“Unfortunately there are few women in the history of comics. That’s the reality.” That was the fallacy used by Franck Bondoux, organizer of French comics festival Angouleme, to retroactively justify the lack of female nominees for the fest’s lifetime achievement award. His notion belied not just an oversimplification of an industry—maybe ladies draw today, but not in olden times!—but a deep ignorance of history and culture.
Bondoux’s assumptions are just one reason why The Complete Wimmen’s Comix (Fantagraphics) couldn’t come sooner. In the 1960s and ’70s, female comics artists were turning out pages alongside R. Crumb and Robert Williams, but were alienated by sexism, both on the page and within the culture of underground comics. Wimmen’s Comix was their response—a collectively run feminist alternative comic that ran from 1970 through 1992, in one form or another, with more than 100 contributors.
The new release, edited by Trina Robbins, features all 18 issues from front cover to back. Recurring themes are sexual harassment in the workplace (and liberal hippie spaces); female sexual desire (demonstrating a noticeable difference in how the naked female form is depicted when a man isn’t drawing it); and social double standards. Several comics recount illegal abortions. There’s rich variation in form and style, from artsy exercises to gag comics, autobiography to sci-fi (and a little too much fantasy for my taste…). While some comics veer into feminist clichés (earth goddesses, female utopias), any unapologetic “man-hating” is nothing compared to the sexualized violence toward women that appeared ad nauseam in Zap and Weirdo.