Some of the sharpest wit and comic strips these days is women's work. Kathy Guy's White Draws for every Woman, besieged by the colliding demands of bosses, boyfriends, and a mother who brandishes a copy of Bride's magazine. Lynn Johnston voages her strip in the heat of domestic chaos, and in three short years, the Pattersons of For Better or For Worse have edged out the Bumpsteads as the first family of the funnies for more of the best work in cartoon humor. Our men are making their own work. This was an ad that appeared in newspapers across the US in two advertising the two most prominent women working in comics at that time, Kathy of Kathy and Lynn Johnston of For Better or For Worse with the Universal Press Syndicate one of the most popular comic pages of the day, Accompanying their pictures and sample comic strips. Kathy is shopping for a dress, Johnston's exhausted super mom Ellie Patterson is talking about birthday parties with her kids. And the men making their own mark. Yeah, that's a list of Universal Press indicets other comic strips seventeen of them all written by men representation when Kathy was not the first woman to grace the pages of the Funnies, far from it, but she was certainly held up with others as an example of feminism winning. As we discussed in the last episode, it uh wasn't. But what Cathy's success did demonstrate was that women writing about their own experiences was a winning formula after the Women's liberation movement in the US. This opened doors for artists like Lynn Johnston and many others, a legacy that contributed to the semi autobiographical comic work that's published in papers, but let's be honest, mostly online today. But it's not quite that simple. Women had been writing about their experiences long before Kathy. Their histories are present, but their work wasn't regarded with the same ever rents that the infinity amounts of men in their midst were. And that's what we're exploring today. The women who laid the foundation for Kathy's work to thrive, the radical writers on the fringes working at the same time who were changing the game independently, and the people she shared the Funny Pages with. You mean the men I shared the pages with. Oh my god, Kathy. Well, yeah, like at first, I'm going to talk about the women that came later too. Are you going to talk about dale Bert? I mean, as little as I possibly can, But Kathy, could you give me a second? I can't leave until one of us says a pivvy one liner. Sorry that since they started doing the show, Kathy has just been like appearing to me like a sleep paralysis demon. I'll be falling asleep and then there she is too dimensional at the end of my bed and the dressing room at the mall. A Come on, Kathy, You're more than a dressing room gag. You're better than that. You're right, I'm working on it. Well, I think you're doing great. Sorry, everyone, I just need to like shut my eyes for a few seconds. And then she tends to disappear. Hi hi hi, Hi, Hi Hi, Cathy. Please, I need to start the show. Okay, I think she's gone. This is ac cast. She burst into the world in nineteen seventy six. She's at work, she's out on dates, and she don't like politics from Mama and heurban to with Theminis friends and she's fighting all the stands. It with chocolate and hand Kathy she's fighting back to stress the success. Let's got her some slack. Oh, Cathy, My Cathy and Cathy, She's gotta like go in ay. There's no out that women were always popular in the funny pages, which started around the turn of the twentieth century. The thing is that these characters were overwhelmingly designed, written, and plotted out by men. When comics first came into newspapers in a big way in the early nineties, Characters like We Need the Breadwinner by Martin Branner showed a young woman who worked to support her parents and adopted brothers. Characters like Little Orphan Annie by Harold Gray, one of the most successful comic strip characters ever, began as an anti New Deal and anti Labor Union propaganda character. That's right, Annie is a Jeff Bezos simp. It makes me sick. Blondie was launched in ninety by cartoonist Chick Young, who had gotten successful doing quote unquote pretty girl comics like Beautiful Bab and Dumb Dora. Blondie is still in the papers today and began as a flapper girl who dates and Mary's industrial air dag Wood. By the nineteen eighties. Here's how Blondie sounded in TV specials m Hi, Honey day wood Core and I have just been to a wonderful seminar called how to spend quality time with your husband? And you don't say now, All I need is a quality husband to spend time with. Okay. Some other classic comic strip women Lois of High and Lois created by a man. Betty Boop definitely created by a man, although side note the Betty book character was originally a black woman, but was pretty swiftly whitewashed once she began appearing in papers. The character and Nancy created by men. Broom Hilda created by a man, Betty Veronica man. And while some of these women and girls were funny and dynamic, Nancy was a trickster, wonder woman beat the hell out of people. Many of the women who appeared in the funnies in this era were defined by their roles as wives, mothers, and girlfriends, or the fact that they were not these things as in early Winny winky strips was the whole joke. They were all white, well, Broomhilda was green, and most were linked to men in the nuclear American home in some way. And again, comic books are out of my purview here, so we're sticking to the American newspaper pages. So yes, there were many women drawn on the pages, but rarely were they drawn by women. But that's not to say that women were completely absent from comic strips. Here are some of the creators who paved the way for our Kathy. Oh and also who will not be speaking for a couple of minutes. Okay. Like the messy and choppy American feminist movements we discussed last week, women's presence and the funny pages tended to fluctuate throughout the twentieth century, and in its early years women were relatively successful in the space. Some women were introduced into the industry by working on a team with their significant other. This was a pretty common practice in the creative arts in general, but others busted onto the scene completely on their own. Blondie is the most famous example, but flappers had a major presence in comics, with creators who were women of the time as well. Cartoonist Ethel Hayes created Flapper Fannie, in which cartoonist Gladys Parker took over later in its run, and Parker went on to launch her own clothing line in a brief career as a Hollywood costumer. Off of the strip's success, Ethel Parker also made a strip called Gay in Her Gang in Night, and Anita Lows, who had already made history as the first woman to be a contracted screenwriter back in nineteen twelve Titanic Gear, wrote the successful graphic novel Gentleman Prefer Blonde, which was later turned into the famous Marilyn Monroe vehicle. But the earliest ancestor I can find to a Kathy style cartoon is an artist named Fay King. Fay King wasn't the first woman to become an editorial cartoonist in the US. That distinction belongs to Edwina dum who became a full time cartoonist in nineteen fifteen, but King's style and references to her own life kind of remind me of a nineteen twenties era. Kathy King was born in eighteen eighty nine in Portland, Oregon. She went to college. She was one of the first women to own a car in her area, and she had a highly publicized marriage and divorce with a famous Danish lightweight boxer. He had five times fast Oh my god, famous Danish lightweight boxer, and she worked as a feature writer and cartoonist for a few different newspapers. Even more so than Kathy Guys White and the Kathy character whose lives are tangentially related at best. Fay King was usually the main character in her comics, and she frequently made strips that featured herself and her husband, and later on veiled commentary when that marriage ended. You know, the marriage to the famous Danish lightweight boxer. These depictions of her and the people in her life were not always flattering. We see fay King draw on often as a nervous wreck and her husband as a bizarre, macho womanizer. She was a flapper who, if you remember, was working at the height of the suffragette movement and with continued success after women's suffrage was granted in Here are some of the headlines that fay King's work would generate in the twenties. Judgment by their past wives, fay King advises flappers girls who married guys twice their age, would do well to consult other women they wooed one and then cast off. Women now read newspapers, fake King observes wow. Unlike characters like Blondie, a flapper whose experience was manufactured by chick young fay Kings. Flappers came from a personal place and were often just her life. In the twenties, King worked among a number of talented women, including illustrators like Nell Brinkley, Eleanor Shuer, Edith Stevens, Ethel Hayes, Dorothy if and Virginia Hugett. Here's a quote from a comic historian and an artist in her own right, so legendary that I've got an entire section on her later in this episode. Her name is Trina Robbins, and she literally wrote a book on this era in women's comics called The Flapper Women Women Cartoonists of the jazz Age, And an interview with bust she said this, there's this myth that women didn't draw comics, or that they had to change their names. This is untrue. If you were good, they published you. Women were drawing comics and people loved them, just as many women read newspapers as men, and the editors were smart enough to carry the strips the women liked. Nel Brinkley was a major leader in this time as well, creating the young, working, attractive suffragist illustrated ideal through a character style that became known as Brinkley Girls, and she wrote some of the most overtly feminist comic strips of the time. In a strip called Dimple's day