Acknowledgments

This book, which is about how women’s artwork has been supported by and generative of community, would not be possible without the attentive care, generosity, and brilliance of many folks across the years. The seeds of this project were planted in Nancy K. Miller’s “Experimental Selves” seminar in Fall 2009 during the second year of my PhD in English at the CUNY Graduate Center. In that course, we discussed how women and men narrated their lives in textual, visual, and multimodal memoirs. Professor Miller encouraged us to pay special attention to the importance of relationships between women that disrupted the patriarchal norms of vertical inheritance that often limit women’s lives. It was in this course that I first encountered and wrote about Nan Goldin’s photography, which I later expanded and revised heavily for both my dissertation and then again for this book. It was also in this course that I first read comics in a scholarly context and learned about the field of comics studies when we read proofs from Hillary Chute’s Graphic Women, which was published in 2010 by Columbia University Press’s Gender and Culture Series that Miller coedited. How Chute centered women and their lives in comics—often stereotypically seen as an artform dominated by male artists—profoundly shaped the field of comics studies and my own scholarship in the years to come. It was also in this seminar that I met Meredith Benjamin and Melina Moore, who would later become vital interlocutors and writing partners.

This course was the first of several that I took with Professor Miller, each of which helped me develop a feminist attentiveness to the small and meaningful details of how women developed careers as artists, and how they did so with the support of others while working around societal constraints. Miller eventually became my dissertation director, and I fondly remember when we went to see Goldin’s new “Scopophilia” art exhibit at the Matthew Marks Gallery in December 2011 and then mapped out what would become my dissertation project as we walked along the High Line and ate grilled cheese at a diner in Lower Manhattan.

Other courses and professors in my program at the Graduate Center—which I often referred to as the top-ranked quirky school because of its embrace of noncanonical literatures and cutting-edge methods—were key to my scholarly formation. In David Gerstner’s Film History II course in Spring 2011, I first engaged and became enthralled with archives as I researched and wrote a seminar paper about how the production of The Philadelphia Story (1940) reshaped Katharine Hepburn’s career, utilizing archival collections at both the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts as well as the Margaret Herrick Library that holds the collections of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Beverly Hills, California. Following that initial research experience, I realized that archives were going to be integral to my developing interest in women’s visual–textual artwork that had so often been overlooked. In her introduction to Graphic Women (2010), Chute outlined the vibrant world of women producing comics in the countercultural underground scene in the 1970s; these comics, by and large, did not exist outside of archives in the present day, though that has been changing in the past several years with the digitization of some comics and the republication of others, including the Fantagraphics rerelease of underground series, including Wimmen’s Comix in 2016 and Tits & Clits in 2023.

Meeting Jonathan W. Gray, a professor of race and comics, was also transformative, as he provided a model for a scholar successfully centering his research on comics and questions of identity and social justice. Conversations with Gray were formative in making comics a key part of my scholarly agenda, and he has remained a champion of my scholarship throughout my career. Alongside Gray, Miller was also instrumental in my development as a comics scholar; she had long included graphic memoirs in her teaching and her own scholarship in the fields of autobiography and women’s and gender studies and actively encouraged students who wanted to research comics. Tahneer Oksman, another student of Miller’s a few years ahead of me in the program who wrote her entire dissertation on comics—which became the fantastic “How Come Boys Get to Keep Their Noses?”: Women and Jewish American Identity in Contemporary Graphic Memoirs (2016)—was another important role model for me.

Grants from my doctoral institution—through two Doctoral Student Research Grants (2012, 2014) and three Advanced Research Collaborative (ARC) Knickerbocker Awards for Archival Research in American Studies (2013, 2014, 2015)—funded my initial visits to archives across the United States. I am particularly thankful to Duncan Faherty, who was one of the initiators of the ARC awards and who also supported my archival endeavors in coursework and dissertation workshops. Grants from archives—the Gloria Anzaldúa CMAS-Benson Latin American Collection Short-Term Research Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin (2013), the Mary Lily Research Grant from the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture at Duke University (2016), the Travel-to-Collections Grant from the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College (2016), and the Queer Zine Archive Project summer residency project in Milwaukee, Wisconsin (2017)—and other external organizations—New York City Digital Humanities Graduate Student Digital Project Award (2015)—allowed me to expand my archival research. When the Society for the Study of Gloria Anzaldúa invited me back to UT Austin in 2015 to present on my research in Anzaldúa’s papers, I was able to extend my trip and conduct new research on Anzaldúa that reshaped my eventual analysis of her visual artwork.

