solicited the advice of fellow queer cartoonist Joan Hilty, who was familiar with different comics markets. Hilty responded by sharing materials critical of the UPS and hedging about her advice, explaining, “So, basically, I’m just flip-flopping about what to tell you. I guess that reflects my own mixed feelings about the profession: the exposure’s great but the politics are daunting. . . . On the other hand, your work is so good—putting a lot of other comics to shame on both an artistic and narrative level—it deserves an even wider audience.”19 Bechdel echoed this back-and-forth in notes to herself, in which she drafted questions for the syndicate (“How does the editing process work?”; “How political/sexual/etc. can it be?”) alongside questions for herself (“How much time will this take?”; “How bland would it have to be?”; “Could I work in 4 panels??”).20 These personal questions indicate that she was leaning toward no because this opportunity would require her to create a strip format that would have taken time away from DTWOF and may have needed to be quite “bland.” Based on politics and some well-founded assumptions about what other constraints the strip would face, her refusal demonstrated why LGBTQ comics stayed out of the most visible comics communities until only recently.21 Bechdel turned down the offer in part because she was able to make a living through self-syndicated cartooning. In the early 1990s, she was also earning money through her stationery business, where she sold a catalog of DTWOF items, including mugs, mousepads, and calendars.22

The wide popularity of Bechdel’s self-syndicated comics in publications around the country and her adept business sense brought her a degree of financial solvency as well as an important connection to the communities represented in her strip. While she was publishing DTWOF with smaller periodicals, not only did they send her a copy of every issue, they also frequently corresponded with her. That is, the structures of self-syndication facilitated Bechdel’s close communication with each periodical. This correspondence was often warm and friendly, as her activist interlocutors related as much to her as they did to her recurring cast of characters who became a feature of the comic in early 1987.

Yet shoestring finances made funding the comic a continual battle—one that various periodicals put extra effort into solving, thereby proving the import of Bechdel’s strip to their readers. For example, in the July/August 1988 issue of Valley Women’s Voice (Pioneer Valley, Mass.), the paper printed a notice above one of Bechdel’s strips: “HELP! Don’t let Mo, Toni, Ginger, and friends leave the Valley. Only with your sponsorship ($) can we keep Dykes to Watch Out For in the Valley Women’s Voice.”23 In this notice, the characters are configured as “friends” who might have to move away if financial support doesn’t come through. Ultimately, DTWOF stayed in the Pioneer Valley periodical through the funding of local cartoonist Rob Ranney and others, whose names were published alongside the comic in future issues.

Across the country, members of the Lavender Network (Eugene, Ore.) raised $600 to fund Bechdel’s comics through their July 1990 Save the Dykes event. Sally Sheklow, Bechdel’s contact at Lavender Network, communicated to Bechdel the success of the event through photographs and also included information about her creative project, The Sound of Lesbians, a musical comedy parody.24 Through these items, Sheklow shared the vibrancy of the queer community in the Pacific Northwest and displayed a personal connection with Bechdel. These examples show how personal investment in Bechdel’s comic formed the basis for her support among these varied collectives, linking her to diverse lesbian communities.

These grassroots networks infused Bechdel’s comic with queer ideas from a range of local and nationally known grassroots periodicals. In letters like Sheklow’s, readers shared their responses to the comic, weighing in on its plot and telling her which characters they identified with.25 The publications themselves also provided Bechdel with information about local queer communities across the nation that she included in her strip. If she had accepted UPS’s offer and given up self-syndication, she would have lost her source material.26 In her strip, Bechdel’s characters reflected her readers’ lives, reacting to current events and participating in political activism like the 1987 March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights.

Bechdel further demonstrated how much her characters were living in the same world as her readers in an eleven-year graphic time line she included in her retrospective book The Indelible Alison Bechdel (1998).27 She created five parallel time lines—a general one for national happenings that year; one for Mo; another for Clarice and Toni; yet another for Sparrow, Ginger, and Lois; and a final one for Madwimmin Books. In this chronology, Bechdel included panels and images from her strip and captioned these happenings, arguing for the importance of common lesbian lives by juxtaposing them alongside large-scale events. Through her comic and again through this time line, her readers across the nation could see themselves in her characters, living their lives amid global changes much larger than themselves. To wit, Bechdel used comics to present new ways of thinking about women and queer discourse and to develop politically attuned networks, which she first developed in the pages of WomaNews before expanding to other grassroots publications and networks.

