Historicizing Women’s Comics within the Feminist Movement

Though the Barnard Sex Conference is understood as the catalyst of the feminist sex wars in the 1980s, the tensions that caused the schism had been building over the course of the 1970s. Scholars have traced how the different groups debated this topic at separate conferences and events across the late 1970s,1 and both factions of feminists participated in key events that marked the widening gap between these groups: in San Francisco, for example, the newly formed lesbian BDSM group Samois marched in 1978 in the Gay Freedom Day Parade, while that same year anti-pornography feminists involved in Women Against Violence in Pornography and Media organized a national conference around “Feminist Perspectives on Pornography.”2 As the divide between these groups grew, the Diary’s dramatic censorship at Barnard in 1982 made it clear among sex-positive feminists that new networks that would support their ideas and their innovative visual forms were needed. The story of how the Diary’s artists—Hannah Alderfer, Beth Jaker, and Marybeth Nelson—continued their activism, honed their visual presentation, and eventually collaborated on Caught Looking in 1986 is an important example of how women built artistic networks in this period to support their visual politics. But there are numerous other important stories of network building and artistic production, many of which have remained submerged deep in the archives, including important collaborations in comics and feminist anthologies, as well as innovations in representing feminist politics in photography and other visual media.

Just as certain feminists rejected the Diary’s collage aesthetics in the 1980s, leading to the curtailment of its circulation and reception, so, too, did some feminists reject the aesthetics of women’s comics throughout the 1970s. Some of these comics anticipated and critiqued the feminist movement’s shortsightedness, especially with regard to including lesbians and women of color in the movement, which the Diary and Caught Looking and the artists in the following chapters would continue to focus on in the following decade amid a larger conversation about sexuality. Due to popular understandings of the form as a misogynist enterprise, comics existed at the margins of feminism and struggled for broader recognition in movement bookstores and publications.3 While women cartoonists broadly adopted feminist ideals in their work, the independent scene in which they created these comics—known as the underground—was populated predominantly by straight white men who often produced comics that centered retrograde and offensive depictions of women and gender relations.4 At this time of rich, multifarious social revolutions, there were a number of women cartoonists who frequently worked to counter the patriarchal underground ethos. Among them, cartoonists Lee Marrs and Roberta Gregory were particularly important for pushing boundaries in the way they directly represented the exclusions of both the underground and feminism in their comics, illuminating why new spaces for artistic production were necessary.

Marrs’s and Gregory’s comics were part of a lively domain of independent comics produced by women in the 1970s in coordination with the larger countercultural underground comics movement.5 Two long-running feminist series emerged out of this space: Wimmen’s Comix (1972–92) and Tits & Clits (1972–87). Wimmen’s Comix ran for seventeen issues and nearly two decades, while Tits & Clits ran for seven issues and a decade and a half. In that time, the series collectively featured the work of over one hundred women cartoonists and often served as the entry point for new generations of women entering the field. While Marrs and Gregory were contributors to both series, their involvement with the Wimmen’s Comix collective across the run of the series more clearly demonstrates the depth of their participation in the comics scene. Marrs was not only a founding member of the Wimmen’s Comix collective but also an editor of the second issue and one of the most prolific contributors to the series, producing images for the front and back covers of three issues.6 Gregory was notably the first openly nonheterosexual contributor, depicting same-sex attraction in her first comic in the series, “A Modern Romance,” which appeared in Wimmen’s Comix #4.7 Both women contributed to over a third of the seventeen issues, participating across its full run.

Outside these two series that operated as safe spaces for women’s content, the larger underground comics scene was known for its frequent misogyny. Prominent underground cartoonist Trina Robbins, self-appointed herstorian of the movement, claims that “it was almost de rigueur for male underground cartoonists to include violence against women in their comics, and to portray this violence as humor.”8 Working in the same medium, women’s underground comics challenged misogyny as form by producing a range of liberated women’s bodies on the page. In so doing, these works also pushed back against the limitations of feminist discourse in the 1970s, particularly with their open focus on and embrace of many forms of sexuality. Both the Wimmen’s Comix and Tits & Clits series were important interventions that set the stage for Marrs, Gregory, and countless other artists to create works elsewhere. For Marrs and Gregory, their resulting individual comic books, The Further Fattening Adventures of Pudge, Girl Blimp (1973–77) and Dynamite Damsels (1976), respectively, allowed them to specifically examine the space for women’s sexuality within the feminist movement.9

Marrs’s and Gregory’s individual comics and their collective participation foreshadow their later trailblazing work creating representations of women’s LGBTQ experiences in the Gay Comix (1980–98) series in the coming decade, as discussed later in this chapter. In tracing the arc of their careers, we can see how their investments in multiple movements echo the shifting social landscape around them. Scholars like Hillary Chute, Susan Kirtley, Sam Meier, Leah Misemer, and Nicholas Sammond have analyzed the underground feminist comics series’ influence.10 This chapter extends those conversations by tracing how two artists who developed through Wimmen’s Comix and Tits & Clits responded to their affiliated social movements and provided a platform for emerging artists interested in LGBTQ expression, both in their individual comic books as well as in their foundational comics in early issues of Gay Comix. This chapter also contends with how the social position of these comics and their resulting location in archives have often circumscribed how we understand their contributions to histories of both comics and feminism.

Despite directly engaging feminist issues, these comics and artists struggled to find support from the broader women’s movement. The artists contemporaneously cited how couching their political critiques in this visual, often humorously irreverent form presented an insurmountable barrier. In a 1980 interview in The Comics Journal, Robbins opined, “It’s really weird the way leftists and militant feminists don’t seem to like comix. I think they’re so hung up on their own intellect that somehow it isn’t any good to them unless it’s a sixteen-page tract of gray words.”11 Here, Robbins identified genre tunnel vision in which only text in a certain form passed ideological muster. In an interview from 1979 printed in the grassroots publication Cultural Correspondence, Marrs expanded on the practical consequences of that prejudice: “But we got totally rejected by the women’s movement, for the most part. . . . Not just that Ms. magazine wouldn’t run us, but bookstores across the country wouldn’t carry us, because we did not have a heavy, traditional, feminist political line.”12 Marrs equated these concrete examples with rejection, for they foreclosed the ability of the collective to reach a broader feminist audience despite their varied attempts to participate.13 Her quotation also foregrounded their comics as something done differently from the feminist norm in their content, even though later in the same interview Marrs went on to compare their comics with the “work[ing] through” that happened in “consciousness-raising groups.”14 Notably, these feelings of frustration came at the close of the decade when women broadly felt disillusioned by the promise of feminism, as Marrs and Gregory recorded in their solo comics.15

Within this social landscape, Marrs’s and Gregory’s comics document the frustrations with second-wave feminism by depicting the movement within their pages. The intersection of the coming-of-age narrative with representations of grassroots feminist organizing allowed both artists to review and critique the first half decade of women’s liberation in the early 1970s. Their comics bildungsromane, Marrs’s The Further Fattening Adventures of Pudge, Girl Blimp and Gregory’s Dynamite Damsels, both feature a young female protagonist coming into her own sexuality as she grows in her involvement in the feminist movement.16 While coming-of-age tales, particularly around sexual knowledge, were common in women’s underground comics, Marrs’s and Gregory’s linkage of this growth to the feminist movement is relatively unique. Across their comics, they represented the early movement through its grassroots organizing spaces—consciousness-raising groups, demonstrations, self-help clinics, and more—often alluding to historical referents in these moments. The close readings later in this chapter put these comics back into conversation with their contemporary feminist interlocutors, demonstrating the limits of these movement forms in supporting a range of women’s experiences. The juxtaposition of text and image in these comics allowed them to realize and challenge more viscerally the tenets of feminism through women’s own bodies. In visualizing and interrogating feminist forms, Marrs and Gregory theorized new possibilities for women engaging their politics with their bodies.