Dreams, a flapper named Dimple would fantasize about becoming the president, or an aviator or a chorus girl, things that weren't attainable at that time. Virginia Hugett's work centered on girls from working class backgrounds, and she made strips like Molly the Manicure Girl or Babs in Society, a strip about a shop girl who suddenly inherits a massive fortune. And what was more, this community of women comic artists knew and liked each other. Brinkley and King would often draw each other and took turns doing illustrations in court at the highly publicized case of the Albert Snyder murder, which I could make an entire podcast about what a Wikipedia rabbit hole, And instead of focusing on the murder victim, the husband, Brinkley and King of course drew the murderer Ruth his wife. It's all very cool. Moving right along onto the comics of the Depression and World War Two era. Unlike the early days of flappers and first wave feminism. Most of the women appearing on the funny pages at this time were created by men and tended to fall into predictable categories. You recognize these the lionized mother, the heavily sexualized loose girl, and the occasional film fatale professional. My favorite of these was a character called Brenda's Star. It was a strip that followed the soap opera e story of a reporter named Brenda Starr who had this wild romantic life and would solve crimes. It was originally conceived by a male artist, Dale Messick, but was soon taken up by women until its conclusion in two thousand eleven, and even inspired a B movie featuring the character starring Brookshields back in the nineties. She's much more than a woman, much more than your average reporter. Give me the White House, please, much more than any man good handle they want you. And just as many of the mainstream feminist movements were gate kept by race, women who were given a platform in the early comic strip days were overwhelmingly white, with some exceptions. Enter Jackie ORMs. Jackie ORMs was born in nineteen eleven grew up in the Chicago suburbs and went on to become the first black woman to be a nationally syndicated comic artist, writing a number of popular strips over her career. Because of the deeply normalized segregation in the US throughout her life, Orms's work appeared primarily in black newspapers, most prominently The Pittsburgh Courier and the Chicago Defender. Her work gained a huge following and was said to reach over one million people a day. Lankston Hughes even once said in the late forties that quote, if I were marooned on a desert island, I would miss Jackie Orms's cute drawings. That's so cool. Her first strip in nineteen thirty seven and thirty eight was called Torchy Brown in Dixie to Heart, and it was the story of a teenager from Mississippi who became famous singing at the Cotton Club, which was a nightclub in Harlem that ran in the nine twenties and thirties that ended up launching the careers of many famous black performers while still being operated under Jim Crow's segregation laws. That is, it was at first a whites only and later a segregated club. Torchy was a hit with readers immediately, and the character made a huge comeback in the nineteen fifties with Torchy and Heartbeats, where Jackie ORMs updated the protagonists as an adventurous young woman who dates around in search of true love while pursuing her dreams. Most famously, Torchy had a storyline in nineteen fifty four where she and her boyfriend, a doctor in a predominantly black neighborhood, talked about how environmental racism affected his patients after waste from a local chemical plant began to leak into the local water supply. In the studio of Jackie Arms, one of the few women cartoonists, the popular comic strip characters of Torchy and Heartbeat and Patty Joe literally spring to life. Syndicated in scores of news papers, her cartoons reached more than a million raiders each week. Torchy became a fashion icon, and not by mistake. Alongside the comic strip that ORMs drew, would often be a paper doll model of Torchy with several outfits, giving young black women an outlet with which to see themselves in the fashions of the day and act out their own stories with the paper. Doll Ormes's most famous work was called Patty Joe and Ginger, a comic strip that ran from to nineteen fifty six and consisted of two black sisters, one a chatty kid and the other a tall, lean teenager. The format was very simple, and each one panel strip, Patty Joe the kid, would make a comment about modern life to her sister Ginger, who never spoke. Depending on the occasion, Ginger reacted with shock, or annoyance, or tenderness to whatever Patty Joe sets through. Patty Joe Jackie ORMs was able to use an innocuous, seeming kids Say the Darndest Things format to launch biting commentary on the oppression experienced by Black Americans of this time. ORMs this strip, from the day after the white murderers of young Black boy Emmett till We're Found Not Guilty in has been cited as one of the most important works in the strips run. In it, Patty Joe stands in the kitchen doorway as the ever silent Ginger hides a newspaper with the news of the not guilty verdict hidden behind her back. Patty Joe says I don't want to seem touchy on the subject, but that new little white tea kettle just whizzled at me. Patty Joe was very much the star here, and it led to one of the most successful comic strip merchandising moves in the early history of comics, and a very important one in addition to the Patty Joe paper dolls that appeared alongside the strip. Much like Torchy, Jackie ORMs oversaw the release of a Patty Joe doll between nine in ninety nine that gave young black girls a toy of the character that many modeled their behavior on. In a toy market where very often the only representations of Black women and girls relied heavily on Mammy stereotypes, the Patty Joe doll was a big deal, and ORMs oversaw the production herself. The sharp commentary that ORMs made in her work didn't come without consequences. The powers that be viewed her very much as a threat. According to Matthew Tuche at the African American Intellectual History Society, the FBI had a file on Jackie ORMs that went from nineteen forty eight to nineteen fifty eight. At the height of the Red Scare, the agency interviewed her, and agents would sometimes come to follow her to the bookstore she frequented in not just a stunning waste of government funds, but an attempt to establish a connection between ORMs and the communist part. Her FBI file was two hundred and eighty seven pages long, longer than Jackie Robinson's file by over a hundred pages, which brings me to this panel of Patti, Joe and Ginger from the period that ORMs was under surveillance. It would be interesting to discover which committee decided it was Unamerican to be black. This strip, of course, is a reference to the House of Unamerican Activities Committee during the Red Scare, and it makes sense why this committee was on Jackie Orms's mind in particular. ORMs retired from cartooning in ninety six, was a founding board member of the Disabled Museum of African American History, and was a longtime member of an antique doll enthusiast club in Chicago. Her legacy continues now through the ORMs Society, an online collective that promotes black women in the comics industry. Another icon of the Depression era, was an artist named Marge Buell. She worked professionally just as Marge Love, a mononymous artist. Very confident. Marge was born on a farm in nineteen o four. She worked her way up in the industry as a magazine illustrator and started the beloved strip Little Lulu in nineteen thirty five, about a young girl who's known for challenging boys to prove that she can do anything they can. The comic only ran for ten years, but You'll set the stage for women to merchandise the hell out of their most popular characters. As Kathy Leader Would, Lulu outlived the strip through merchandizing, through cartoon shorts in the nineteen forties, through an anime in the nineteen seventies, through an HBO animated series in the nineties. Like Kathy Leader Would, Lulu was also used heavily in American commercials. She was a spokes cartoon for Kleenex, tissues for Pepsi, and she was featured in a permanent Time Square billboard for over ten years. Yet Clean Next tissues in the economy Back and to Jeff any tissue You'll never and back for the new pack of clean Up four hundred gives more more for your money than ever before. Like Kathy guys White would be later, Marge was heavily involved in the marketing of her character, and it paid off in a huge way. She sold off the copyrights to Lulu in nineteen seventy one, doing very well for herself. Little Lulu would go on to inspire Friends of Lulu, a nonprofit that ran from eleven to promote comic books by women and to get girls involved in making comics themselves. The nineteen forties also brought a series of successful strips about teenage girls, lining up pretty closely with the explosion in marketing to American teenagers, and these strips tend to be pretty lighthearted and mostly about teen girls pining over teen boys in strips like Lynda Walter's Susie Q. Smith, which she wrote with her husband, and Hilda Terry's Tina and Hilda. Terry fought very hard to be the first woman to be accepted into the National Cartoonist Society and was finally successful in nineteen fifty one. Nineteen fifty one, there was also wartime propaganda comic strips. Gladys Parker, who had been working back since the Flapper strips in the nineteen twenties made the comic Betty g I to inspire women to get involved in American war efforts, and then went on to create a semi autobiographical comic called Mopsi in ninety nine. Mopsy was a protagonist that was an absolute dead ringer for Gladys Parker herself, in a move that mirrored many American women's experiences in World War Two. Mopsie worked as a munitions plant worker and a nurse in the comic strip and then