All told, across my years of research, the following archives and the archivists therein were critical to the research conducted for this book: ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives at the University of Southern California; Special Collections and University Archives at Cal State University, Long Beach; Paul Brians and Lynn R. Hansen comics collections at Washington State University; Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection at the University of Texas at Austin; Queer Zine Archive Project in Milwaukee, Wisconsin; the Comic Art Collection of the Russel B. Nye Popular Culture Collection at Michigan State University; Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture at Duke University; Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College; Human Sexuality Collection at Cornell University; Fales Library at New York University; Barnard Center for Research on Women Records in Barnard Archives and Special Collections, Barnard College; various research divisions at the New York Public Library; and Lesbian Herstory Archives in Brooklyn, New York. Living within a short walk of the Lesbian Herstory Archives for five years had a special influence on this project, in ways both manifest and subtle. Digital archival collections, including the Alexander Street Press Underground and Independent Comics Collection; Independent Voices Collection at Reveal Digital; and Gale Archives of Sexuality and Gender helped contextualize the research conducted in physical archives. Karen Green, the extraordinary comics curator at Columbia University who has built impressive circulating and archival comics collections, introduced me to the Alexander Street Press collection shortly after it was launched, and it was here that I read my first feminist underground comics before later researching them in collections at WSU and MSU in the summer of 2012.

An inimitable team of brilliant and inspiring scholars—Nancy K. Miller, Jonathan W. Gray, David Gerstner, Kandice Chuh, and Hillary Chute—helped shepherd the project through exams and the dissertation defense, each one leaving a mark that shaped my revision and eventual book. For Chute to agree to serve on my dissertation committee as an outside reader was particularly meaningful as Graphic Women remains such an important touchstone. Chute’s support of my scholarship has been integral to my professional success throughout my career, and I wouldn’t be in the field—at least not in the same way—if I hadn’t encountered her research, which sparked and undergirded my own.

As I was beginning to write my dissertation, the writing group I formed with Meredith Benjamin and Melina Moore, two fellow graduate students who also worked with Miller as their primary adviser, was indispensable in helping me finish my dissertation and find my scholarly voice. Since our first formal meeting on June 22, 2015, and ongoing to the present day, our group, self-styled as M3, has supported one another. We’ve exchanged hundreds of emails, likely thousands of texts, and innumerable pages, talking about all aspects of professionalization. It is so special to have readers who deeply understand your writing process and can help cheer you on to completion when writing feels nearly impossible. Their brilliant insights are present in nearly every page of this manuscript, and I am a profoundly better writer and thinker thanks to our group. I could not ask for better colleagues and friends. Earlier writing groups during grad school with other English Program students Christopher Ian Foster and Velina Manolova as well as with J. Ashley Foster, Angela Francis, Tracy Riley, and Leah Souffrant influenced my scholarly trajectory and provided lasting colleagues.

Other groups during grad school also helped me flourish as a scholar. In my educational technology work as coordinator of OpenCUNY, an open-source digital platform where graduate students could build websites and develop public digital scholarship, and as an Instructional Technology Fellow in the Macaulay Honors College program, I worked alongside an interdisciplinary cohort of scholars who were capacious in their thinking. A number of them—including Gregory Donovan, Jen Jack Gieseking, Laurie Hurson, Amanda Licastro, and Christina Nadler—became quick and enduring friends who challenged me to think about how my scholarship moved across disciplines.