Bechdel’s use of publication networks, and its influence on her ideological and artistic approaches to her stories and drawings, demonstrate the necessity of considering grassroots contexts when studying comics, particularly with regard to their relationship to feminist and queer discourse. Similar to the way the visual and page-layout contexts affected in-panel representation, as I discussed in the last chapter, Bechdel’s comics also interacted with other content on the pages of the periodical, and thus established particular techniques for expressing lesbian experience. Bechdel’s comics do visual work akin to what contemporary lesbian theorist Teresa de Lauretis argues that feminist cinema should do in “construct[ing] another (object of) vision and the conditions of visibility for a different social subject.”28 As Bechdel glibly puts it in an interview, “I would love to be the lesbian Norman Rockwell.”29 Further specifying this project in a retrospective comic, Bechdel asserts that her goal is to create “a catalog of lesbians! I would name the unnamed. Depict the undepicted!”30 That is, to embody Rockwell in a lesbian way, Bechdel seeks to “catalog” a wide array of “undepicted” lesbian experiences, making visible a multiplicity of “different social subject[s]” and creating the possibilities to maintain these “conditions” through her business savvy and persistence. Well-known for the Saturday Evening Post covers in which he illustrated everyday U.S. culture for more than five decades, Rockwell further broadened the swath of the United States he covered in later work when he tackled topics like civil rights. In some of her work, Bechdel directly echoes Rockwell, as when she modeled the cover of her 1994 calendar on Rockwell’s iconic Thanksgiving painting Freedom from Want (1943) by positioning the recurring cast of DTWOF around a table to celebrate the protagonist’s birthday.31 By naming her comic Dykes to Watch Out For, she directed her readers to look at this project and be complicit in making visible these new subjects, an action that included not only reading her comics but also financially supporting her through purchasing calendars and other items.

Not only do Bechdel and de Lauretis theorize each other, but we can build from them a theory of the archives that contain these works. Explicitly queer and queer-adjacent archives are the frame around Bechdel that further sustains these “conditions of visibility,” making apparent “different social subject[s]” from those found in comics collections in other archives as the previous chapter discusses. Archives that collect not only personal papers but more extensively a world of queer experience—periodicals, books from grassroots publishers, movement T-shirts and buttons, and so on—allow us to see the process of “construct[ing]” queer subjectivity and make visible not only queer individuals but a truly “social subject” in her investment in collective politics and queer networks. To wit, we can see the quotidian queer community that Bechdel strived to “catalog,” taking a page from Rockwell’s depictions of everyday U.S. communities. Heather Stephenson, the journalist who solicited the Rockwell sound bite from Bechdel, posits, “Bechdel sees herself as an archivist chronicling her generation through the details of lesbians’ daily lives.”32 This embodiment of Bechdel “as an archivist” speaks volumes, for as a lesbian, “her generation” is the queer one that has hitherto not been seen in such fullness or, in de Lauretis’s language, as “construct[ed].” It is perhaps little surprise, then, that two decades later the critical reception of Bechdel’s Fun Home focused on the archival aspects of her work, including her precise reproduction of personal family objects. Though this personal archive reflects individual queer experience, established queer archives make visible political networks that sustain individuals and allow us to understand Bechdel as “the lesbian Norman Rockwell” in a manner that individual autobiography alone cannot grasp.

Queer Comics Archives

Archives are not simply an aesthetics of Bechdel’s work: she engages existing archives and, like many lesbian feminists before her, actively creates her own archives.33 She saved not only her own comics, correspondence, and documentation of her business practices, but also the periodicals that printed her work, effectively preserving the social movement around her that might otherwise not be saved, as other artists in this book did in both their art and files. The next chapter on Anzaldúa will further examine how and why women involved in social movements preserved their community within their own personal archives. Bechdel’s archival engagements directly inform her artwork not only in subject matter but also, as scholars like Hillary Chute have discussed, in her rigorous process of drawing from physical examples.34 Her dual engagement with existing archives and her own practice of saving materials came together in late 2008 when she donated a first accession of archival material to the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College. She documented this process in a video posted to YouTube titled “The Memoirist’s Lament,” where she shows her many filing cabinets all over her house before she divulges that Smith College will be archiving these materials.35 With this reveal, the camera pans back from the material being shown and text appears across the screen: “god help them.” She then transitions to looking inside the filing cabinets, culling folders that end up among those materials going to Smith College. She has since donated several more accessions and plans to send along additional materials, so her archival connection is active in the present day.

When she began to identify files to send to Smith, Bechdel was also in the midst of another creative project of organization as she suspended her twenty-year comic strip, DTWOF, in May of that year and curated a selection of strips to be published with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, the same publisher that released Fun Home. Both projects were completed in fall 2008, as Smith received twenty boxes of archival materials and The Essential “Dykes to Watch Out For” was released. Due to the simultaneity of these endeavors, the archives weigh heavily on The Essential “Dykes.” And it is not only the space of the Sophia Smith Collection that inflects the book; she also visited two other university archives that spring while giving talks about Fun Home at those institutions—the Jean-Nickolaus Tretter Collection in GLBT Studies at the University of Minnesota and the Human Sexuality Collection at Cornell University—that house the papers of her longtime publisher Firebrand Books. She blogged about both visits on her website.36