was fired from her defense job in nineteen seven and had to leave the workforce d pressing. However, you should google a picture of Gladys Parker. She's I think my new style icon. She's incredible. The nineteen fifties was not a good time for honestly, anybody, really, anybody who wasn't a white guy in America, and women's presence in the funny pages dipped. In their place came the Donna redified domestic goddesses that exemplified the indoctrination that set the stage for Betty Free Dance, the feminine mystique to become such a hit among white middle class housewives who had been pushed out of the workforce after the war ended. You've got Lois of High and Lois a suburban housewife. You've got flow from Andy Capp, the long suffering wife who deals with her husband's womanizing and excess drinking like it's her job, which it kind of was. And into the sixties, as the civil rights movement and social unrest surrounding the Vietnam War dominated headlines, not much of this was reflected in the funny pages. For the most part, the medium was stuck about ten years in the past in the comic strips that took awards home at the Alley Awards for comics were Peanuts by Charles Schultz, a soap opera strip called on Stage by Leonard Starr, and Dennis the Menace, not exactly strips that reflected social progress, radicalism, or gains made by these movements, and that applied to the feminist movement as well. But when the newspapers wouldn't carry the radical messaging of the time, a bunch of women decided to do it themselves, enter the underground comics movement. Well, the newspaper pages lagged far behind the times in the fifties into the sixties, and seventies. Prior to Kathy, Beginning in ninety six, another comic scene was thriving, that being underground comics, comics with two MS and an AX by the way, a scene that was very vibrant in the US and the UK. For as long as there had been illustrated comics, there had been poorn knockoffs of comic book characters, but in the late sixties, illustrators began to organize, independently, publish, and create their own X rated characters. They're basically the edge lords of the late sixties, very much a part of the sex, drugs, and rock and roll era with its start in the early sixties with stuff like Stacts Adventures of Jesus. The big thing about underground comics was that they were completely uncensored. Are Crumb, one of the most prominent artists of this movement, spoke to what the scene meant in an interview from He said this, people forget that. That's what it was all about. That's why we did it. We didn't have anybody standing over us saying no, you can't draw this or you can't show that. We could do whatever we wanted, and so they did whatever they wanted. Centered in the San Francisco area. At the height of free Love, Crume and Company started a number of self published comics issues full of truly some of the most fucked up things You'll ever see in your life. ZAP Comics, a project helmed by Our Crumb, became a flagship publication for the movement and launched a number of artists after getting get start sold on the sidewalk of Hate Ashbury out of a baby stroller by Crumb's then wife. So yeah, these were the edge lords of the sixties and seventies. The comics were shock, talking hard, and not in the way that all radical artists liked. The movement was built around drawing and saying whatever you want and consisted of almost completely white guys. Artist Grass Green was one of the only black artists involved in underground comics, and so that meant that sometimes they were just saying funked up stuff for the sake of saying fucked up stuff. And the comics from these majority male collectives would often feature themes like incest, murder, rape, and pretty aggressive able is um and you guess it, misogyny ran rampant. This brings us back to Trina Robbins, the world's leading historian and women comics artist, who was also at the helm of creating space for women in the underground comics movement. Robbins didn't want to get involved in zap comics. She wanted to start her own thing, and this was a fairly controversial move. Robbins said this of our Crumb's work. It's weird to me how willing people are to overlook the hideous darkness in Crumb's work. What the hell is funny? Ab out rape and murder? And this resistance made a lot of sense for the time. By the late sixties, the second wave of feminism was well underway in the US, and by vent, Trina Robbins had had enough of the misogyny in existing underground comics. After meeting fellow cartoonist Barbara Willie Mendez, the two decided to make their own comics and recruited other women to do it with them, artists like Meredith Kurtzman, the daughter of Mad magazine creator Harvey Kurtzman, like Carol Kaylish, like socialist cartoonist Lissa Lions, and Michelle Brand to make the first issue ever of women's underground comics. Called it Ain't Me Babe. Here's an interview Robin's did in about her motivation to start comics of her own. I mean, for the longest time, if you wanted to draw comics, you really had two choices. One was mainstream and mainstream you know, the big two, Marvel and DC was all about guys punching other guys. You know, That's basically what it was about. And this isn't something that women and I don't awful autaman to, This isn't something we want to draw, This isn't even something we can draw. You know, I'm not very good at guys punching each other. It's not what I do. And they but the other alternative was the Underground. But the Underground was completely male dominated mail and and it was all about sex and drugs and rock and roll, and you know, the sex part was extremely misogynists towards women. It was all male gaze and male viewpoint. So there was until Babe, until It Ain't Me Babe, there was nothing really for women. So suddenly we had another kind of comic with another kind of contributors. And the cover of It Ain't Me Babe does not shy away from iconic women of the funniest pages. It references them explicitly. The cover has Olive Oil Popeye, it has Wonder Women, It has Little Lulu from Marge member Her. It has Mary Marvel, She and a Queen of the Jungle, and Elsie the Cow, who I guess was a mascot for a dairy company. And these characters are all charging together with their fists raised and furious in solidarity. The cover reads it ain't Me Babe, Women's Liberation, and the contents are much the same. The majority see women reimagining themselves as the centered parties in fables and fantasy stories and even Sunday funnies. My favorite one of these is called Breaking Out. Artist Carol Kalish imagines the existing women in the comics banding together for world domination. Little Lulu decides to stop trying to prove to boys that she's worthwhile and strike out on her own. Supergirl gets sick of Superman's condescension. Veronica realizes that Betty is far more important to her than Archie. Petunia Pig tells Porky to cook his own dinner, and they all strike out on their own to create a women's only clubhouse. It holds Up It Ain't Me Babe was a huge success, selling over forty copies from an independent printer. So early on, Trina Robbins was rightfully confident that there was a whole market for women in the underground, and two began a longer sustaining project, Women's Comics, spelled w I M M E N. In the first issue alone, Women's Comics addresses teenage abortion, female masturbation, leaving an abusive marriage, leaving a job where a woman is being sexually harassed, and one written by Robbins herself called Sandy Comes Out, which was one of the first lesbian coming out stories and comics ever. Because they were uncensored, these strips are deeply unapologetic. Women's Comics had no interest in engaging in both sides is um, and they feature women who take radical views without explaining or apologizing. You don't like that they don't want an abortion, Okay, oh well, you don't like that she wants to leave her husband, leave her job. Isn't straight? The collection offers no explanation and no apologies. A number of women whose work appeared in the pages of Women's Comics went on to have pretty impressive careers. And there was Lee Mars, who began as an assistant on comics like Little Orphan, Annie High and Lois and Prince Valiant, who went on to create her own radical works that embraced body positivity and queerness through her strip called Pudge Girl Blimp from nineteen seventy three to seventy seven. There was Aileen Kominski, who did a comic about an insecure, misfit masturbaiter called Goldie Neurotic Woman. There was Diane Newman, creator of the violent and impulsive icon D D. Glitz. There was Sharon Rudol, who went on to write the graphic novel biographies of famous political activists. And this was a roster that grew with each passing issue. And once again, while the collection grew more diverse in including more queer women, later in his run, it remained overwhelmingly white. A lot of these comics can't really be done justice here. What you need to know is that they were unapologetic, edgy, sometimes in the right direction, that sometimes in a direction that very much doesn't age well. They were explicit, and they were touching on women's issues that would have been virtually impossible to do in the funny pages that they were commenting on and sometimes directly parodying. What you also need to know is that the politics of the era and the fact that there is a majority of white CIS authors means that there are many comic strips that other non white or non SIS women in a way that is offensive. The comic was designed to provide opportunities to women as time went on. The collection was not just a platform these ideas, but to provide opportunities to women comic artists as time went on, making point to cycle out the editors regularly to ensure that new artists and ideas and issues would be introduced. In the nineteen seventy three issue, editor Lee Mars explains what Women's Comics is about. The