While Marrs’s and Gregory’s comics illustrated how much feminism in the 1970s sparked sexual discovery, they also documented how the movement did not serve women who were not heterosexual, white, and middle-class. Both comics featured white-coded protagonists who struggled with their sexuality, so Marrs and Gregory centered critiques of how feminism did not support such women. Each artist’s own personal identification as a bisexual woman also plays a role in this critical focus, especially given that their comics sometimes read as semi-autobiographical accounts.17 In each comic, we see how feminist spaces facilitate each protagonist’s first sexual experiences and embrace of nonheterosexual identities and practices. Though the characters gained sexual knowledge through intimate experiences with women affiliated with women’s liberation, there were limits to how much overt lesbian or bisexual representation was welcomed in the movement proper. These plot points echo the early movement’s struggle with lesbian feminism, as documented by Victoria Hesford in Feeling Women’s Liberation (2013), in which she charts “the emergence of a new figure—the feminist-as-lesbian—which, in turn, has had a defining effect on the way in which women’s liberation in particular and feminism in general has been remembered and represented.”18 It is through the stories of these protagonists and their struggles with squaring their same-sex desire within the movement in the works of artists like Marrs and Gregory that we begin to see how women were frequently disregarded due to their difference from a straight, white, middle-class norm.

Marrs’s and Gregory’s representation of race relations in both comics provided a strong counterpoint to the general lack of regard for women of color in the broader feminist movement at the time. Both artists represented women of color, and Black women in particular, in their work more than other contemporaneous feminist media did, and in the process they demonstrated how these women felt their concerns were not prioritized within the feminist movement. As they documented elsewhere in interviews and comics, their focus on race relations within feminism and representing diverse bodies arose, in part, out of their own upbringing in 1950s America: Gregory grew up biracial in a Southern California, Latinx–Caucasian household, while Marrs was raised white in the South amid the backdrop of the civil rights movement.19 In her book Liberation in Print (2017), which surveys the early feminist movement through grassroots periodicals and their affiliated collectives, Agatha Beins establishes how women of color often had to navigate “implicit racism in dominant narratives characterizing the women’s liberation movement.”20 As Beins surveys, in the 1970s feminists were debating the limits of sisterhood in grassroots feminist periodicals across the United States; but comics such as Marrs’s and Gregory’s, in their position somewhat outside the movement, could comment holistically, coalescing years of movement debate in their visual forms.21 The coming-of-age narrative structure facilitated their critiques of how the feminist movement was heterocentric and white-dominated by showing how women had their consciousness raised through the movement yet grew to realize its limitations. Alongside these critiques, both Marrs’s Pudge, Girl Blimp and Gregory’s Dynamite Damsels simultaneously charted a pathway forward, gesturing to the conditions of possibility that would allow for the full participation of Black women and lesbians in the feminist movement. Not only did these artists lay the groundwork for future cartoonists in these comics and in their later work in the 1980s, but their concerns about feminism’s exclusions anticipate the networks that future artists created to address these issues across the 1980s, including Alison Bechdel, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Nan Goldin, all of whom are discussed later in this book.

Because most of Marrs’s and Gregory’s comics—like women’s underground comics in general—were released in small print runs and have not been republished, archives are essential in accessing these works and writing these histories. However, these comics surface unevenly from archives. Since their contexts and histories have often been overlooked, this chapter in some ways is a work of feminist recovery, reaching back from the contemporary scholars also working on this period to the second-wave feminists themselves who reached even further back in history to rescue feminist foremothers. However, in surveying the varying archival contexts in which these comics are preserved, this chapter puts pressure on the limits of recovery for marginalized media. We read, in the spirit of Ann Laura Stoler, along the archival grain to suss out the frameworks behind how these comics were collected in archives and how that has affected how they’re positioned on the margins or not at all in histories of feminism and comics.22 In then analyzing these comics anew and putting them back into conversation with their contemporaries in the feminist movement, this chapter identifies a new pathway through feminist thought in these overlooked comics. The archiving of these and other feminist comics from this period reflects how they were stuck between movements and modes of feminism, threatening their legacy.

Reading across Archives, Working between Movements

The marginalization that feminist underground comics faced in the 1970s from both the larger underground comics scene and the feminist movement continues today. As Susan Kirtley reflects in the middle of a recent essay in which she untangles the different ways that underground women cartoonists responded to the feminist movement and its ideologies in their work, “Perhaps as a result of this ‘outsider’ status in both feminist and underground circles, these important, influential comics have rarely been studied, which is another example of an unfortunate double standard, for these comics most certainly bear additional examination, both for historical research and to further our understanding of the craft and form of comics.”23 Kirtley’s observation echoes that of Chute’s eight years earlier in her landmark monograph Graphic Women (2010), where she roots her lineage of contemporary women cartoonists in the underground, asserting that these works had not received ample attention.24 In the time between Chute and Kirtley, many scholars have begun to focus more intently on the underacknowledged role of women as creators of comics—both in the underground and more broadly.25 And yet the “‘outsider’ status” persists. In this section and throughout the book, I insist that these works and our reception of them are affected by their marginalization in archives, and it is no different here. How their position is inscribed in the very archives through which scholars access and write about these works shapes this scholarship.

Feminist underground comics are found within many collections, but it is how they are organized in these spaces that keeps them on the margins of discourse. Indeed, if we not only look to their status within one archives but instead analyze their position in multiple archival locations, we start to understand their persistent marginalization. This tactic of reading across archives is one that I develop here as a practical and theoretical notion that works to understand the cultural positioning of objects. Many archival research projects analyze objects through their collection in one location; this chapter and book insist that for those materials collected across many locations—as grassroots materials and comics often are—we must consider how these various collections tell us different stories of how these materials were understood in their time and pay particular attention to the way these varied tellings of the past continue to influence how they are understood in the present. To read across archives also requires that we look outside the collections that often contain just the comics and locate connections to other materials in archives that speak to how comics participated in larger cultural discussions.

For example, tracking the seventeen issues of Wimmen’s Comix (1972–92) in its various archival locations demonstrates how it and its fellow feminist underground comics were stuck between and subsequently marginalized by both the feminist and underground movements. Although there are some archives that maintain archival records and papers from individual cartoonists—such as the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum at The Ohio State University and, increasingly, in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia University—most comics materials within archives are simply copies of the original comics themselves assembled together by avid collectors. Thanks to these kinds of collectors, issues of Wimmen’s Comix—though often not the complete run—exist in a number of university and grassroots archives across the United States, including at Harvard University, Iowa State University, the Lesbian Herstory Archives, Michigan State University, ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, Pennsylvania State University, Stanford University, University of Connecticut, University of Virginia, Washington State University, et cetera. The politics and proclivities of the individual collectors who donated their comics to these institutions matter a great deal, as Nicholas Sammond identifies in a recent essay: “Who collects or does not collect a given title, how they identify themselves, can shape the presence, absence, and location of that title in an archive. Likewise, the conditions under which that archive was created and is structured will, obviously, determine both the nature of its holdings and how they are organized and encountered. This often replicates in the archive the very history of marginalization that gave rise to women’s and queer comix in the first place.”26 In this passage, Sammond describes the interplay between collectors and archives and how an archival collection is shaped by a collector’s biases in addition to the leaning of the archives as a whole. The upshot of these forces, Sammond posits, is that marginalized works are again often sidelined. Depicting the situation that Sammond alludes to with these insights, many of the archival collections that contain Wimmen’s Comix and other progressive titles do not center these works, leaving them dispersed and obscured, both organizationally and historically, to contemporary researchers.