These three archival encounters erupt onto the pages of Bechdel’s introduction to The Essential “Dykes.” As in her graphic memoirs—Fun Home (2006), Are You My Mother? (2012), and The Secret to Superhuman Strength (2021)—in the introduction she re-creates personal documents in the telling of her artistic genealogy, but adds another level to this representation by depicting herself entering a locked room called the archives and accessing the documents there.37 Once she has entered this space, she starts rummaging through the drawers, seemingly disrupting classification yet retrieving her files in precise chronological order.38 In the comic, she builds a narrative of how she became an artist through her reading of these archivally housed documents. Key here is her sprawling rendition of the archives itself, pictured in a long vertical panel on the left-hand side of the page. She uses this verticality to great effect, depicting the space as filled with rows of infinitely tall filing cabinets. This image resembles, in part, the back room of the Tretter Collection, where she took a photo of herself in awe during her visit and subsequently shared on her website.39 However, in her drawing, the shelves of the archival boxes are replaced by impossibly fantastic filing cabinets, more closely resembling giant versions of the filing cabinets that populate her home as shown in the YouTube video about donating her files to the Sophia Smith Collection. As she readies files documenting her own career for the archives, Bechdel imagines the archives as merging domestic and institutional storage in her comic, acknowledging the hybridity of the space where such files are organized and kept. By creating a fantasy archives through which she relates her personal queer history, Bechdel recognizes how institutional repositories collect a larger scope of queer genealogy—as she discussed in her blog posts about her visits to the archives at the University of Minnesota and Cornell University. In nesting three archives into one representation in this comic, she underlines their interconnected nature and how archives not only contain grassroots networks but are themselves also part of a network.

This network of archives that collect intersectional queer and feminist histories comprises grassroots archives started by activists as discussed in the first chapter. Ann Cvetkovich’s An Archive of Feelings (2003) jump-started critical conversations about radical archives and remains a vital cornerstone, much as Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever (1995) did for more general archival concerns. Cvetkovich’s delineation of grassroots archival spaces not only illuminates Bechdel’s own symbolic embrace of archives, but from Cvetkovich’s description we can also fashion a definition of queer comics archives, which preserve this doubly marginalized work—as comics are an art form often not taken seriously that marginalized folks then embrace to represent their experience. Following an extended discussion of the Lesbian Herstory Archives, Cvetkovich defines the shared attributes of queer archives more generally: “Ephemeral evidence, spaces that are maintained by volunteer labors of love rather than state funding, challenges to cataloging, archives that represent lost histories—gay and lesbian archives are often ‘magical’ collections of documents that represent far more than the literal value of the objects themselves. . . . Queer archives can be viewed as the material instantiation of Derrida’s deconstructed archive; they are composed of material practices that challenge traditional conceptions of history and understand the quest for history as a psychic need rather than a science.”40 Throughout this passage, Cvetkovich focuses on different registers of “history” and the “challenges” that grassroots archives present, nuancing and interconnecting both concepts—history and archives—through repetition. Through coalescing ideas of “history” and its “challenges” in the “challenge [to] traditional conceptions of history,” Cvetkovich demonstrates how all the items in her opening catalog add up: as “material practices” that can perform these “challenges” through various methods. In Bechdel’s representation of archives, we can see how she leverages her “‘magical’ collection of documents” to narrate the overarching trajectory of her career, selecting items that together culminate into “more than” the sum of their parts. In activating archival objects, Bechdel “challenge[s] traditional conceptions of history” and uncovers her lived lesbian history that shapes her long-running comic. Whereas Bechdel illustrates the multivalent possibility of queer archives, Cvetkovich communicates the ways that archives enact that multivalence.

How queer archives are more personally constructed through the collective labor of individuals committed to making queer histories visible differentiates comics collections in queer and queer-adjacent archives from comics held in other archives. To create a framework for understanding how comics operate in tandem with the queer archives that house them, I theorize the notion of queer comics archives. They “challenge traditional conceptions of history” not only through the comics’ content but also in how they open up “material practices” that give us new ways to analyze the documents themselves, conceptualize the affiliated histories, and, ultimately, understand their individual histories as connected to a larger queer community. This analysis enacts de Lauretis’s “conditions of visibility,” allowing for the recovery of new individual and collective histories.41 As discussed in the prior chapter through the notion of researching across archives, archives in general allow us to read comics with a new fullness and to see the personal networks surrounding their creation. While some of the archival collections in the last chapter made it seem like women and queer folks were on the periphery—“totally isolated and broken from history rather than being a part of it”—reading across archives and embracing queer comics archives allows Bechdel and other LGBTQ individuals to “see [them]selves as part of a coherent history” and community.42

Queer comics archives empower us to see new comics not housed in other comics collections and to understand the importance of social activism to comics through studying them in their original queer publication contexts in addition to examining them as they touch the lives of gay and lesbian folks who donate their ephemera to the archives or who are preserved through their communication with the artists themselves. Collections-building “material practices” embody “queerness as collectivity”—an articulation of the relational queer theory that José Esteban Muñoz theorizes in Cruising Utopia (2009).43 Just as Muñoz maps queer collectivity through close reading, new practices of close-reading comics and other image–text creations that emphasize relationality can map how queer activisms shape such works both in this chapter and others in this book. Departing from the traditional formalism of comics scholarship that “privileges art and artists with more cultural capital, not less,” this approach decenters the individual, honoring the rich history of collaboration in comics.44 This method pairs with the previous chapter wherein cartoonists represented and considered the role of the individual within a social justice–oriented community. Together, these tactics open a conversation about the multiple ways that communities shape even single-authored works.