Anthology of Women Cartoonists is intended to give support and encouragement for aspiring women cartoonists throughout the country. We have no desire to be an exclusive, divisive or female chauvinist group, of fear, some of our friends have expressed. We do hope that publication of high quality beginning work will give our womenist artists a chance to be seen and a foothold in the industry based on their talents of mind, hand and eye, rather than more traditionally requested parts of their anatomy, and provide good comic entertainment for all. Women's comics also drew a clear line between the radicals that appeared in their pages and the more liberal American feminists women who are associated with the now the National Organization Women or MISS magazine, as edited by Glorious Steinham. Women's comics had an issue with MISS magazine, specifically after the comics were refused ad space in the feminist magazine Long story Short. For a time, MISS Magazine was, according to Trina Robbins, too afraid to have their magazine pulled from the shelves for quote unquote advertising pornography, and the artists of women's comics were rightfully piste. Miss would later reverse this decision, but come on, Steinham. Here's one of my favorites from women's comics in nineteen seventy three, in a strip called Reactionary Comics by Marjorie pachet Sky. The conversation is between two women. Oh. It says here that um men are becoming quite enthusiastic about women's lib Don't I know it? Mine just liberated me by taking up with that redhead who runs the food co op. But I'm supposed to have his dinner ready whenever he shows up. Yeah, come to think of it, mine sits at home while I go to work, and they still won't lift a finger when it comes to doing housework. I pay his rent. I'm not going to wash his socks too. We could pick up a couple of losers, but the swing is around here is solo grade. They'd probably try and snatch our purses. And when you do get down to the nitty gritty, everyone is so liberated that there's not a bit of affection, not to mention plain old manners. Well, we could get liberated all the way. I read this article in the New Cosmo, The Lesbian Experience. You're a great kid and everything, but I sort of had something in mind with great, big arms to put around me. This character has a thought bubble where she's thinking of a completely erect penis. The other character replies, sigh, we might as well go to the laundry room with burno bras. When we get done, it'll be time to watch Mary Tyler Moore right on, Sister not bite my ass. This trip embodies the early issues of women's comics for me. It features two women talking in a pretty dated way about their frustrations. They have interesting talking points. They're resenting how women's liberation had been intended to free them of the demands that men put upon them, but instead empowered men to ask more of them. Now that they have jobs, why not pay his rent and cook his food. Similar topics are explored in the early days of the Kathy comics in the nineteen seventies, where men asked Kathy to pay the check as some sort of proof of her own liberation. It's not an acknowledgement, it's a challenge. In nineteen seventy five, Alien Kaminsky and Diane Newman departed the collective due to differences in opinions on both feminism and Trina Robbins ongoing criticism of Our Crumb, who Kaminsky was in a relationship with and is still married to today. Kaminsky and Newman started a separate women driven comics collective called Twisted Sisters that ran from nineteen seventy six to ninety four and featured pretty significant crossover with artists who appeared in women's comics well. This came out of an in ternal conflict. This meant that the community had actually expanded and began to provide even more opportunities for aspiring artists. However, while women's Comics and Twisted Sisters were doing what quite literally no one else was at this time, and this space was very hard one, having been created outside of the male dominated underground comics movement that was sometimes actively hostile to them. The issues that exist and are explored in women's comics are the same ones that surrounded the second wave feminist movement at large. Women's comics, while increasingly inclusive as time went on, remained overwhelmingly white for the duration of its run, and while women of color were included in the collections fairly often, they were more often than not written by white artists. In many cases, particularly early in women's comics run, white women draw and write black and brown characters as other whether it be playing into tired exotic stereotypes of Asian and African women to set up a narrative where white women dominate or escape Western white patriarchy, or by using non white women as side characters with no purpose but to serve as plot set up for white protagonists. In the Western world and especially interesting issue came in nineteen where women's comics observed the bi centennial of America by using women's stories and their historical erasure to tell the nationalistic display of this year to fuck off. On the cover is Betsy Ross wearing a soldier's uniform and holding a gun, but still being handed the fabric for the American flag by a general. Can you have it ready by next week? He asks? Indigenous women are acknowledged in this issue, although as far as I could tell, no Indigenous cartoonists contributed. Queen Lilio Collani and Harriett Tubman were celebrated the Salem which trials were addressed. The first woman to run for president was spotlighted. The list goes on. These themed issues became a feature of the collection. We saw the work issue, the fashion issue, the occult issue, the three D issue, I Kid you Not The book came with three D glasses and gave me a my grain. There was also the child Psychology issue that explored how girls are socially conditioned to accept a whole lot of ship. Another standout was the Men's issue, in which women artists put the let's say female gazed on issues of masculinity. Here's one last favorite of mine from the nine Horrible Relationships issue from Angela Bocage. Titled New Age, Same Old Ship. It parodies a shock jock radio show that shows how women have handled domestic abuse from their partners throughout the years. It starts with a woman from eight with a big smile and a black eye, saying this, it really was thoughtless of me, even at our family meals. I knew he wanted the plates warmed, so when I forgot when Chuck's boss was at dinner, well maybe I was asking for this, but I can't even see it, can you. I like these new makeup formulas today they do cover We hear similar phrases from different women from n N. The final woman in the strip is from and stands with a fat lip, smiling in front of a cooing baby in a high chair. She says, this, Gerald a model husband. In so many ways. You can get really stressful around here for someone who's used to an optimal office environment. And if that gets to Gerald sometimes and he acts out, well, when you consider I had a better chance of getting killed by terrorists and getting married much less to a guy with a job, well, the bottom line is I created this reality. I take responsibility for my life, even forgetting battered, and I feel damned bloody. That terrorist statistic she's referring to is totally bogus, and the author knows it. She includes a parenthetical saying that quote. This dubious statistic was actually reported in one of the USA's bougies newsies to scare eighties spinsters. Unquote. That bougie newsy was Newsweek. That dubious statistic was from a study that claimed that women over forty had less than a three percent chance of getting married. As they put it, it was more likely a woman of that age would be killed by a terrorist than be married. This stat was repeated ad nauseam and had a hold on the culture for some time, even though it was completely fake. I remember it most clearly appearing in Sleepless in Seattle. To conclude the comic strip, the host of the fake shock Jock radio show returns and says, this, okay, lots of you got it on the nose, so to speak. Betty, Shadow, Shock Treat, and Cathy all died of injuries. So remember, get hit, get out. This is women's comics and the underground movement at its best edgy and shocking, but also with a clear perspective and purpose. I'm very glad that these collections were made and think that their legacy is still felt today. By over financial struggles and internal issues, the comics stopped publishing. So no, Kathy guys White was far from the first woman to work in comics in a major way and never claimed to be. And maybe you've heard about some of the women in this episode before. Maybe you haven't, but it's clear that the Jackie ORMs is of the world. The fay Kings, the women whose work thrived in their day in spite of pop culture history at large letting them fall to the wayside in favor of their white male cohort, were important and warrant continued discussion. The last handful of years have brought marginalized people erased from history back into focus, and the comics industry should be a part of this discussion. Basically, what I'm saying is, give me my Jackie ORMs biopic yesterday. In part two of this episode, will be looking at four comic artists working at the same time as Kathy guys White, Alison Bechdel, Gary Trudeau, Aaron McGrew r and Lynn Johnston artists who, like Kathy, took some risks and the way that the culture responded to those risks is telling. That's coming up Wednesday on ac Cast. Oh Jesus passed the Lane cuisine. Let's just eat chocolate, dude, And before we go, I wanted to add a maya culpa to our last episode. I quoted a writer named Robin Morgan, who a listener graciously informed me is a notorious transphobe. I was not aware. I feel very foolish for not knowing, and I apologize for the oversight and anyone that it may have upset. Fuck that at Cast is an I Heeart radio production hosted, written, and researched by me Jamie Loftus. The show is executive produced by the wonderful Sophie Lichterman, edited by the wonderful Isaac Taylor. Music is from Zoey Blade and the slapper of a theme comes from Brad dick Art. Voices you heard today include my Mommy, Joel Smith, not my my mom, Comma Joel Smith. Joel Smith is not my mom. It would be cool. Also Caitlin Toronte and Jackie Michelle Johnson as Kathy, see you Wednesday,