In many prominent collections of underground comics, which have been put together by avid collectors who are men, Wimmen’s Comix and other feminist titles are few and far between, eclipsed by a hefty dose of misogynist portrayals prevalent in many underground comics. While this context usefully explains some of the formal barriers that women were working against in their comics, progressive titles can get lost amid this retrogressive cacophony, seeming peripheral or secondary to the movement. These underground comics collections often contain a brief description seeking to describe all of the collection’s content—for example, both of Washington State University’s comics collections provide this summation: “They frequently depict graphic violence, and many are sexually explicit.”27 While this portrayal rings true for many underground comics—feminist ones included—how progressive titles address sex and violence sets them apart in ways not recognized by this reduction. They seem like outliers not only in terms of their content and how they handle it, but also in terms of their production history, as they continued to be created well after the heyday of the underground in the 1960s and early 1970s. This difference in periodization likely contributes to the fact of their being incompletely collected—for Wimmen’s Comix, roughly two thirds of the seventeen issues were published after 1975, the year that Patrick Rosenkranz marks as the cutoff in his history of the underground comics movement.28 Because these comics had a different orientation to content and time than the bulk of the underground, they are often not well served or as completely collected in such archival collections.

For this reason, feminist collections of comics, including those at Harvard University and the University of Virginia or lesbian collections at the Lesbian Herstory Archives, provide a useful counterpoint. In these collections, feminist underground comics are positioned in the archives as being in dialogue with other comics by women and broader feminist works, locating them in a genealogy of works that extend out of the underground. In such groupings, one can see how Wimmen’s Comix has shaped decades of feminist women’s comics and continues to shape contemporary women’s work in the medium—something that is otherwise obscured in the incomplete or marginalized organizational schemes in other archives. However, while these feminist collections allow for a careful tracing of the artistic evolution in women’s comics and show how Wimmen’s Comix and other underground feminist works like those of Marrs and Gregory were formative for future artists, these collections also isolate these works as innovators who were ahead of their time. To wit, these titles are peripheral in different ways in both underground and feminist collections because they seem, in part, stuck between movements—too late for the underground and too early for feminist comics.

Feminist underground comics represent important critiques of the feminist movement in comics form. But women produced other comics at the time that have also been overlooked by archives and scholars. As this chapter and the next shows, there were a number of feminist comics that women published that explicitly responded to and critiqued feminist as well as gay and lesbian activism. Marrs, Gregory, and other important women underground cartoonists inspired subsequent generations of women who published their comics within feminist and gay and lesbian periodicals in the 1980s, as the next chapter examines through cartoonist Alison Bechdel, who self-syndicated her Dykes to Watch Out For comic strip (1983–2008) in an impressive array of grassroots and independent newspapers. Even in the 1970s, though, there were women, many of them anonymous or pseudonymous, producing comics in feminist newspapers in local and unacknowledged ways.29 At that time, there were numerous local, independent feminist newspapers around the United States. However, although these women’s comics were important for illustrating feminist principles in a different form within those local collectives, these cartoonists did not, by and large, connect to or participate in the larger comics communities in major urban areas or based around publications with national distribution. In recent years, many scholars have taken up Kate Eichhorn’s call for the archival turn in feminism and gone to the archives to nuance our understanding of the contemporary feminist movement and tell stories of local collectives that have been excluded from the major narratives.30 While these scholars have deftly worked through grassroots sources, they have yet to fully account for the rich visual culture of feminism and how such works unfurl different theories and histories of feminism.31 It is one of the primary goals of this book to provide this account.

Moreover, when comics are collected solely alongside other comics, they are separated from the cultural conversations and communities that supported this work. Similarly, when comics are discretely collected as primary document collections without further historical context in the collection itself, it severs important connections to that context. Their history has to be reassembled by again working across archives to grasp how different people within these social movements both understood and collected these comics. Reading the comics solely within comics collections reduces our understanding of their impact. On the other hand, reading them across these spaces reveals how their precarious historical position emerges precisely out of how they were stuck between the feminist and underground movements in their time, which later shapes how they were collected.

This chapter, drawing on the holdings of multiple archives, reconnects these contexts and locates these connections in order to describe this larger social framework. These archives include underground comics collections at Washington State University, a broader comics collection at Michigan State University, digital collections of comics including the Alexander Street Press Underground and Independent Comics database, grassroots archives including the Lesbian Herstory Archives and the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, and digital collections of grassroots newspapers and ephemera including Reveal Digital’s Independent Voices, Gale’s Archives of Sexuality and Gender, and others. Reading feminist comics in these multiple locations reveals how they were important to many different communities. It also underscores how and why they were and remain peripheral to these conversations.

The different understandings of these comics in their varied archival locations demonstrates why we should always examine how materials are structured within archives. Reading across archives with these comics in particular, we learn something about the multiple, intersecting nature of social movements, which is deepened when we turn to Marrs’s and Gregory’s comics that mediate these intersections. Where the previous chapter discussed how grassroots archives and independent collectors safeguarded marginalized images, this section broadens that conversation by thinking through how all sorts of archives organize material in ways that promote different histories. The following chapters will further this conversation by examining the varied visual production of three artists active in the 1980s in order to demonstrate how we can theorize the collectivity of feminist and queer visual cultures within many kinds of archives and show how they were in dialogue with archives. The visual cultures discussed in this chapter and the ones that follow nuance our conceptions of feminist and other affiliated histories. For Marrs and Gregory, they leverage the comics form to document and challenge the feminist movement, deploying visual tactics to theorize the role of sexuality with feminist circles.

Pudge, Girl Blimp: Feminist Collectives Shift the Sexual(ity) Conquest

Published in three issues in the 1970s—the first in 1973, the second in 1975, and the third in 1977—Marrs’s The Further Fattening Adventures of Pudge, Girl Blimp is, on its surface, an amusing romp in counterculture San Francisco through the eyes of a seventeen-year-old virgin newly arrived from the Midwest. At the center of most of the narrative, the protagonist, an unconfident and heavyset young woman, constantly faces barriers and setbacks on her ultimate quest to be deflowered. This general plot structure and its irreverent tone is in keeping with the underground comics form that Marrs both adopts and critiques. Through infusing her comic’s form and content with feminist politics, Marrs dramatically reconstitutes both Pudge and her quest over the course of the narrative. Marrs renders the comic in a densely illustrated fashion that depicts Pudge within crowds as she negotiates different countercultures. All these characters exist within heavily annotated surroundings, which articulate a shared visual politics that embed Pudge’s experiences among the many people and groups she encounters.