Reading queer comics as they originally appeared in the pages of grassroots periodicals, and examining how other materials on the page intersect with them, reveals how comics are but one panel on an entire spread of content.45 In this way, the periodical should be further understood as a space of exploration, which allows us to trace how comics art and styles evolve within grassroots communities. The stylistic freedom of the periodicals themselves also transfers to the visual artwork within, facilitating the making of other image–text creations crucial to the development of the cartoonists who evolved their practices in these communities. That is, these adjacent image–text creations should also be read comicitously. These practices allow us to read beyond the static frame that closets comics. When we fixate on the frame and what’s inside, as strict comics formalism would have us do, we fix straight edges to our interpretation rather than considering queerer readings that cross borders—to evoke the theorization of Gloria Anzaldúa, whose hybrid drawings are the subject of the following chapter.46 Many early exploratory cartoons were never republished outside of queer publication networks, but such works—like comics-infused advertisements—are important to understanding more nuanced takes on feminism and queer theory inflected by the thought of local collectives. These modes of reading comics bring the surrounding community and production history to bear on what is created in the panel.

Such practices are not applicable only to comics that appear in grassroots spaces; rather, we must be generally attentive to original publication histories and to reading across publication contexts—in addition to reading across archives. Whenever a comic is republished in a new venue, its meaning—and sometimes also its content—shifts. With queer comics especially, moments of republication build community as the new setting makes the comic visible to a new audience. As we have already seen, feminist, gay and lesbian, and other alternative grassroots periodicals enfolded Bechdel’s comic into their own local communities and inscribed her comic with additional meaning when they raised money to support her work. A growing body of scholarship by Agatha Beins, Julie Enszer, and others acknowledges the importance of periodicals in the development of the women’s movement and gay and lesbian organizing, which this chapter extends by examining the role of comics in and as embodying this collective environment.47

Because Bechdel’s work was published in numerous formats and within highly specific political contexts and publications, close-reading her work within those original contexts is essential to understanding the narrative and aesthetic developments of her work. For example, in the March 1984 issue of WomaNews, Bechdel produced an advertisement for two upcoming WomaNews workshops where participants would “learn practical skills” like “editing/proofreading” and “layout/pasteup” (Figure 3.2).48 The women in Bechdel’s drawing for the advertisement exhibit serious demeanors as they demonstrate the skills covered in each workshop. Their faces communicate dedication—an attribute that WomaNews would want to encourage in potential new collective members. The humor lies in the action of their hands. The writerly type, bent so earnestly over a sheet of paper for the “editing/proofreading workshop,” concentrates her energies on marking one big single X on the paper as if to pronounce cheekily, “No, no, and no; all of this has to go!” Below her, the woman engaged in the “layout/pasteup workshop” has been stymied by her overzealous approach to the tools of the trade—glue, paper, and scissors. The glue is all over the table, and cutout paper rectangles of various sizes are stuck all over her. Yet she still determinedly holds the scissors in her right hand as she attempts to wrest control of her left hand from the glue’s grasp. That levity and a bit of chaos enter the frame through the working hands implies that the activity of making WomaNews is not a mechanical endeavor but rather a creative, open, and human one. There is space for mess and occasionally flip decisions within a fervent framework.

Reading this piece as but one panel in a full-page spread, we can see how its meaning radiates as those looking at the advertisement could imagine the work of their hands carefully editing the news briefs or curating the advertisements to fill space on this and subsequent pages. We can also consider Bechdel’s drawing on this page from within the context of her broader artistic development: the social organizations and events referenced here influenced the evolution of her work, and it is pages like these that she edited and organized when she participated in page layout alongside other members of the WomaNews collective. Her pithy representations of the women here and in those that she draws for the WomaNews letters pages covered in the next section are part of an effort to match her style to fit not only the periodical’s politics but also its limited page space.