Some of the sharpest wit and comic strips these days is women's work. Kathy Guy's White Draws for every Woman, besieged by the colliding demands of bosses, boyfriends, and a mother who brandishes a copy of Bride's magazine. Lynn Johnston voages her strip in the heat of domestic chaos, and in three short years, the Pattersons of For Better or For Worse have edged out the Bumpsteads as the first family of the funnies for more of the best work in cartoon humor. Our men are making their own work. This was an ad that appeared in newspapers across the US in two advertising the two most prominent women working in comics at that time, Kathy of Kathy and Lynn Johnston of For Better or For Worse with the Universal Press Syndicate one of the most popular comic pages of the day, Accompanying their pictures and sample comic strips. Kathy is shopping for a dress, Johnston's exhausted super mom Ellie Patterson is talking about birthday parties with her kids. And the men making their own mark. Yeah, that's a list of Universal Press indicets other comic strips seventeen of them all written by men representation when Kathy was not the first woman to grace the pages of the Funnies, far from it, but she was certainly held up with others as an example of feminism winning. As we discussed in the last episode, it uh wasn't. But what Cathy's success did demonstrate was that women writing about their own experiences was a winning formula after the Women's liberation movement in the US. This opened doors for artists like Lynn Johnston and many others, a legacy that contributed to the semi autobiographical comic work that's published in papers, but let's be honest, mostly online today. But it's not quite that simple. Women had been writing about their experiences long before Kathy. Their histories are present, but their work wasn't regarded with the same ever rents that the infinity amounts of men in their midst were. And that's what we're exploring today. The women who laid the foundation for Kathy's work to thrive, the radical writers on the fringes working at the same time who were changing the game independently, and the people she shared the Funny Pages with. You mean the men I shared the pages with. Oh my god, Kathy. Well, yeah, like at first, I'm going to talk about the women that came later too. Are you going to talk about dale Bert? I mean, as little as I possibly can, But Kathy, could you give me a second? I can't leave until one of us says a pivvy one liner. Sorry that since they started doing the show, Kathy has just been like appearing to me like a sleep paralysis demon. I'll be falling asleep and then there she is too dimensional at the end of my bed and the dressing room at the mall. A Come on, Kathy, You're more than a dressing room gag. You're better than that. You're right, I'm working on it. Well, I think you're doing great. Sorry, everyone, I just need to like shut my eyes for a few seconds. And then she tends to disappear. Hi hi hi, Hi, Hi Hi, Cathy. Please, I need to start the show. Okay, I think she's gone. This is ac cast. She burst into the world in nineteen seventy six. She's at work, she's out on dates, and she don't like politics from Mama and heurban to with Theminis friends and she's fighting all the stands. It with chocolate and hand Kathy she's fighting back to stress the success. Let's got her some slack. Oh, Cathy, My Cathy and Cathy, She's gotta like go in ay. There's no out that women were always popular in the funny pages, which started around the turn of the twentieth century. The thing is that these characters were overwhelmingly designed, written, and plotted out by men. When comics first came into newspapers in a big way in the early nineties, Characters like We Need the Breadwinner by Martin Branner showed a young woman who worked to support her parents and adopted brothers. Characters like Little Orphan Annie by Harold Gray, one of the most successful comic strip characters ever, began as an anti New Deal and anti Labor Union propaganda character. That's right, Annie is a Jeff Bezos simp. It makes me sick. Blondie was launched in ninety by cartoonist Chick Young, who had gotten successful doing quote unquote pretty girl comics like Beautiful Bab and Dumb Dora. Blondie is still in the papers today and began as a flapper girl who dates and Mary's industrial air dag Wood. By the nineteen eighties. Here's how Blondie sounded in TV specials m Hi, Honey day wood Core and I have just been to a wonderful seminar called how to spend quality time with your husband? And you don't say now, All I need is a quality husband to spend time with. Okay. Some other classic comic strip women Lois of High and Lois created by a man. Betty Boop definitely created by a man, although side note the Betty book character was originally a black woman, but was pretty swiftly whitewashed once she began appearing in papers. The character and Nancy created by men. Broom Hilda created by a man, Betty Veronica man. And while some of these women and girls were funny and dynamic, Nancy was a trickster, wonder woman beat the hell out of people. Many of the women who appeared in the funnies in this era were defined by their roles as wives, mothers, and girlfriends, or the fact that they were not these things as in early Winny winky strips was the whole joke. They were all white, well, Broomhilda was green, and most were linked to men in the nuclear American home in some way. And again, comic books are out of my purview here, so we're sticking to the American newspaper pages. So yes, there were many women drawn on the pages, but rarely were they drawn by women. But that's not to say that women were completely absent from comic strips. Here are some of the creators who paved the way for our Kathy. Oh and also who will not be speaking for a couple of minutes. Okay. Like the messy and choppy American feminist movements we discussed last week, women's presence and the funny pages tended to fluctuate throughout the twentieth century, and in its early years women were relatively successful in the space. Some women were introduced into the industry by working on a team with their significant other. This was a pretty common practice in the creative arts in general, but others busted onto the scene completely on their own. Blondie is the most famous example, but flappers had a major presence in comics, with creators who were women of the time as well. Cartoonist Ethel Hayes created Flapper Fannie, in which cartoonist Gladys Parker took over later in its run, and Parker went on to launch her own clothing line in a brief career as a Hollywood costumer. Off of the strip's success, Ethel Parker also made a strip called Gay in Her Gang in Night, and Anita Lows, who had already made history as the first woman to be a contracted screenwriter back in nineteen twelve Titanic Gear, wrote the successful graphic novel Gentleman Prefer Blonde, which was later turned into the famous Marilyn Monroe vehicle. But the earliest ancestor I can find to a Kathy style cartoon is an artist named Fay King. Fay King wasn't the first woman to become an editorial cartoonist in the US. That distinction belongs to Edwina dum who became a full time cartoonist in nineteen fifteen, but King's style and references to her own life kind of remind me of a nineteen twenties era. Kathy King was born in eighteen eighty nine in Portland, Oregon. She went to college. She was one of the first women to own a car in her area, and she had a highly publicized marriage and divorce with a famous Danish lightweight boxer. He had five times fast Oh my god, famous Danish lightweight boxer, and she worked as a feature writer and cartoonist for a few different newspapers. Even more so than Kathy Guys White and the Kathy character whose lives are tangentially related at best. Fay King was usually the main character in her comics, and she frequently made strips that featured herself and her husband, and later on veiled commentary when that marriage ended. You know, the marriage to the famous Danish lightweight boxer. These depictions of her and the people in her life were not always flattering. We see fay King draw on often as a nervous wreck and her husband as a bizarre, macho womanizer. She was a flapper who, if you remember, was working at the height of the suffragette movement and with continued success after women's suffrage was granted in Here are some of the headlines that fay King's work would generate in the twenties. Judgment by their past wives, fay King advises flappers girls who married guys twice their age, would do well to consult other women they wooed one and then cast off. Women now read newspapers, fake King observes wow. Unlike characters like Blondie, a flapper whose experience was manufactured by chick young fay Kings. Flappers came from a personal place and were often just her life. In the twenties, King worked among a number of talented women, including illustrators like Nell Brinkley, Eleanor Shuer, Edith Stevens, Ethel Hayes, Dorothy if and Virginia Hugett. Here's a quote from a comic historian and an artist in her own right, so legendary that I've got an entire section on her later in this episode. Her name is Trina Robbins, and she literally wrote a book on this era in women's comics called The Flapper Women Women Cartoonists of the jazz Age, And an interview with bust she said this, there's this myth that women didn't draw comics, or that they had to change their names. This is untrue. If you were good, they published you. Women were drawing comics