As Pudge attempts to lose her virginity, she simultaneously acquires a more positive sense of her body and a more dynamic sense of what losing her virginity might mean through these interpersonal encounters. The trajectory of how she strives to lose her virginity reflects this growth of meaning, as her first two failed attempts within the opening pages of the first issue involve her trying to get herself taken advantage of and trying to take advantage of someone else, showing very little respect or thought for herself or others.32 After this second try, a textual panel asks if Pudge will have her “consciousness raised” and if she “will . . . ever see herself as whole person, female?”33 This moment, which happens on the sixth page of over a hundred pages of content across three issues, marks an explicit departure from the narrative structure with which Marrs begins her comic. Up until that point, her character would have easily fit in a raunchy underground comic that sexualized and objectified its women characters. Though the series remains comical and irreverent, Marrs employs feminism to shift the underground narrative incrementally over the course of the three issues through the protagonist’s exposure to and participation within feminist collectives.

A variety of feminist collectives play a role in raising Pudge’s consciousness, transforming her relationship to sex, consent, sexuality, and her body. Her change issues from her interactions with other characters who challenge her to think more critically about her actions and more generously about herself. She accidentally encounters feminism through a self-help clinic when she finds a notice posted on a community bulletin board in the Mission neighborhood.34 When she enters the room, she finds women clustered around a slide presentation about their cervixes before the group breaks up to help each other perform self-examinations with speculums and mirrors (Figure 2.1). Quickly pulled into the action, a woman helps Pudge examine her cervix in the bottom right of a panel crowded by other legs splayed in the air and accompanied by the faces of other women who assist the reclining women.

Among this crowd of women, we see a diverse group all working together. Compared with her mainstream feminist contemporaries, Marrs represents such collectives as more racially integrated, positioning an intersectional avant la lettre feminism as necessary for Pudge’s growth. As Shilyh Warren points out in her analysis of the second-wave feminist documentary Self-Health (1974), which depicts a group of women learning about reproductive health and performing cervical examinations together, the required solidarity of sisterhood produces the “sameness in the bodies of women who are all white.”35 Warren invokes Carla Kaplan’s work The Erotics of Talk (1996), which untangles how consciousness-raising groups compelled homogeneity through “subtle pressures to conform to particular viewpoints or to avoid taboo subjects, especially about race and class.”36 In Marrs’s rendering, however, text and image strongly promote difference, especially along racial lines. In the panel where various women examine their cervixes, not only do the sheer number of legs and faces accompanied by exclamations like “Mine’s pinker than yours!” promote difference on the most basic level, but other comments more explicitly affirm such values. Explaining speculum use to Pudge, a Black woman facilitating the meeting declares, “You see, every woman looks different inside.”37 Through these differences, Marrs embraces heterogeneity rather than enforcing a sisterhood of sameness.

In illustrating this collective, Marrs not only creates a self-help group with more progressive politics than mainstream depictions but also comically renders a contemporary moment of feminist history—in September 1972, Los Angeles police arrested Carol Downer and a number of other women who had been leading self-help workshops on the rationale that these services constituted unlicensed medical practice.38 Because Downer had been charged with helping treat women’s yeast infections with yogurt, the case became known as the Great Yogurt Conspiracy, as a report of the case in the feminist newspaper off our backs called it.39 In the aftermath of Downer’s acquittal and the attendant press coverage, a 2004 article in Feminist Studies understands this case as “the now comical police bust over yogurt.”40 By alluding to this moment in feminist history, Marrs connects to her feminist readers and suggests that her comic and character are part of that history.

While the seizure of strawberry yogurt that was a staff member’s lunch and not intended for the treatment of yeast infections is already funny,41 Marrs heightens the humor in her account of the event. In these panels, a character resembling Downer suggests yogurt as a treatment method, prompting an undercover cop to cry out, “You’re all under arrest!!” while trying to yank up her pants and ineffectually search her purse for her badge.42 Although the actual arrests happened in a police raid, this rendering captures the humorous manner in which the event was received by the general public. Marrs conveys her support of feminism by heightening the ridiculousness of the cops in this telling. This self-help clinic exposes Pudge to more perspectives and open dialogues about women’s bodies and pleasures before she joins a consciousness-raising group, which she faithfully attends over the rest of the series.

Pudge’s participation in a consciousness-raising group across all three issues shapes her perspective about her eventual sexual encounters. Through the depiction of these group settings, Marrs creates the space for conversation while simultaneously foreclosing the possibility of fully engaging any one woman’s issues. In her introduction to the group in Pudge, Girl Blimp #1, Marrs fashions this spacious lack of listening by fracturing sequential paneling: the recursive flow of the women’s conversation sets the panels spiraling (Figure 2.2).43 At the center of this spiral, Marrs insets a “start” arrow, as if to suggest a deliberate order to read, from inside out. However, this order clashes with the traditional left-to-right movement of a page, which is still in play: the first and final rows are not canted into the spiral structure. These two conflicting orders underline the directionless movement of the group’s conversation. In each section of panel we see a different woman speaking of her gendered frustrations, and in the spiraled section these moments overlap each other so that the women’s sentiments cannot be deciphered in full. In other panels, characters trail off in ellipses, such that no thought is closed or resolved, regardless of whether fully spoken on the page. Just like Marrs’s depiction of the women’s self-help group where panels were filled with many voices and bodies, here we see various groupings and conversations afloat as Pudge makes her first introductions. As the panels start to spiral, these voices are fragmented into their own panels, verbalizing their frustrations without any space for real response. In a space outside the tilted panels, Marrs annotates the encounter: “the weeks go on . . . .” What we’re seeing, particularly in the central spiral, is not one consciousness-raising session but many. The women circumnavigate their ideas amid a crowded audience. This sequence acts as a temporal montage fast-forwarding us through Pudge’s first consciousness-raising sessions, underlining her participation and suggesting, with the temporal marker, her potential growth at the sequence’s end.

Since her interactions with the consciousness-raising group occur within the last few pages of the comic, it is not until the second issue that the personal impact on Pudge can be tracked. That is, Pudge, Girl Blimp #2 is the issue in which we can start to see how the seeds of feminism planted in the first comic are starting to shift Pudge’s actions and goals. She continues to interact with the group in scattered moments that punctuate the text, indexing how the group becomes as much of a continual presence in her life as her goal to lose her virginity. When we see Pudge spend extended time with the consciousness-raising group, the formal panel layout begins to spiral once again. Unlike the inside–out spiral of Pudge, Girl Blimp #1 that conflicted with the left-to-right reading of the top panels, this spiral reads outside in, moving more seamlessly from the top row of panels across the page (Figure 2.3).44 Here, rather than indicating multiple sessions, arrows lead the reader through a single spiraling conversation in which the women discuss their anger. Because of the many women in attendance, no one woman can do much more than simply register her anger, suggesting this group as a place to start consciousness-raising but not one that will allow for full processing.