The comics studies panels at the Modern Language Association conference, both those organized by the Comics and Graphic Narratives Forum as well as those put together independently, were my first foray into the field and were key to my scholarly development. Jonathan W. Gray, who served on the Forum at its inception, made me feel welcome in the field and at MLA—no easy feat for such a huge conference—introducing me to countless scholars and making me feel like my contribution was important. As I started presenting on and organizing panels at the MLA, befriending Leah Misemer, a fellow graduate student in the field, at the conference in 2014 was a turning point in my scholarly development. We became collaborators and champions of each other’s research, putting together panels at the MLA and other comics conferences as well as coediting a special issue of INKS: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society based on one of those panels. Through my friendship with Misemer and further participation in comics studies panels and conferences, the whole field opened up, and I made close connections with emerging and established scholars. This community proved crucial as I stepped into the profession and includes Michelle Abate, Colin Beineke, Jenny Blenk, Scott Bukatman, Jeremy M. Carnes, andré carrington, Julian Chambliss, Hillary Chute, Brannon Costello, Anthony Michael D’Agostino, Fernanda Díaz-Basteris, Lan Dong, Ramzi Fawaz, Kristen Gay, Erica Gillingham, Karen Green, Justin Hall, Charles Hatfield, Jason Helms, Yetta Howard, Bill Kartalopoulos, Aaron Kashtan, Katherine Kelp-Stebbins, Susan E. Kirtley, Joshua Abraham Kopin, Frederik Byrn Køhlert, Zack Kruse, Martha Kuhlman, Rachel Kunert-Graf, Andrew J. Kunka, Sarah Lightman, Francesca Lyn, Keith McCleary, Sam Meier, Nicholas E. Miller, Rachel R. Miller, Elizabeth “Biz” Nijdam, William Orchard, Osvaldo Oyola, Anna Peppard, Christopher Pizzino, Alexander Ponomareff, Roger Sabin, Lara Saguisag, Nicholas Sammond, Joe Sutliff Sanders, Jeremy Stoll, Gwen Athene Tarbox, Janine Utell, Emmy Waldman, Rebecca Wanzo, Qiana Whitted, Justin Wigard, and Daniel Worden. A special thanks to Carnes and N. E. Miller for our seltzer weekend writing retreats where I revised portions of this manuscript; to Kopin, McCleary, and Oyola who offered informal writing support and friendship through our prolific Housewives Cat Popcorn group chat; and to Kirtley and Kunka who read the full manuscript as I prepared the final version for the press.

As I was finishing my dissertation in the spring of 2015, I was over the moon to receive an email from Jason Weidemann, the editorial director at the University of Minnesota Press, expressing interest in my research after having heard about it from my dear friend Jen Jack Gieseking. When Jason and I met at the following MLA conference in January 2016 after I had defended my dissertation, we had a deeply warm and engaging conversation about the importance of uplifting queer history. The level of engagement he brought to the conversation let me know that Minnesota would be the right home for the project, and it has been lovely to work with him throughout the years to transform the dissertation into a book. His unwavering enthusiasm helped me see the way forward in revising my newly defended dissertation, particularly as I crafted the book proposal in the spring of 2016 and finalized the advance contract that September. I am thankful to the anonymous peer reviewers and faculty board who approved the project in its early and revised forms as well as to Zenyse Miller, the editorial assistant at the Press who made preparing the manuscript seamless thanks to her detail-oriented attention. Countless individuals at the Press were instrumental in the production and preliminary promotion process, including Shelby Connelly, Eric Lundgren, Rachel Moeller, Caitlin O’Neil, Maggie Sattler, Mike Stoffel, Nicholas Taylor, and all the other great folks at the Press I will meet as the book makes its way into the world. Thanks also to Jeff Clark and his design firm, Crisis, for the gorgeous cover design, Neil West of BN Typographics West for typesetting, and Sean Grattan for a wonderfully comprehensive and subtly amusing index.

Many thanks are due to the generosity of the artists and executors of the artists involved in this book for allowing the art to be reprinted. Thanks as well to Gayle Rubin, Carole S. Vance, and Nancy K. Miller who shared additional insights about the feminist sex wars and the Barnard Sex Conference, reading and responding to my first chapter with detailed remarks that helped strengthen the final version.

Imagining how to tackle the revision and incorporate an explicit discussion of archives into every single chapter and have the different topics speak to each other was no easy feat, but it was made possible both thanks to Jason Weidemann as well as to the support of my M3 writing group as well as other editors at crucial points in the process. Notably, as I heavily revised my chapter on Alison Bechdel for the “Queer about Comics” special issue of American Literature, the issue editors, Ramzi Fawaz and Darieck Scott, spent ample time discussing with me how I might better foreground my claims and articulate the intertwined role of archives and grassroots networks. Fawaz made time for one-on-one conversations with me about the research, enacting the critical generosity of editorship as mentorship, and it shows in the essay, which was completely transformed from the dissertation chapter and gave me the critical apparatus and vision for how I would reshape the rest of the book. The three honors that the Bechdel essay in American Literature received let me know that I was on the right path. Moreover, being invited by Fawaz, Tori Yonker, and other individuals at the Department of English at the University of Madison, Wisconsin, to speak as part of the Americanist Lecture Series in 2019 gave me a chance to share my newly revised chapter on Lee Marrs and Roberta Gregory and receive invaluable feedback from the community.