and people loved them, just as many women read newspapers as men, and the editors were smart enough to carry the strips the women liked. Nel Brinkley was a major leader in this time as well, creating the young, working, attractive suffragist illustrated ideal through a character style that became known as Brinkley Girls, and she wrote some of the most overtly feminist comic strips of the time. In a strip called Dimple's day Dreams, a flapper named Dimple would fantasize about becoming the president, or an aviator or a chorus girl, things that weren't attainable at that time. Virginia Hugett's work centered on girls from working class backgrounds, and she made strips like Molly the Manicure Girl or Babs in Society, a strip about a shop girl who suddenly inherits a massive fortune. And what was more, this community of women comic artists knew and liked each other. Brinkley and King would often draw each other and took turns doing illustrations in court at the highly publicized case of the Albert Snyder murder, which I could make an entire podcast about what a Wikipedia rabbit hole, And instead of focusing on the murder victim, the husband, Brinkley and King of course drew the murderer Ruth his wife. It's all very cool. Moving right along onto the comics of the Depression and World War Two era. Unlike the early days of flappers and first wave feminism. Most of the women appearing on the funny pages at this time were created by men and tended to fall into predictable categories. You recognize these the lionized mother, the heavily sexualized loose girl, and the occasional film fatale professional. My favorite of these was a character called Brenda's Star. It was a strip that followed the soap opera e story of a reporter named Brenda Starr who had this wild romantic life and would solve crimes. It was originally conceived by a male artist, Dale Messick, but was soon taken up by women until its conclusion in two thousand eleven, and even inspired a B movie featuring the character starring Brookshields back in the nineties. She's much more than a woman, much more than your average reporter. Give me the White House, please, much more than any man good handle they want you. And just as many of the mainstream feminist movements were gate kept by race, women who were given a platform in the early comic strip days were overwhelmingly white, with some exceptions. Enter Jackie ORMs. Jackie ORMs was born in nineteen eleven grew up in the Chicago suburbs and went on to become the first black woman to be a nationally syndicated comic artist, writing a number of popular strips over her career. Because of the deeply normalized segregation in the US throughout her life, Orms's work appeared primarily in black newspapers, most prominently The Pittsburgh Courier and the Chicago Defender. Her work gained a huge following and was said to reach over one million people a day. Lankston Hughes even once said in the late forties that quote, if I were marooned on a desert island, I would miss Jackie Orms's cute drawings. That's so cool. Her first strip in nineteen thirty seven and thirty eight was called Torchy Brown in Dixie to Heart, and it was the story of a teenager from Mississippi who became famous singing at the Cotton Club, which was a nightclub in Harlem that ran in the nine twenties and thirties that ended up launching the careers of many famous black performers while still being operated under Jim Crow's segregation laws. That is, it was at first a whites only and later a segregated club. Torchy was a hit with readers immediately, and the character made a huge comeback in the nineteen fifties with Torchy and Heartbeats, where Jackie ORMs updated the protagonists as an adventurous young woman who dates around in search of true love while pursuing her dreams. Most famously, Torchy had a storyline in nineteen fifty four where she and her boyfriend, a doctor in a predominantly black neighborhood, talked about how environmental racism affected his patients after waste from a local chemical plant began to leak into the local water supply. In the studio of Jackie Arms, one of the few women cartoonists, the popular comic strip characters of Torchy and Heartbeat and Patty Joe literally spring to life. Syndicated in scores of news papers, her cartoons reached more than a million raiders each week. Torchy became a fashion icon, and not by mistake. Alongside the comic strip that ORMs drew, would often be a paper doll model of Torchy with several outfits, giving young black women an outlet with which to see themselves in the fashions of the day and act out their own stories with the paper. Doll Ormes's most famous work was called Patty Joe and Ginger, a comic strip that ran from to nineteen fifty six and consisted of two black sisters, one a chatty kid and the other a tall, lean teenager. The format was very simple, and each one panel strip, Patty Joe the kid, would make a comment about modern life to her sister Ginger, who never spoke. Depending on the occasion, Ginger reacted with shock, or annoyance, or tenderness to whatever Patty Joe sets through. Patty Joe Jackie ORMs was able to use an innocuous, seeming kids Say the Darndest Things format to launch biting commentary on the oppression experienced by Black Americans of this time. ORMs this strip, from the day after the white murderers of young Black boy Emmett till We're Found Not Guilty in has been cited as one of the most important works in the strips run. In it, Patty Joe stands in the kitchen doorway as the ever silent Ginger hides a newspaper with the news of the not guilty verdict hidden behind her back. Patty Joe says I don't want to seem touchy on the subject, but that new little white tea kettle just whizzled at me. Patty Joe was very much the star here, and it led to one of the most successful comic strip merchandising moves in the early history of comics, and a very important one in addition to the Patty Joe paper dolls that appeared alongside the strip. Much like Torchy, Jackie ORMs oversaw the release of a Patty Joe doll between nine in ninety nine that gave young black girls a toy of the character that many modeled their behavior on. In a toy market where very often the only representations of Black women and girls relied heavily on Mammy stereotypes, the Patty Joe doll was a big deal, and ORMs oversaw the production herself. The sharp commentary that ORMs made in her work didn't come without consequences. The powers that be viewed her very much as a threat. According to Matthew Tuche at the African American Intellectual History Society, the FBI had a file on Jackie ORMs that went from nineteen forty eight to nineteen fifty eight. At the height of the Red Scare, the agency interviewed her, and agents would sometimes come to follow her to the bookstore she frequented in not just a stunning waste of government funds, but an attempt to establish a connection between ORMs and the communist part. Her FBI file was two hundred and eighty seven pages long, longer than Jackie Robinson's file by over a hundred pages, which brings me to this panel of Patti, Joe and Ginger from the period that ORMs was under surveillance. It would be interesting to discover which committee decided it was Unamerican to be black. This strip, of course, is a reference to the House of Unamerican Activities Committee during the Red Scare, and it makes sense why this committee was on Jackie Orms's mind in particular. ORMs retired from cartooning in ninety six, was a founding board member of the Disabled Museum of African American History, and was a longtime member of an antique doll enthusiast club in Chicago. Her legacy continues now through the ORMs Society, an online collective that promotes black women in the comics industry. Another icon of the Depression era, was an artist named Marge Buell. She worked professionally just as Marge Love, a mononymous artist. Very confident. Marge was born on a farm in nineteen o four. She worked her way up in the industry as a magazine illustrator and started the beloved strip Little Lulu in nineteen thirty five, about a young girl who's known for challenging boys to prove that she can do anything they can. The comic only ran for ten years, but You'll set the stage for women to merchandise the hell out of their most popular characters. As Kathy Leader Would, Lulu outlived the strip through merchandizing, through cartoon shorts in the nineteen forties, through an anime in the nineteen seventies, through an HBO animated series in the nineties. Like Kathy Leader Would, Lulu was also used heavily in American commercials. She was a spokes cartoon for Kleenex, tissues for Pepsi, and she was featured in a permanent Time Square billboard for over ten years. Yet Clean Next tissues in the economy Back and to Jeff any tissue You'll never and back for the new pack of clean Up four hundred gives more more for your money than ever before. Like Kathy guys White would be later, Marge was heavily involved in the marketing of her character, and it paid off in a huge way. She sold off the copyrights to Lulu in nineteen seventy one, doing very well for herself. Little Lulu would go on to inspire Friends of Lulu, a nonprofit that ran from eleven to promote comic books by women and to get girls involved in making comics themselves. The nineteen forties also brought a series of successful strips about teenage girls, lining up pretty closely with the explosion in marketing to American teenagers, and these strips tend to be pretty lighthearted and mostly about teen girls pining over teen boys in strips like Lynda Walter's Susie Q. Smith, which she wrote with her husband, and Hilda Terry's Tina and Hilda. Terry fought very hard to be the first woman to be accepted into the National Cartoonist Society and was finally successful in nineteen fifty one. Nineteen fifty one, there was also wartime propaganda comic strips. Gladys Parker, who had been working back since the Flapper strips in the