The matter of space was a constant consideration in her work, as it could vary depending on the nature of the publication venue. For example, when Bechdel worked directly at WomaNews and Equal Time, she created advertisements that needed to fit into set layout spaces on the page, but when she started self-syndicating her DTWOF comic strips, she had to contend with the layouts of a whole range of periodicals. Her DTWOF comics blossomed alongside her participation in the collectives of grassroots periodicals. In the Firebrand reprints, we see these comics spanning two slim horizontal pages, while they take up a large full page in The Essential “Dykes.” When Bechdel sent her comics off to numerous periodicals, she included information about how to print and arrange her work, giving the periodical a few horizontal and vertical possibilities so that the comic could fit various page layouts. When we expand our reading of a comic beyond the edges of the frame, as archives that house vast collections of queer periodicals allow us to do, we activate the notion of queer comics archives that free us to read comics in multiple contexts and fully engage “queerness as collectivity.”49

Bechdel’s development as a comics artist while working as part of the WomaNews collective was a formative period in her career. By assessing these archivally held works through the close-reading methods of queer comics archives, it’s possible to trace the evolution of Bechdel’s work at this time. The following sections focus specifically on her process of deliberate revision and the importance of her comics-adjacent work. These accounts push back on the sense of Bechdel as a singular genius, since they show how Bechdel’s participation in queer networks influenced her work. Queer comics archives make visible the networked world that queer comics thrived in and that has heretofore been little discussed in comics scholarship. Moreover, while we recognize the labor of the hands within comics studies, such labor has been theorized through the artist–author who individually creates a work; here we have the opportunity to retheorize this labor as a collective one.

WomaNews and Revision

Bechdel started publishing in WomaNews in the July/August 1983 issue and spent the next two years evolving her comic in the pages of the periodical while also participating in its production. As she became a member of the collective in late 1983, she produced one comic per issue along with other contributions.50 As she developed her hand, her earlier work explicitly served as the foundation for later work. Such was the case with a series of images of lesbians writing that Bechdel debuted in the October 1983 issue (Figure 3.3).51 These graphics accompanied readers’ letters. Bechdel consolidated these individual panels into a DTWOF comic in September 1984 (Figure 3.4) and substantially revised this strip for the first collection of her comics that Firebrand Books released in October 1986 (Figure 3.5).52 This three-year period of intense refinement preceded her creation in early 1987 of the iteration of DTWOF that most readers are familiar with, which follows a dedicated cast of characters. By tracking her revisions for these letter-writing lesbians, it is possible to untangle Bechdel’s process of making new lesbian subjectivities visible alongside her development as a politically informed comics artist. Moreover, her choices to represent a racially diverse grouping of women within these comics as well as in other graphics created for the collective echoes her commitment to women of color feminism that was ascendant within the feminist movement in the 1980s, as previous chapters have touched on and as the following chapter will delve into in further depth through the drawings of celebrated Chicana lesbian feminist Gloria Anzaldúa.

Bechdel’s literary lesbians evoke the range of opinions that surround them on the letters page. The first image in the October 1983 issue of WomaNews shows an agitated woman, biting the tip of her pen while mulling over the next words to add to two pages of vigorously scrawled handwriting.53 She sits in a simple, square panel at the beginning of the letters page, in the top left of three columns, right next to the staff box.54 Her punchy persona and penmanship tap into the unsettled energies on the letters page. The extreme color contrast deployed in representation—only scratchy, intense blacks or negative white space, no shades of crosshatched gray—visually underscores the raw nerves.

The correspondence that surrounds this image has the same level of fierce passion to it—maybe even more. In one of the dispatches on the page, for instance, Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga issue a public call, asking WomaNews readers to donate money to help get This Bridge Called My Back (1981) back into print with Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press after the dissolution of Persephone Press, reported in the pages of WomaNews two months previous.55 This much-lauded anthology of woman of color feminism launches the next chapter’s focus on Anzaldúa’s own visual production. Having this letter share page space with Bechdel’s figure underscores how interconnected the artists surveyed across this book were, even as they occupied distinct spaces within the feminist and gay and lesbian movements for social justice.

The women that Bechdel drew for the letters page in the following months similarly conveyed an intensity of feeling. All told, during her tenure at WomaNews she created six letter-writing lesbians who were freely repurposed in the same section in subsequent issues. In all these images, the women are actively putting words on the page. The last of these figures first appeared in the July/August 1984 issue of WomaNews, a year after Bechdel’s first contributions to the collective.56 This focused dyke, in a jumper and with an apparent mullet, crunches on M&Ms, which are spilled across the selfsame page where she is composing. This woman and those who precede her embody a wide variety of writerly affects—from those who smoke while writing57 to those who contort their bodies to write58 to those who stare out into the distance for inspiration.59 In each iteration, the words of the letters surrounding these images supply the context, connecting the women to the voices on the page commenting about WomaNews and sharing about larger happenings in the feminist movement—like the publication troubles of This Bridge.

When Bechdel further developed these writerly affects in the “Literary Dykes to Watch Out For” comic strip in the September 1984 issue of WomaNews (Figure 3.4), she reframed these figures through her own words.60 In this short strip, a narratorial voice, identified as “Heloise C. Bland” in the strip’s subtitle, proposes, in the first, text-only panel, “to provide a brief psychological catalogue of the more common types of lesbians who write.”61 In the following panels, we encounter six distinct women, represented not just as “types” but more specifically as species: Bland gives each of them a pseudoscientific name in the accompanying boxes that describe each woman. These six species do not generally map one-to-one with their six WomaNews letters-page predecessors; rather, their evolutions are more complex.