This spiral is simpler—in its specified direction and illustration of one session—yet both spirals mark the women’s space as formally discrete from the rest of the comic. Not only are these spiraling panels distinct, but also, in their troubling of traditional panel layout and subsequent overlapping and simultaneous collapsing of voices and moments, they are destructive to the comics page. While these spirals evoke the psychedelic culture that was often part of the underground scene,45 this sense of disruption also resonates with the notion of écriture feminine, developed contemporaneously in Hélène Cixous’s “The Laugh of the Medusa”: “[Women] take pleasure in jumbling the order of space, in disorienting it, in changing around the furniture, dislocating things and values, breaking them all up, emptying structures, and turning propriety upside down. . . . A feminine text cannot fail to be more than subversive. It is volcanic; as it is written it brings about an upheaval of the old property crust, carrier of masculine investments; there’s no other way.”46 Disorder emanates not just out of the writing, but also out of the women themselves, whose deep conversations jump-start the spirals as they perform the gestures that Cixous enumerates. They rhetorically “jumbl[e] the order of space” by reconsidering their values and reflect on how they have already “empt[ied] structures” through changes instigated in their group discussions. While this “volcanic” force only “brings about an upheaval” of the format of two pages, its energy suffuses the rest of the plot, redirecting Pudge’s focus.47 Not only do these moments of feminist collectivity change Pudge’s trajectory and the ways she eventually achieves her goal, but also the series itself—with a lusty yet conventionally unattractive and unconfident protagonist—challenges a whole subset of misogynist underground comics featuring graphically attractive women drawn for the purposes of objectification in sexual situations. Through these representations, Marrs subtly disrupts the prevailing structures that constrain and contain comics and suggests innovative possibilities for the form and the characters therein.

Moreover, this feminist sensibility shapes how Pudge’s eventual encounters with sexuality are illustrated and how Pudge participates in them outside of the received beliefs with which she begins her narrative. At first, her feminist engagement seems to act as a potential hindrance to her goal, as she rejects the further advances of her first suitor, Jethro, an undercover cop who devalues her as a “suspect” when their vehicular tryst is interrupted by other policemen.48 However, her personal growth in the consciousness-raising group opens Pudge up to a more wide-ranging and satisfying engagement with her sexuality. Her next two partners demonstrate more progressive mindsets: Jane, a lesbian in her consciousness-raising group, and Skeets, a straight male activist. Her sexual connection with these two partners moves beyond the simplistic quest of losing her virginity, and this change underlines her evolving ideas. From her continuing explorations in feminism, she has gained a sense of self-worth and bodily respect for herself and her partners.

Both of these sexual experiences transpire in the third issue. Her encounter with a woman, however, which happens within the first few pages, shapes the arc of the installment, setting the tone for the heterosexual encounters to follow. With Jane, Pudge first experiences an orgasm and, during this shared intimacy, the two women discuss Pudge’s initial, fraught forays with men. For Marrs, lesbian desire nestles comfortably alongside both the feminist movement and heterosexuality and amplifies Pudge’s conceptions of sexuality. In Marrs’s multipage depiction of Pudge’s intimacy with Jane, she shows both women actively exploring the contours of each other’s bodies for the purposes of pleasure.49 Pudge’s experience is especially heightened, likely because this represents her first successful sexual encounter with another person and, therefore, fulfills her goal—albeit not in a manner she could have originally conceived of. When Pudge turns to satisfy Jane, Pudge’s figure occupies most of the panels as we watch her eager and curious face learning how to give pleasure.50 Pudge also dominates the panel space during her own orgasm (Figure 2.4). As Jane disappears, we zoom into a row of three panels that show Pudge’s orgasm as a fire in her loins that races up her body and shoots out the tips of her hair into a star-filled eruption. In the orgasmic moments, bodies dissolve into psychedelic, wavy lines surrounded by stars and curved shapes. When Pudge later sleeps with Skeets on multiple occasions, her pleasures there stylistically echo and thereby refer back to those with Jane.51

While this narrative in three parts begins as a comical, over-the-top sexual conquest, Marrs employs feminism in the form of collectives to nuance Pudge’s trajectory and sexuality. On the very last page of the comic, following her birthday, Pudge thinks forward to her future. Here, she realizes, “I can be anything at all!!” picturing career trajectories in six circular panels that overlap each other and the rectangular panels (Figure 2.5).52 This revelation results from her new progressive politics rather than the loss of her virginity: these realizations forecast career possibilities now open to women because of feminism. The six imagined scenarios not only speak to feminism’s impact on real women, but also open up new narratives for female characters.53 As Pudge raises her consciousness and the series therefore moves away from a misogynistic plot, Pudge’s story can be read both as her personal bildungsroman as well as a treatise to underground comics, entreating change.

The impact of Marrs’s comics can be seen in how they reached a wide audience, who then saved the comics for posterity within collections that became part of archives. Finding Pudge, Girl Blimp in many archival locations, as noted in the previous section, confirmed the breadth of Marrs’s message and how her character’s journey spoke to both the underground and feminism as it critiqued both movements. Reading across archives helped excavate the different stories that Marrs was nesting within her narrative and how her story was received, even if it remained rather marginal to either movement.

Dynamite Damsels: Reckoning with Feminist Rhetoric

On the front cover of Dynamite Damsels, Roberta Gregory positions her comic in relation to watershed moments within the feminist movement. While the front covers of The Further Fattening Adventures of Pudge, Girl Blimp always centrally situate Pudge in the middle of a crowded, countercultural San Francisco milieu that wraps around onto the back cover, Gregory’s protagonist, Frieda, is decentered. Both the front and back covers of Dynamite Damsels illustrate collectives of women representing the feminist movement. The contrasting placements of the protagonists is suggestive of how they encounter and convey feminism to their readers. In Marrs’s story, Pudge is solidly the main character; these are her adventures, and she serves as a node through which we learn not only about feminism but also about other countercultures that crowd around her on the covers. For Gregory’s text, although Frieda is the protagonist, the covers spatially locate feminism as the main character. Frieda changes and grows throughout the narrative, but her transformation simultaneously tells feminism’s story, for which Frieda acts as a filter.

While Pudge, Girl Blimp functions as an introductory primer to feminism, showing how it can positively reshape someone’s experience, Dynamite Damsels speaks to those already in the feminist movement and depicts its shortcomings. Gregory formulates this critique both through the experiences of the characters and how she illustrates those happenings. Like Marrs, Gregory’s pages are dense, but text, rather than bodies, commands space. That is, the women process their feminism through sizable speech and thought bubbles that entangle them and crowd their bodies. Even moments of pleasure are mediated through and curtailed by feminist rhetoric on the page. While feminism provides these women with the initial platform to raise their consciousness, we can see on the page itself how it becomes a stifling force. Together, both comics outline the potential of the feminist movement while also locating in their representations the seeds for change.

By referencing key texts and moments within the feminist movement, Gregory both celebrates and challenges feminism through her irreverent representation. The cover depicts the protagonist dreaming of a group of armored women riding horses and carrying the banner of feminism on shields that show a ♀ with a fist inside the circle (Figure 2.6). This symbol had become an icon of feminist empowerment when it was chosen for the cover of one of the first widely available mass-market anthologies of the women’s liberation movement, Sisterhood Is Powerful (1970), which was edited by Robin Morgan. On both Gregory’s and Morgan’s covers, the centrally located symbol pulsates in red.