nineteen twenties made the comic Betty g I to inspire women to get involved in American war efforts, and then went on to create a semi autobiographical comic called Mopsi in ninety nine. Mopsy was a protagonist that was an absolute dead ringer for Gladys Parker herself, in a move that mirrored many American women's experiences in World War Two. Mopsie worked as a munitions plant worker and a nurse in the comic strip and then was fired from her defense job in nineteen seven and had to leave the workforce d pressing. However, you should google a picture of Gladys Parker. She's I think my new style icon. She's incredible. The nineteen fifties was not a good time for honestly, anybody, really, anybody who wasn't a white guy in America, and women's presence in the funny pages dipped. In their place came the Donna redified domestic goddesses that exemplified the indoctrination that set the stage for Betty Free Dance, the feminine mystique to become such a hit among white middle class housewives who had been pushed out of the workforce after the war ended. You've got Lois of High and Lois a suburban housewife. You've got flow from Andy Capp, the long suffering wife who deals with her husband's womanizing and excess drinking like it's her job, which it kind of was. And into the sixties, as the civil rights movement and social unrest surrounding the Vietnam War dominated headlines, not much of this was reflected in the funny pages. For the most part, the medium was stuck about ten years in the past in the comic strips that took awards home at the Alley Awards for comics were Peanuts by Charles Schultz, a soap opera strip called on Stage by Leonard Starr, and Dennis the Menace, not exactly strips that reflected social progress, radicalism, or gains made by these movements, and that applied to the feminist movement as well. But when the newspapers wouldn't carry the radical messaging of the time, a bunch of women decided to do it themselves, enter the underground comics movement. Well, the newspaper pages lagged far behind the times in the fifties into the sixties, and seventies. Prior to Kathy, Beginning in ninety six, another comic scene was thriving, that being underground comics, comics with two MS and an AX by the way, a scene that was very vibrant in the US and the UK. For as long as there had been illustrated comics, there had been poorn knockoffs of comic book characters, but in the late sixties, illustrators began to organize, independently, publish, and create their own X rated characters. They're basically the edge lords of the late sixties, very much a part of the sex, drugs, and rock and roll era with its start in the early sixties with stuff like Stacts Adventures of Jesus. The big thing about underground comics was that they were completely uncensored. Are Crumb, one of the most prominent artists of this movement, spoke to what the scene meant in an interview from He said this, people forget that. That's what it was all about. That's why we did it. We didn't have anybody standing over us saying no, you can't draw this or you can't show that. We could do whatever we wanted, and so they did whatever they wanted. Centered in the San Francisco area. At the height of free Love, Crume and Company started a number of self published comics issues full of truly some of the most fucked up things You'll ever see in your life. ZAP Comics, a project helmed by Our Crumb, became a flagship publication for the movement and launched a number of artists after getting get start sold on the sidewalk of Hate Ashbury out of a baby stroller by Crumb's then wife. So yeah, these were the edge lords of the sixties and seventies. The comics were shock, talking hard, and not in the way that all radical artists liked. The movement was built around drawing and saying whatever you want and consisted of almost completely white guys. Artist Grass Green was one of the only black artists involved in underground comics, and so that meant that sometimes they were just saying funked up stuff for the sake of saying fucked up stuff. And the comics from these majority male collectives would often feature themes like incest, murder, rape, and pretty aggressive able is um and you guess it, misogyny ran rampant. This brings us back to Trina Robbins, the world's leading historian and women comics artist, who was also at the helm of creating space for women in the underground comics movement. Robbins didn't want to get involved in zap comics. She wanted to start her own thing, and this was a fairly controversial move. Robbins said this of our Crumb's work. It's weird to me how willing people are to overlook the hideous darkness in Crumb's work. What the hell is funny? Ab out rape and murder? And this resistance made a lot of sense for the time. By the late sixties, the second wave of feminism was well underway in the US, and by vent, Trina Robbins had had enough of the misogyny in existing underground comics. After meeting fellow cartoonist Barbara Willie Mendez, the two decided to make their own comics and recruited other women to do it with them, artists like Meredith Kurtzman, the daughter of Mad magazine creator Harvey Kurtzman, like Carol Kaylish, like socialist cartoonist Lissa Lions, and Michelle Brand to make the first issue ever of women's underground comics. Called it Ain't Me Babe. Here's an interview Robin's did in about her motivation to start comics of her own. I mean, for the longest time, if you wanted to draw comics, you really had two choices. One was mainstream and mainstream you know, the big two, Marvel and DC was all about guys punching other guys. You know, That's basically what it was about. And this isn't something that women and I don't awful autaman to, This isn't something we want to draw, This isn't even something we can draw. You know, I'm not very good at guys punching each other. It's not what I do. And they but the other alternative was the Underground. But the Underground was completely male dominated mail and and it was all about sex and drugs and rock and roll, and you know, the sex part was extremely misogynists towards women. It was all male gaze and male viewpoint. So there was until Babe, until It Ain't Me Babe, there was nothing really for women. So suddenly we had another kind of comic with another kind of contributors. And the cover of It Ain't Me Babe does not shy away from iconic women of the funniest pages. It references them explicitly. The cover has Olive Oil Popeye, it has Wonder Women, It has Little Lulu from Marge member Her. It has Mary Marvel, She and a Queen of the Jungle, and Elsie the Cow, who I guess was a mascot for a dairy company. And these characters are all charging together with their fists raised and furious in solidarity. The cover reads it ain't Me Babe, Women's Liberation, and the contents are much the same. The majority see women reimagining themselves as the centered parties in fables and fantasy stories and even Sunday funnies. My favorite one of these is called Breaking Out. Artist Carol Kalish imagines the existing women in the comics banding together for world domination. Little Lulu decides to stop trying to prove to boys that she's worthwhile and strike out on her own. Supergirl gets sick of Superman's condescension. Veronica realizes that Betty is far more important to her than Archie. Petunia Pig tells Porky to cook his own dinner, and they all strike out on their own to create a women's only clubhouse. It holds Up It Ain't Me Babe was a huge success, selling over forty copies from an independent printer. So early on, Trina Robbins was rightfully confident that there was a whole market for women in the underground, and two began a longer sustaining project, Women's Comics, spelled w I M M E N. In the first issue alone, Women's Comics addresses teenage abortion, female masturbation, leaving an abusive marriage, leaving a job where a woman is being sexually harassed, and one written by Robbins herself called Sandy Comes Out, which was one of the first lesbian coming out stories and comics ever. Because they were uncensored, these strips are deeply unapologetic. Women's Comics had no interest in engaging in both sides is um, and they feature women who take radical views without explaining or apologizing. You don't like that they don't want an abortion, Okay, oh well, you don't like that she wants to leave her husband, leave her job. Isn't straight? The collection offers no explanation and no apologies. A number of women whose work appeared in the pages of Women's Comics went on to have pretty impressive careers. And there was Lee Mars, who began as an assistant on comics like Little Orphan, Annie High and Lois and Prince Valiant, who went on to create her own radical works that embraced body positivity and queerness through her strip called Pudge Girl Blimp from nineteen seventy three to seventy seven. There was Aileen Kominski, who did a comic about an insecure, misfit masturbaiter called Goldie Neurotic Woman. There was Diane Newman, creator of the violent and impulsive icon D D. Glitz. There was Sharon Rudol, who went on to write the graphic novel biographies of famous political activists. And this was a roster that grew with each passing issue. And once again, while the collection grew more diverse in including more queer women, later in his run, it remained overwhelmingly white. A lot of these comics can't really be done justice here. What you need to know is that they were unapologetic, edgy, sometimes in the right direction, that sometimes in a direction that very much doesn't age well. They were explicit, and they were touching on women's issues that would have been virtually impossible to do in the funny pages that they were commenting on and sometimes directly parodying. What you also need to know is that the politics of the era and the fact that there is a majority of white CIS authors means that there are many comic strips that other non white or non SIS women in a