Although the letters-page lesbians show a range of affects, their association with the opinions page of a feminist periodical restricts their representation. In fact, their framing bespeaks these limitations—they are seen, more or less, in medium close-up, focusing their attention on the act of composition. We know relatively little about the worlds of these characters. They universally evoke collectivity by remaining open for identification with the varied letter writers of WomaNews. In her strip, Bechdel retains the universal quality of these women by transforming them into literary species.

To understand these species, we must grasp their natural habitat and behaviors, so we are treated to these dykes in medium to medium–long shot, connected to their physical surroundings and the fullness of their bodies. In all the panels, we are told a story about the woman in association with her environment that shapes and is shaped by her writerly affect. The first four species are solitary, but the final two open up species of writers who are sexual (Scriptus interruptus) and social (Procrastinatoria inertia), and Bechdel increases the size of these panels in order to show these women engaged in composition through avenues of relation to other bodies. All these writerly species, however, have something, animate or otherwise, that inspires them to write.

The most newly evolved of the species in the strip is the one on the technological forefront, Floppius discus, who stares intently into a computer screen while jamming to tunes on her portable audio cassette player, the “Walkperson.” Both of these technologies were newly available in the 1980s, with the personal computer highlighted in the American cultural zeitgeist in 1984 following an unprecedentedly popular Apple commercial during that year’s Super Bowl.62 This new, hip writerly persona exists alongside the orderly Analus perfectus, diligently at her typewriter with a cup of tea as day breaks. In the structure of the comic, this picture of perfection is formally contrasted with Tequila nocturnalia, the tortured writer—both smoker and alcoholic in this rendition—scribbling out words in the dead of night. But what about Analus perfectus vis-à-vis Floppius discus? We are in a moment of coexisting writerly technologies, but there is the future pull to the computer, borne out over time, further bolstering the forward motion of this woman. It is interesting, then, that in this strip Bechdel portrays Floppius discus as a Black woman and the only overtly raced character. The future is more multicultural and complex than the white and tidy world of Analus perfectus, soon to be obsolete.

When Bechdel published this strip in her first DTWOF collection in 1986, she made further changes, forecasting the developing politics of her representations (Figure 3.5). Indeed, looking from the version of “Literary Dykes to Watch Out For” in WomaNews to the one in her first published collection is akin to a lesbian spoof of the childhood “spot the differences” game in any Highlights magazine. If Floppius discus were the multicultural future foretold in the first iteration, then this future is building steam in the second version, where two more dykes are visually reworked as women of color. These reworkings of Ingestis poetica and the woman listening to Procrastinatoria inertia do more than simply acknowledge the rising prominence of feminist women of color. These personages also foretell Bechdel’s embrace of lesbian feminist representational diversity within her comics, which becomes further evident when she relaunched DTWOF with a multiracial cast of recurring characters in 1987. It’s hardly a coincidence that these two revised figures resemble two of her DTWOF characters, Sparrow and Ginger, respectively.

Overall, the collected version of this comic is more polished—from the neater styling of the typeface to the amount of detail lavished in representing each woman. In the revision process, some background elements were omitted to streamline the drawing—from the missing ashtray in Tequila nocturnalia’s frame to the reduction of the food items represented in Ingestis poetica’s workspace. In the revision of Procrastinatoria inertia, the “most prevalent type of lesbian writer,” Bechdel changed the panel in numerous subtle ways that culminate in altering its meaning and its relationship to the reader. In both iterations, Procrastinatoria inertia has vaguely the same look—her T-shirt-and-jeans torso faces forward while she gazes semi-wistfully off to the left in recounting her Connecticut childhood. In its first version, Bechdel directly aligned this dyke with the readers of WomaNews by portraying her in a WomaNews T-shirt. This WomaNews Procrastinatoria inertia tells her tale at the bar to no one in particular—there is a couple getting handsy off frame to her right, and on her left, her one potential listener dozes while clenching a bottle of alcohol. With this T-shirt, Bechdel suggests that all readers are likely this woman at one point or another. In her revision and with her addition of a Black proto-Ginger in the frame, Procrastinatoria inertia takes on new meaning. By depicting the woman in a plain white T-shirt, Bechdel removed the associational ties to WomaNews, but we know, by the framing of the comic, that she is still not only a lesbian but also ostensibly a dyke to watch out for, in the many valences of the phrase. Though the couple off frame to the right are still getting handsy in this version, this new Procrastinatoria inertia, in telling her tale, provokes a response—namely, proto-Ginger’s apparent exasperation. Her annoyed expression isn’t just about an irritating bar patron but gestures toward an exhaustion with this kind of white lesbian feminist, obliviously grandstanding about her privilege with no sense of the varied experiences of the feminists around her. For Bechdel, reflecting her engagement in the evolving feminist movement around her, intersectional politics became an even more overt discourse in DTWOF in future years, evident through the women of color characters she created for the strip and stories that often referenced prominent feminists of color like Audre Lorde and Barbara Smith.