In addition to referencing Morgan’s anthology, the cover of Dynamite Damsels inscribes another contemporaneous event. In May 1970 at the Second Congress to Unite Women, a group of lesbians took over the stage prior to the opening session, demanding that lesbianism be accepted by the Congress following Betty Friedan’s recent admonition of lesbians as a “lavender menace.”54 The protesters wore T-shirts bearing the phrase “LAVENDER MENACE” across the bust and held up signs that proclaimed, “THE WOMEN’S MOVEMENT IS A LESBIAN PLOT!”55 This action led to greater lesbian visibility and to the National Organization of Women passing legislation in favor of lesbians in the following year.56 Gregory’s cover humorously revises this key moment in early feminism. As Frieda dreams, her cat Pumpkin stays awake, wondering, “Is the women’s movement really a lesbian plot?” Although the lavender menace succeeded in its immediate goal, Gregory suggests that, over half a decade later, lesbianism’s relationship with feminism remains open to debate by transforming the exclamation into a question silently considered by a cat. By unraveling this query in the narrative, Gregory presciently previews one of the conflicts that would further erode the cohesion of the women’s movement in the 1980s.

The major narrative within the self-published Dynamite Damsels is divided into nineteen vignettes that primarily revolve around Frieda’s sexual awakening and her commitments as a feminist activist, though they sometimes also focus on other key characters.57 Following a couple of prefatory comics, the story begins in the middle of a feminist consciousness-raising session, as Frieda brings a Black woman, Edie, who is interested in joining the group.58 Edie asks about the whiteness of the feminist movement and participates in the session after she’s quickly answered, but there is an uneasiness to this exchange among the members and the group forecloses a fuller consideration of race.59 The women then turn to discuss sex in this and subsequent sessions, so that this vignette, titled “Group Dynamics,” positions sex—not race—as the main vector of interest for this feminist plot.60 The marginalized role of race within this feminist group foreshadows the frictions that Frieda faces as her sexuality shifts, as well as the work that feminists of color would continue to do in the following decade to challenge the perceived centrality of whiteness within the movement, as I discuss in further detail in the chapter on Gloria Anzaldúa.

As the group discusses sex, Frieda, the twenty-three-year-old virgin protagonist, has little to contribute and blushes at her admission of inexperience.61 Three vignettes later, however, Frieda meets Doris, a stereotypical masculine dyke, who jump-starts Frieda’s sexual desires.62 Frieda negotiates her burgeoning sexual feelings through textual rhetoric. As this more prominent text often limits figural representation, much of the comic is told through reactive faces rather than fuller forms. Even moments of intimacy are crowded by sizable speech and thought bubbles, unlike Pudge, Girl Blimp, where text recedes to make space for bodies on the page.

The sheer volume of words on the page becomes stifling when Frieda contemplates her sexual and activist identity while she’s alone in her bed, suffering from sleeplessness in two vignettes aptly titled “Insomnia I” and “Insomnia II.”63 In the first vignette, Frieda names feminism as the reason she cannot sleep, reflecting that she has “so much on [her] mind” now that her consciousness has been raised (Figure 2.7). When she finally falls asleep, a dream of embracing Doris wakes her abruptly and her whole body reveals her feelings as she viscerally reacts: she gasps and trembles, her heart pounds, and her cheeks flush. Her immediate thoughts, “Not again! . . . I gotta stop havin’ those dreams!” disclose that this is not the first time that she’s had this dream; the fact that this comic vignette starts and ends with the same panel reinforces this ceaseless repetition. In the penultimate panel, a dejected Frieda rests her head on her hand, mulling over the implications of this fantasy, first wondering, “Am I O.D.’ing on feminism?” Following thoughts—“Am I carrying it [i.e., feminism] to its logical conclusion?”—corroborate that her politics may have germinated this desire. Yet she manifests discomfort with how these feelings challenge her politics, causing her to ask, “I thought I was open-minded—why, then, can’t I accept my own feelings? Hell!”64 She cannot escape the contradictory considerations that collapse around her; she cannot push them to the side (of the panel). These solitary moments of feminist self-reflection illustrate the feminist battle cry that “the personal is political” by unfurling the political in hefty speech bubbles in the most intimate of spaces, Frieda’s bedroom. In this and her following bout of insomnia, Frieda endeavors to synthesize her feelings and her politics, yet she cannot find any reprieve from the words on the page.

In “Insomnia II,” Frieda experiences broader feminist discontent (Figure 2.8).65 Here, she tallies the difficult economics of being a full-time feminist activist after a tough and demoralizing demonstration. Her textual worries dominate even more of the page space in this second episode. In a close-up panel, Frieda gazes with furrowed brow directly out at the reader, wondering if she could make a difference by “writ[ing] another bookful of rhetoric.”66 In “Insomnia I,” as she attempts to resolve her earlier sleeplessness, she initially turns to her bookshelf but quickly tosses a work of feminism over her right shoulder, deciding, “I don’t want to read any feminist rhetoric right now.”67 Her visceral response to feminism in both “Insomnia I” and “Insomnia II” bespeaks her fatigue with the movement, and the qualifying adjectives “another” and “any” collapse the vibrancy of feminist voices into a dull chain of sameness. Yet this feminism is her life force; through Frieda, rhetoric lives and breathes on these pages.

Is Frieda’s direct gaze in “Insomnia II” as she considers writing a book an autobiographical rupturing of the fourth wall? Is Dynamite Damsels Gregory’s “bookful of rhetoric,” and is that even possible if it’s in comics form? If anything, although Gregory’s comics form is overrun with textual rhetoric, her pages confront these words, illustrating their potential stranglehold on bodies and discourse but also working through this impasse in a different medium that allows body and language to reckon directly with each other. Parsing her life run by feminist rhetoric, Frieda tosses and turns in bed. The comics page heightens this motion by alternately zooming in and out from a variety of angles on her frustrated face. In “Insomnia II,” Frieda tackles her feminism face-to-face (or, rather, face–to–thought bubble), and her circular ruminations achieve forward motion in the following vignette when she admits her lesbian feelings. The vignette, a nocturnal interlude between leading a feminist demonstration and coming out, allows Frieda to relate the tangible issues that undergird her daily existence apart from these climatic instances. In this second bout of insomnia, she faces her feminist hardships before her sexuality propels her into renegotiating the terms of her political engagement.

In her waking life, her commitment to feminism brings her fulfillment, but she also feels compelled to deny her sexual orientation. This strain reaches a breaking point at the center of the narrative during a feminist demonstration that Frieda leads, which is portrayed across three pages in “The Unity Show,” the longest vignette in the comic. This demonstration immediately precedes her second bout of insomnia.68 Before the march begins, Frieda is unabashedly positive, blushing at the thought of the feminist action while clasping her hands and verbalizing, “Sisterhood is beautiful—oh, god, I’m so jazzed—it’s just like the early days of the movement—.”69 Her burgeoning sexual desire prompts her blushing earlier in the narrative, likening it to a joyous postcoital glow. In these panels, she is positively bubbly—gushing, “We gotta get ’em all together an’ then turn ’em into fanatical feminists!”—rather than bothered by any of her insomniac concerns.70 When the march starts, Frieda’s exuberance builds and she proclaims, “It’s beautiful! It’s all beautiful and perfect!” (Figure 2.9).71 Mid-demonstration, her mounting energy climaxes as she floats above the crowd with her arms open and eyes closed, surrounded by stars and ♀s. In the following panel, her fellow feminists gaze on her bliss, confirming the sexual undertones by declaring her “positively orgasmic.”72 This moment represents the first time that Frieda finds release when flushed. At this point, Frieda is still entering into sexual self-knowledge, but she finds equivalent fulfillment through her organizing. Yet, in the following panels, the demonstration takes a turn for the worse as female counterprotesters start to assault Frieda physically. In their accompanying verbal attacks, they notably deride Frieda and her compatriots with stereotypes, saying, “They’re probably all lesbians . . . and know karate!”73 This event crushes Frieda’s spirit, since she tried to play it straight for the purposes of the march and is aware that homophobia is also replicated within her feminist group.