Another key figure was Chris Lura, who worked with me as a developmental editor on the project, helping me focus on the nuts and bolts and zero in on the small details of how to revise the dissertation into a book. Lura spent a lot of detailed time with me on my writing, extensively marking up chapters and writing out multiple pages of overall feedback where he took time to explain specific principles to follow to strengthen both my writing and the connective tissue across the chapters of the book. We also spent hours on the phone and video chat reviewing his notes and discussing the process of revision. What I learned from Lura’s feedback helped me improve my writing across the board.

In 2016–17, the same academic year I secured the book contract, I had the extremely good fortune of landing a tenure-track job in visual rhetoric in the English department at the University of Florida (after three years of applying to nearly two hundred jobs) where I was hired to support the long-standing comics studies program that the late Don Ault started after he came to the university in the 1980s. I immediately felt welcome and at home in the department—another quirky school that embraces noncanonical literatures, foregrounds cutting-edge theoretical approaches, and prioritizes a diversity of intersectional representation. Getting a job where I could put comics front and center in my research and teaching heavily influenced my approach to the book and my research trajectory. In that first year at UF, I applied for and received the Humanities Scholarship Enhancement Fund, which supported a monthlong research trip to New York City as well as my developmental editing work with Chris Lura. In New York, I researched and wrote in the Shoichi Noma Reading Room at the New York Public Library after having found it wonderful to research and write in the Wertheim Study while I was first conceiving of the dissertation project as a graduate student. It was during that stay in New York in the summer of 2018 that I constructed a new outline for the book and reimagined how the project would need to grow and change. This funding from UF was fundamental in jump-starting the revisions on the book, and I have felt even further supported by my very warm and collegial department where not only am I encouraged to teach comics as I see fit but other faculty also regularly include comics in their curricula and advise grad students who research comics.

Over the years, my chair, Sid Dobrin, has been a champion of my research and a constant source of advice. Barbara Mennel, who directed the Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere, has been instrumental in helping me secure research funding both inside and outside the university, and Sophia Acord, who used to work alongside Barbara at the Center, has been similarly wonderful. The University of Florida College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and Center for the Humanities and Public Sphere (Rothman Endowment) also provided a publication subvention to support this book’s production. Kenneth Kidd and Anastasia Ulanowicz, my colleagues in children’s literature who also support the comics research in the department, have been invaluable mentors and friends. I serve often with Kenneth and Anastasia on dissertation committees, and it has been gratifying to learn from both of them about their approaches to the field as scholars of children’s literature. Marsha Bryant and Jodi Schorb have both been huge founts of feminist and queer wisdom in helping me navigate the profession and the university. Over the past few years, it’s been lovely to be in a writing group with Kenneth and my colleagues Rae X. Yan, Delia Steverson, and Suzan Alteri. Their energy and enthusiasm for their research was always motivating, especially in the moments where the book project felt insurmountable. More recently, I also joined with my colleagues Marsha Bryant and Leah Rosenberg in a writing accountability check-in as we all worked to complete major projects, which was so useful as I completed portions of the manuscript. I have been extremely lucky to be in a department with a thriving community of junior faculty. I have also met wonderful colleagues in other departments, including Rachel Gordan, Ariel Pomputius, and Dillon Vrana. It has been particularly amazing to find so many scholars across the university who are enthusiastic about the importance of comics in a research setting. A long-standing local cartooning school in Gainesville, the Sequential Artists Workshop, has been another important space of community.

The engagement of my students at UF as well as at NYU Gallatin—where I taught first-year writing and research courses from 2013 to 2017 as I was writing my dissertation—has been a sustaining force as I composed this book. In my graphic archives course that I’ve taught in many iterations at both NYU and UF, students learn how to research visual print culture in archives while immersing themselves in recent theoretical conversations around radical archives and materials. Watching how these younger generations embraced visual cultures from generations past and how their archival encounters were transformative demonstrated to me how important it was to put discussions of archives at the heart of the manuscript. Teaching comics, especially now that I can center comics in my curricula at UF, has allowed me to consider the particular ways of looking at image and text together that comics encourage.

Throughout this process, friends have provided crucial moral support and helped me see the path to completion. These are the folks with whom I’ve bantered about ideas and passionately shared research findings, but also those who listened to me vent over the difficulties of the writing process. Their friendships have provided the sustenance necessary to finish the book. My friend Matt Glass has read much of what I’ve written and has even driven me to archives when I did research in his hometown of Atlanta. He’s been a vital sounding board helping ensure that my writing made sense to a lay audience.