Queer Comics–Adjacent Material

More than just comics, Bechdel’s image–text contributions to WomaNews included covers, advertisements, and graphics accompanying articles—all of which were innovative in how they communicated feminist ideas in a distilled manner. Her visual language, which was heavily informed by the grassroots publication networks in which she operated, had enormous impact on the feminist and queer political communities who read her works, and who would in turn influence the broader discourse around gender and sexuality in feminism. In fact, by the 1990s, Bechdel would report in numerous interviews that women had learned about lesbian culture through her comics.63 Her early and diverse image–text work in WomaNews allowed her to experiment with different ways to create more visible lesbian experiences.

Across Bechdel’s many advertisements, including those promoting social events and collective-building workshops, we can see her nascent visual politics, where she is thinking about how to portray a range of characters that represent collective experience. Her advertisement for the WomaNews Fifth Anniversary Variety Show! embraced diversity by featuring five very different women locked arm in arm doing high kicks (Figure 3.6).64 Unlike the Rockettes, the famous New York City all-female precision dance troupe known for both high kicks and a similitude of appearance among its members, the five women here differ from each other in every attribute: age, race, weight, cup size, height, shoe taste, hairstyle.65 Bechdel’s visual reference radiates particularly forcefully as the December date of this event—and thus the publication of the advertisement in the November and December/January issues of WomaNews—coincided with the Rockettes’ performative mainstay, the annual Christmas Spectacular.66 For Bechdel to copy the Rockettes’ signature high kick but radically depart from the accompanying display of only one sort of woman is especially progressive given that the Radio City Music Hall mainstays were not yet a racially integrated troupe.67

Bechdel’s image suggests the unified movement of her dancers’ high kick—other visual signifiers of similarity be damned. These women are linked together in political movement that builds strength from their diversity. Unlike the Rockettes, who pride themselves on uniformity, success here is judged by difference—how many kinds of women can come together in coalition, high-kicking (literally or metaphorically), arm in arm? This visual collectivity echoes artistic approaches discussed in chapters 1 and 2 that showed diverse groupings of women celebrating differences in feminist settings: in the comic printed in the Barnard Diary (1982), multiple Black and white women emerged out from under the bed in the final panel to talk with one another about sex, and in Lee Marrs’s Pudge #1 (1973), the protagonist encountered a packed room of diverse women looking at their cervixes together and excitedly commenting on their differences.68 The artists in the following chapters, Gloria Anzaldúa and Nan Goldin, also represent collectivity in their chosen visual media.

The wording of Bechdel’s ad suggests further coalitional broadening beyond the visual register. The text framing the image is hand-drawn by Bechdel as well, suggesting that she was involved in the nitty-gritty details of the event. In the November version of the advertisement, the text beneath the image exclaims, “Singers! Dancers! Musicians! Surprises!” A number of possible expressions are enthusiastically encouraged; spectacles that fall outside the expected triptych are celebrated as “Surprises!” Further, prominently under the event information and taking up the same width as the image and its adjacent text, a line announces, “Performance space wheelchair accessible,” welcoming sisters with physical disabilities. The text extends the range of expressions and bodies that can participate in both this variety show and this collective. Moreover, this advertisement, in both the November and December/January issues, is embedded on the bottom right of the two-page calendar of events potentially of interest to those in the WomaNews community. Beyond the borders of this ad, we are immersed in a wide range of upcoming events for women of all sorts of dispositions.

In other advertisements, Bechdel showcased more ways that readers could support the collective. For the April 1984 issue, she devised a new advertisement for the sale of WomaNews T-shirts (Figure 3.7).69 In seeking to draw women into the collective by celebrating its politics as an active, fun, engaged endeavor, Bechdel employed multiple panels. In its arrangement of panels into a two-by-two grid, this advertisement reads as a comic. The narrative does not follow one woman in her WomaNews T-shirt but potentially four different women with diverse approaches. In each panel, cropping or perspective obscures the face of each woman, but contrasting visual cues—background texture, T-shirt, and hairstyle—suggest that we are looking at four different lived experiences. The illustrations encourage various uses for the T-shirt, definitively echoed in exclamatory text in the space below each panel. In the top row of panels, Bechdel portrays two women altering the T-shirt to fit their daily lifestyles—the first woman rips off the collar, sleeves, and bottom hem of the shirt to create a punk look, while the second keeps a pack of cigarettes rolled in her right sleeve. By recommending alterations to the T-shirts in the very advertisement selling them, Bechdel and the WomaNews collective imagine a whole host of gender presentations in this garb. The WomaNews T-shirt and WomaNews itself are open for reinterpretation and negotiation on a regular basis.