Following this difficult march and the anxiety and agitation of her sleepless night, Frieda comes out as a lesbian, an admission that radically reconfigures her relationship to feminism. Throughout, feminism leaves little space for Frieda’s newfound sexuality, and this is no more evident than when she receives a phone call during an intimate moment. The telephone rings as she is in bed discussing lesbian relationships with Doris and her partner, thinking to herself, “What a beautiful moment—if only it could last forever!”74 The “RING-GG!” splays vertically between panels, viscerally cutting off the intimate exchange from Frieda’s harried conversation about the women’s center in the next panel. Two very different Friedas exist on either side of the ring. By this point in the story, she is fed up with feminism, such that these phone calls are strenuous affairs. The feminism on the phone calls her into unhealthy sacrifice and no longer recognizes her fully. In response to the phone call, she sends Doris, the most visibly lesbian character, in her stead.75 She has already come out to her fellow feminists, but by answering the call with Doris, Frieda learns that they do not embrace her new identity and community as fully as they claim.

The final two pages culminate in a face-off between Frieda’s feminism and her lesbianism through the figure of Doris. When Doris arrives at the women’s center to fill in for Frieda, the women literally shove her into a closet to hide her, not wanting her to appear in a television show they are filming about the center (Figure 2.10).76 Although they do not physically accost Doris, their actions echo those that Frieda suffers at the march, when hateful women try to silence her. When Frieda arrives and learns what has happened to Doris, her response is to quit her work with the women’s center and leave the consciousness-raising group—opting to take time to reassess her own identity, independent of activist work.77

Frieda’s actions are not a full-scale rejection of feminism but a recalibration. Her soul-searching transformation throughout the comic illustrates the malleable mentality that feminism must strive for if it does not want to alienate its lesbian sisters, not to mention women of color. If Pudge, Girl Blimp acts as a treatise to underground comics and feminist newcomers, then Dynamite Damsels is a didactic manual for feminism, depicting methods of alienation to avoid. In the comic’s visuality, Gregory wields feminist rhetoric and associates it with bodies, indexing who commands which rhetorics to both include and exclude.

As with Marrs, how Gregory’s comic exists across archives situates its feminist contributions. Both comics were collected variously and paired with newer comics by women outside of underground collections, which suggests how they inspired and shaped this future work. One surprising archival location of Dynamite Damsels is as one of the earliest artifacts on the online Queer Zine Archive Project, which collects zines that queer people made, starting in the late 1980s through the present. Though the visual style of Dynamite Damsels differs from the DIY aesthetics of many of the zines, which are closer to the look and feel of the Diary and Caught Looking, it echoes the personal nature of many zines and gives insight into lesbian and feminist lives in the 1970s. Because the comic documents not only the feminist movement but also the life experiences of the many women involved, Gregory’s comic adds to the collection’s understanding of the evolving language and everyday histories of queer social movements.

As I will discuss further in the conclusion, both Gregory’s and Marrs’s comics were also collected at the Lesbian Herstory Archives. In addition, a research binder on early lesbian comics put together by photographer Tee Corinne included Gregory’s letters and early comics, revealing the development of her comics feminism.78 All of these details scattered across archives grounded the comics contributions of these women and showed how they were embedded within multiple communities interested in issues of social justice.

Creating Networks for New Generations with Gay Comix

Following these solo works, Gregory and Marrs kept making comics within the underground publishing scene, frequently contributing to the Wimmen’s Comix and Tits & Clits comics series. In these comics, both artists continued to explore themes related to women’s sexuality, but it is their groundbreaking work in the Gay Comix series that would make space for new generations of lesbian and bisexual women cartoonists similarly invested in the project of visually representing women’s sexuality. Gay Comix was notably the first comics series to feature both gay men and lesbians in its pages. The editors aimed to balance that content in addition to seeking out additional representations from across the gender and sexual spectrum. Running for twenty-five issues across two decades, from 1980 to 1998, Gay Comix featured the work of over one hundred artists and served as a launching point for a number of emerging artists. Having a dedicated space where women could explore LGBTQ themes helped facilitate a boom in lesbian comics in the 1990s, as this section illustrates.

Both Marrs and Gregory began participating in the series from its first issue, their contributions solicited by underground cartoonist Howard Cruse, who served as editor of the series for the first four issues. Along with underground veteran Mary Wings, Marrs and Gregory outlined a capacious understanding of female homosexuality in Gay Comix #1 (1980), providing generous groundwork for future artists to examine wide-ranging facets of such experiences. In that initial issue, Marrs and Gregory both produced comics that harked back to their earlier comics yet expanded the narrative exploration of sexuality past the coming-of-age beginnings of Pudge, Girl Blimp and Dynamite Damsels. Their brief comics tackled adult sexuality and showed how sexuality is a fluid, evolving dynamic across many years that can be shaped by the community around you.

With the eight-page “Stick in the Mud,” which opens the volume, Marrs traces the love life of a bisexual woman, Susan, from her early childhood all the way through to domestic bliss with Carol, illustrated in a final panel where the two relax together in rocking chairs on their porch, knitting and discussing upcoming social plans while the cat naps between them (Figure 2.11). Whereas Pudge emerges from her narrative as an eighteen-year-old with an evolved sense of sexuality who contemplates her future career, Susan struggles with her sexuality for years from her adolescence through her adult life. She yo-yos from one failed love to another, cycling through a range of relationship types with lovers of different genders. This nonlinear narrative progression shows Marrs drawing on while simultaneously upending the tropes of the romance comic, a popular midcentury form that narrated how a young woman found fulfilling heterosexual love with one perfect partner.79 Marrs dispenses with the possibility of a traditional heterosexual pairing for her protagonist early on, illustrating the courtship, marriage, and divorce in less than a page, following the depiction of failed female loves and preceding some years of a tumultuous swinging lifestyle. Through subverting the expectations and linearity of the romance comic, Marrs makes visible the romantic difficulties for a person who falls outside of accepted sexual norms; yet, in the ultimate subversion of the genre, she offers up a happy ending where the protagonist finds herself in a stable, committed relationship, but with a woman.

A few stories later in the same issue, Gregory’s five-page piece “Re-Union” starts from a point that coalesces the beginning and ending of Dynamite Damsels, creating a viable lesbian feminist community over the course of the comic. We begin again with a consciousness-raising session, but here, when one woman comes out to the group, not only is she accepted by the group but the comic also traces how this disclosure positively alters the life path for two of her fellow groupmates as they work up the courage to seek female partners also. The comic follows the three women through their love lives until they all bump into one another at a women’s concert six years later. This concert is the realization of lesbian–feminist community that Frieda wasn’t sure was possible when she left her women’s group at the end of Dynamite Damsels (Figure 2.12). Three parallel panels at the end of the comic show each woman impressed by the other two while they reflect on how they’re still figuring out their own life. The wording of each woman’s thought bubble is virtually the same, demonstrating the validity of each path and refusing to judge one woman’s experience as more or less evolved. Gregory’s image for the back cover of that first issue of Gay Comix shares this ethos as she interweaves six scenes of men and women openly expressing and being accepted for their homosexual identities under text that proclaims, “When you’re in love, the whole world is lavender.” In the space of a few pages each, these comics, together with Marrs’s piece, illustrate a multifaceted range of sexual practices and relationship types, opening up the space to tell all sorts of stories of sexuality across the run of the series. Numerous other women soon joined them, inspired by their work here and in subsequent issues.