Over the past few years, Melissa Iuliano and I have shared a weekly meetup at a local coffee shop where we drank caffeine, enjoyed baked goods, and worked on creative projects. The redrafting of several chapters of the book happened during our meetings, in which our mutual friends Roxanne Palmer and Maxine Worthy sometimes participated. The cadence and continuity of our meetings helped me make steady progress and feel like things were moving forward, even when I was struggling with the manuscript. At our meetings, Melissa was often prototyping art projects for the students she teaches—it was illuminating to sit alongside an artist and watch her work through her process at the same time that I wrote about other visual artists and their artmaking practices. Becoming friends with Maxine, Melissa, and Roxanne—the Meow Brigade—when I moved to Gainesville has been a major bright point in my life. All of them are visual artists in a variety of media; watching how they move between the different forms and adapt processes informed my understanding of how many of the artists in this book drew on many forms in their own careers.

The culinary and crafty companionship of Leah Souffrant has influenced this project in many ways. In the years when I lived in New York City we often gathered together to cook and chat, talking about and sometimes making art. As an academic, multimedia artist, and poet, Leah has been both an inspiration and a role model; her constant belief in the significance of my research has kept me going. Over the years, cooking and sharing a meal together has been something that I’ve done with a number of people whose friendship has been integral for this book. Amanda Licastro and Joanna Tsai are two of those folks with whom I’ve cooked many a meal and whose fierce friendship has sustained me. Some other key individuals who’ve been there throughout this long process include Joan Brady, Ivy Chang, Mia Chen, Rachel Corbman, Gregory Donovan, Jen Jack Gieseking, Sean Grattan, Velina Manolova, Edie Nugent, Heath Pennington, Tracy Riley, Sasha Terris-Maes, Christie Troy, Lora Webb, Mary Zaborskis, and Carolyn Zola.

During the first year of the pandemic, Dillon Vrana organized the neighbors in our cul-de-sac to socialize safely every Friday outside. We were academics in different departments at the university, so our conversations were a fun and dizzying cross section of ideas. My partner, Tyler, and I looked forward every week to our Friday gatherings with Dillon, Natalie A. Cooper, Heidi Jensen, and Jason Mullen, and we all celebrated our birthdays and major holidays (Fourth of July, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas) with one another. This space of friendship and joy at a difficult moment gave me the energy to keep working on and believing in the book.

Thanks to my family, who are always there at the end of the phone line or cross-country plane trip, for their support. Thanks to my mom for driving me to various archives in the Los Angeles area and helping me select the camera that’s been invaluable to my research process. There’s also something about the all-consuming, detail-driven way in which I research that very much comes from Mom. Thanks to my dad, the computer scientist, for his engineering ethos that practically grounds my work and for his spot-on software conversations. Early in life, Dad gave me a book on how to make art with Microsoft Word, which I took to with particular alacrity, learning the ins and outs of formatting precisely with a word processor. The spreadsheets I made over the course of my research for this book to help me organize my ideas were definitely inspired by Dad. My older sister, Tina, has always been someone I’ve looked up to and who’s provided me level-headed advice for any life situation. In her many years together with her husband, Terrell, it has filled my heart to see our family grow. Becoming an aunt to Liyah, Maya, and Ayla has been a delight. Though my grandparents have all been gone for many years now, I carry them forward with me, drawing on their work ethic and unceasing love. I hope I’ve done them and our family proud.

And last but certainly not least, much credit is due to my partner, Tyler Stalbaum, and our two cats, Champ and Jagger. We’ve become a fearsome foursome over the past three years as the pandemic raged and we mutually supported one another amid stressors both large and small. Champ and Jagger are very different cats, but each is incredibly loving in his own way and spent ample time with me as I worked on or worried over the book. The Covid-19 pandemic ramped up soon after Tyler and I first met in February 2020, fast-tracking the emotional depth of our budding relationship and commitment to each other. Not only did Tyler help keep me sane during Covid, cooking me good food and concocting delicious cocktails, he also took to learning about my area of research with enthusiasm and has been a sounding board and source of advice as I was striving to complete a book manuscript amid a global pandemic. Not only has Tyler been a strong emotional support, but he has also actively participated in the book’s completion, helping me make scans of a number of images and driving me to archives for research and also piloting our U-Haul steadily and safely during a cross-country move as I proofed my book in the front passenger seat. My writing is even stronger and more polished thanks to this family of mine who helped me drag this book across the finish line.