The bottom row juxtaposes these diurnal activities by suggesting two nocturnal approaches to the garment. In these panels, both women are getting ready for bed while wearing their WomaNews T-shirts, but their shared experience diverges from there. Above a caption that intones, “Wear it to bed!” the first woman dons the T-shirt as her nightie while diligently brushing her teeth, an action that suggests a quiet end to the evening. This speculation is supported by both the content of the second panel and its negating caption, “Don’t wear it to bed!” Here, a woman removes her T-shirt in order to join an already naked partner awaiting her under the covers; her evening is likely far from over. While this image is fairly innocuous in its portrayal of an imminent intimate encounter, the inclusion of lesbian sexuality as something that can be playfully tackled in a T-shirt advertisement gestures toward a feminist politics that embraces a wide range of sexual expression, just as the first row validates a gamut of gender presentation. Taken together, these panels celebrate a variety of sartorial choices, reflecting the array of political coverage but injecting it with humor through the comics medium. In this and other advertisements, WomaNews is explicitly evoked at the top, framing these representations. The WomaNews collective nurtured Bechdel’s visual politics and gave her the space to experiment with the comics form. Over the course of her career, grassroots spaces have continued to support Bechdel’s growth. Similarly, for all the artists in this book, collective spaces foster creative experimentation and new mergings of image and text.

Archives and Afterlives: Networking Dykes Online

Eight years after ending DTWOF in 2008, Bechdel released a Thanksgiving strip in November 2016 that responded to the presidential election of Donald Trump. She published the comic both in her local Burlington, Vermont, paper, Seven Days, as well as on her personal blog, where she briefly prefaced it with the following: “Since I stopped drawing Dykes to Watch Out For at the tail end of the Bush administration, people have asked me many times if I thought about my characters, and if so, what they were up to. And I would have to be honest. No, I didn’t think about them, and I had no idea what they were doing. But last week they all started flooding back.”70 She has since circulated two more strips in Seven Days and through her online outlets, the second coinciding with the Ides of Trump postcard-writing campaign in March 2017 and the third in July 2017 following the characters as they celebrate the Fourth of July. As she wrote on the release of this second strip, “I plan to continue doing these on an occasional basis as a way of staying sane.”71 The commenters on her website and Facebook post thanked her for this strip and agreed with her sentiment about maintaining sanity. Even though Bechdel had not published a strip in nearly a decade, her community continues to affectively relate to DTWOF—evident in these responses and in Bechdel’s statement that people asked after her characters.

These moments of interaction evidence how the transformation of grassroots infrastructure in the digital era facilitates community connection. Bechdel herself cites this direct interaction with her “strong community of readers” as a reason to start releasing her strips on her blog when she began the practice in early 2006.72 Though common Internet wisdom advises against reading the comments, in queer communities this space facilitates an engagement that shapes future work. This dialogue echoes the correspondence with individual periodicals that I discussed at the outset of this chapter. In both instances, those who love her work communicate their support and discuss the future trajectory of her plot. In digital space, she often directly responds to these suggestions in the comment stream or by penning response posts on her blog.73 If you didn’t engage these comment streams, you would miss how much of Bechdel’s work is informed by and formed through dialogue with her readers. One of the hallmarks of comics is how they circulate among many publication venues, and I have argued throughout this chapter that we must centralize grassroots periodical networks as an important space that fosters feminist and queer visual cultures while simultaneously underlining how archives preserve these networks. The next chapters will look to how Gloria Anzaldúa and Nan Goldin also developed their visual practice through close connections with grassroots communities they represented in their artwork.

By turning to the digital in closing, I urge us to pay attention to how the electronic infrastructure of these spaces further facilitates “queerness as collectivity.”74 In digital spaces, we must regard both those new artists who have innovated the form of webcomics and those artists, like Bechdel, who take up the digital to supplement existing careers and how they re-create their physical communities in these new spaces. For Bechdel, this new infrastructure supports her identity as “the lesbian Norman Rockwell” as she connects more closely with readers while making lesbian experience visible in multiple forms.75 On her blog, she not only distributes her comics but also shares sketches, textual reflections alongside accompanying photos, homemade videos, and various other new media image–text creations. This platform allows her to get back in touch with her grassroots beginnings at WomaNews and Equal Time, where she created comics-adjacent work in close proximity to her more formally legible comics. By embracing queer comics archives and affiliated spaces, we come to regard the role of queer community and transgress the borders of what constitutes comics in ways that better reflect and serve shifting queer activisms.

In the following chapters, I further push on those formal boundaries by highlighting the comicity of Anzaldúa’s drawings and Goldin’s photographs as both artists engaged sequence and multiplicity to build community. Like Bechdel, Anzaldúa and Goldin both challenged the visual formats they embraced, and they continue to be celebrated and supported in emerging digital networks when activists share their work on networks like Tumblr and create new work in their style on image-creation platforms like Instagram.76 The next two chapters will look to how they created their innovative visual work through collective spaces and how the archives make visible their artistic activism in working to create visibility for diverse sexual experiences.