While Wings and Marrs helped define the developing series in the first several issues, Gregory shaped the voice of the publication over the course of its entire run. Across its twenty-five issues, Gregory was the most frequent female contributor, with pieces in over three quarters of the issues and with half of Gay Comics #21 (1993) devoted solely to her work.80 In addition to influencing the career of Alison Bechdel, as will be discussed in the following chapter, Gay Comix inspired many other women to contribute in subsequent issues, such that the series shifted from portraying the perspectives of veteran underground cartoonists to sharing the work of a younger generation of emerging cartoonists.

This new cohort of lesbian cartoonists included women who would broaden the landscape of lesbian comics in the 1990s with continuing series and collections encompassing strips drawn from their work in Gay Comix as well as from grassroots newspapers and zines. The next most frequent female contributors after Gregory—Jennifer Camper, Leslie Ewing, Joan Hilty, and Andrea Natalie—embody this publishing energy and fashioning of a lesbian comics landscape. Starting with Gay Comix #2 (1981), Camper published in over half the issues of the series, while Ewing, Hilty, and Natalie began participating in the mid to late 1980s with each artist contributing to roughly a quarter of the issues.81 All four artists published in a variety of grassroots periodicals across the nation, but it was the Gay Comix series that brought them together in print, as in Gay Comix #14 (1991), which featured the work of all four artists inside an issue whose fantasy-inspired cover by Gregory depicted a pair of lesbian mermaids, a male faun cavorting with a male centaur, and a lipsticked reptile in dress, heels, wig, and tiara whom a nearby unicorn gazes on quizzically, wondering if she is “a ‘drag’-on queen?” (Figure 2.13).82 All four artists would appear together again in the final issue, Gay Comics #25 (1998), which brought together seventy-six of the contributors from across the series for a last hurrah, but their varied work in the series was in dialogue with a wide array of artists as the editors continued to welcome new voices.83

Not only did their artistic contributions map out new facets of LGBTQ life from their perspectives as women, but Camper, Ewing, Hilty, and Natalie were also actively community-building through the work they took on alongside the comics they created. That is, their additional community work created infrastructure for future cartoonists and also supported larger queer populations. After a decade of publishing mainly one-off strips that demonstrated her interest in representing LGBTQ community as a multifaceted, intersectional space, Camper curated a selection of these works in Rude Girls and Dangerous Women (1994).84 This collection gestured toward her interest in community building, which would later manifest in her editorship of two comics anthologies, Juicy Mother (2005) and Juicy Mother 2 (2007), where she brought together a range of established and emerging queer creators.85 Ewing’s recurring strip “Mid-Dyke Crisis,” which she published both in issues of Wimmen’s Comix and Gay Comix, represented lesbian relationship dynamics in the contemporary moment and often touched on the HIV/AIDS epidemic, echoing her deep involvement in activism. She organized in the late 1980s with the Names Project AIDS Memorial Quilt and continued thereafter to work in the same sector, including for over a decade as the executive director of the Pacific Center, an LGBTQ community organization located in Berkeley, California.86 Following publishing comics about lesbian life and even creating a lesbian superhero team, Hilty turned to work in mainstream comics variously as an editor, writer, and artist and was with DC’s Vertigo imprint when Gay Comics #25 (1998) briefly profiled her career in the history of all contributors to the series they produced especially for the final issue.87 Natalie founded the Lesbian Cartoonists’ Network in 1990, which fostered community for lesbian cartoonists through a newsletter that provided production and publishing resources.88 In addition to this work, she also published a number of collections of her single-panel “Stonewall Riots” comics in the early 1990s as Stonewall Riots (1990), The Night Audrey’s Vibrator Spoke (1992), and Rubyfruit Mountain (1993).89 All these women were also featured in the collection of lesbian comics that Roz Warren edited, Dyke Strippers: Lesbian Cartoonists A to Z (1995).90 Warren saw this volume as one that would gather together lesbian and bisexual cartoonists and make their work more broadly known beyond the “regional gay and lesbian papers” in which they published.91 Over half of the thirty-five women included in Dyke Strippers also published work in the Gay Comix series at one point or another, demonstrating how well the series supported and represented this population.

In creating Gay Comix, editor Howard Cruse built a bridge between the underground and LGBTQ lives, drawing out those artists who had been representing these experiences at the edges of the counterculture and welcoming in artists from elsewhere, including those who had been producing comics in grassroots feminist and gay and lesbian newspapers. Though Pudge, Girl Blimp and Dynamite Damsels may have been outliers in the underground, Marrs and Gregory were central in inspiring future generations of artists in this new context. The capacious vision with which they charted the contours of sexuality in their comics in the underground allowed them to foster an even wider platform of possibility for this comics series. As Cruse wrote at the end of his editor’s note for that initial issue, “There’s more to gay experience than can be chronicled in 36 pages. So this one’s just for starters. Have fun.”92 This sentiment eschews the possibility of being able to definitively represent all facets of same-gender attraction, and similar remarks were found in each subsequent issue, welcoming new participants. The work of the cartoonists further extended that welcome, making good on Cruse’s opening remarks by offering representations that moved beyond stereotypes to delve into nuanced contours of sexual experience.

Archives and Afterlives: Resituating Legacies in Archival Space

Just as the Gay Comix series facilitated community building that accumulated over the course of its two-decade run, so can comics within archives facilitate future community building. In her scholarship, Eichhorn acknowledges how there’s a living presence to activist material within archives being available to resignify and influence future generations of organizers.93 While she shows how these activists can reactivate the content, Sammond further illuminates how grassroots archives themselves can be dynamic participants in this exchange: “Unlike special collections in larger academic institutions, [community archives] may be (with proper support) better situated to engage critically with their own archiving practices, and to adapt them to changing understandings of the nature of the communities they serve.”94 While the following chapter will look across archives in order to theorize a notion of queer comics archives that identifies how comics operate in tandem with the collections that house them and allow us to understand these places anew through this relationship, one story remains here to tell of the shifting space of feminist underground comics. This adaptation that Sammond identifies happened with the comics collection at the Lesbian Herstory Archives since the time that I started researching there several years ago.

When I began my work there, the comics were tucked away on a bookshelf upstairs, but they have since been moved more centrally downstairs. While the constellation of comics together upstairs did illuminate a genealogy of lesbian comics publishing that informs both this chapter and earlier work, the recontextualization of the comics collection opens up even more possibilities.95 The comics now sit on a mobile book cart in the front room where floor-to-ceiling shelves are filled with published lesbian literature.96 This move thereby places the comics in proximity to these literary lineages and suggests that they can perhaps now be understood as part of these feminist genealogies, as they strived for in their time. However, they remain mobile and separate on the cart, acknowledged and visible as their own community rather than subsumed into and lost within a larger whole. This move also acknowledges the import of comics to LGBTQ communities today, as we are currently in the midst of an unprecedented queer comics boom. Because of this popularity, comics that were overlooked in the past, like those of Marrs and Gregory, may have an opportunity to influence new generations of artists in the future.