way that is offensive. The comic was designed to provide opportunities to women as time went on. The collection was not just a platform these ideas, but to provide opportunities to women comic artists as time went on, making point to cycle out the editors regularly to ensure that new artists and ideas and issues would be introduced. In the nineteen seventy three issue, editor Lee Mars explains what Women's Comics is about. The Anthology of Women Cartoonists is intended to give support and encouragement for aspiring women cartoonists throughout the country. We have no desire to be an exclusive, divisive or female chauvinist group, of fear, some of our friends have expressed. We do hope that publication of high quality beginning work will give our womenist artists a chance to be seen and a foothold in the industry based on their talents of mind, hand and eye, rather than more traditionally requested parts of their anatomy, and provide good comic entertainment for all. Women's comics also drew a clear line between the radicals that appeared in their pages and the more liberal American feminists women who are associated with the now the National Organization Women or MISS magazine, as edited by Glorious Steinham. Women's comics had an issue with MISS magazine, specifically after the comics were refused ad space in the feminist magazine Long story Short. For a time, MISS Magazine was, according to Trina Robbins, too afraid to have their magazine pulled from the shelves for quote unquote advertising pornography, and the artists of women's comics were rightfully piste. Miss would later reverse this decision, but come on, Steinham. Here's one of my favorites from women's comics in nineteen seventy three, in a strip called Reactionary Comics by Marjorie pachet Sky. The conversation is between two women. Oh. It says here that um men are becoming quite enthusiastic about women's lib Don't I know it? Mine just liberated me by taking up with that redhead who runs the food co op. But I'm supposed to have his dinner ready whenever he shows up. Yeah, come to think of it, mine sits at home while I go to work, and they still won't lift a finger when it comes to doing housework. I pay his rent. I'm not going to wash his socks too. We could pick up a couple of losers, but the swing is around here is solo grade. They'd probably try and snatch our purses. And when you do get down to the nitty gritty, everyone is so liberated that there's not a bit of affection, not to mention plain old manners. Well, we could get liberated all the way. I read this article in the New Cosmo, The Lesbian Experience. You're a great kid and everything, but I sort of had something in mind with great, big arms to put around me. This character has a thought bubble where she's thinking of a completely erect penis. The other character replies, sigh, we might as well go to the laundry room with burno bras. When we get done, it'll be time to watch Mary Tyler Moore right on, Sister not bite my ass. This trip embodies the early issues of women's comics for me. It features two women talking in a pretty dated way about their frustrations. They have interesting talking points. They're resenting how women's liberation had been intended to free them of the demands that men put upon them, but instead empowered men to ask more of them. Now that they have jobs, why not pay his rent and cook his food. Similar topics are explored in the early days of the Kathy comics in the nineteen seventies, where men asked Kathy to pay the check as some sort of proof of her own liberation. It's not an acknowledgement, it's a challenge. In nineteen seventy five, Alien Kaminsky and Diane Newman departed the collective due to differences in opinions on both feminism and Trina Robbins ongoing criticism of Our Crumb, who Kaminsky was in a relationship with and is still married to today. Kaminsky and Newman started a separate women driven comics collective called Twisted Sisters that ran from nineteen seventy six to ninety four and featured pretty significant crossover with artists who appeared in women's comics well. This came out of an in ternal conflict. This meant that the community had actually expanded and began to provide even more opportunities for aspiring artists. However, while women's Comics and Twisted Sisters were doing what quite literally no one else was at this time, and this space was very hard one, having been created outside of the male dominated underground comics movement that was sometimes actively hostile to them. The issues that exist and are explored in women's comics are the same ones that surrounded the second wave feminist movement at large. Women's comics, while increasingly inclusive as time went on, remained overwhelmingly white for the duration of its run, and while women of color were included in the collections fairly often, they were more often than not written by white artists. In many cases, particularly early in women's comics run, white women draw and write black and brown characters as other whether it be playing into tired exotic stereotypes of Asian and African women to set up a narrative where white women dominate or escape Western white patriarchy, or by using non white women as side characters with no purpose but to serve as plot set up for white protagonists. In the Western world and especially interesting issue came in nineteen where women's comics observed the bi centennial of America by using women's stories and their historical erasure to tell the nationalistic display of this year to fuck off. On the cover is Betsy Ross wearing a soldier's uniform and holding a gun, but still being handed the fabric for the American flag by a general. Can you have it ready by next week? He asks? Indigenous women are acknowledged in this issue, although as far as I could tell, no Indigenous cartoonists contributed. Queen Lilio Collani and Harriett Tubman were celebrated the Salem which trials were addressed. The first woman to run for president was spotlighted. The list goes on. These themed issues became a feature of the collection. We saw the work issue, the fashion issue, the occult issue, the three D issue, I Kid you Not The book came with three D glasses and gave me a my grain. There was also the child Psychology issue that explored how girls are socially conditioned to accept a whole lot of ship. Another standout was the Men's issue, in which women artists put the let's say female gazed on issues of masculinity. Here's one last favorite of mine from the nine Horrible Relationships issue from Angela Bocage. Titled New Age, Same Old Ship. It parodies a shock jock radio show that shows how women have handled domestic abuse from their partners throughout the years. It starts with a woman from eight with a big smile and a black eye, saying this, it really was thoughtless of me, even at our family meals. I knew he wanted the plates warmed, so when I forgot when Chuck's boss was at dinner, well maybe I was asking for this, but I can't even see it, can you. I like these new makeup formulas today they do cover We hear similar phrases from different women from n N. The final woman in the strip is from and stands with a fat lip, smiling in front of a cooing baby in a high chair. She says, this, Gerald a model husband. In so many ways. You can get really stressful around here for someone who's used to an optimal office environment. And if that gets to Gerald sometimes and he acts out, well, when you consider I had a better chance of getting killed by terrorists and getting married much less to a guy with a job, well, the bottom line is I created this reality. I take responsibility for my life, even forgetting battered, and I feel damned bloody. That terrorist statistic she's referring to is totally bogus, and the author knows it. She includes a parenthetical saying that quote. This dubious statistic was actually reported in one of the USA's bougies newsies to scare eighties spinsters. Unquote. That bougie newsy was Newsweek. That dubious statistic was from a study that claimed that women over forty had less than a three percent chance of getting married. As they put it, it was more likely a woman of that age would be killed by a terrorist than be married. This stat was repeated ad nauseam and had a hold on the culture for some time, even though it was completely fake. I remember it most clearly appearing in Sleepless in Seattle. To conclude the comic strip, the host of the fake shock Jock radio show returns and says, this, okay, lots of you got it on the nose, so to speak. Betty, Shadow, Shock Treat, and Cathy all died of injuries. So remember, get hit, get out. This is women's comics and the underground movement at its best edgy and shocking, but also with a clear perspective and purpose. I'm very glad that these collections were made and think that their legacy is still felt today. By over financial struggles and internal issues, the comics stopped publishing. So no, Kathy guys White was far from the first woman to work in comics in a major way and never claimed to be. And maybe you've heard about some of the women in this episode before. Maybe you haven't, but it's clear that the Jackie ORMs is of the world. The fay Kings, the women whose work thrived in their day in spite of pop culture history at large letting them fall to the wayside in favor of their white male cohort, were important and warrant continued discussion. The last handful of years have brought marginalized people erased from history back into focus, and the comics industry should be a part of this discussion. Basically, what I'm saying is, give me my Jackie ORMs biopic yesterday. In part two of this episode, will be looking at four comic artists working at the same time as Kathy guys White, Alison Bechdel, Gary Trudeau, Aaron McGrew r and Lynn Johnston artists who, like Kathy, took some risks and the way that the culture responded to those risks is telling. That's coming up Wednesday on ac Cast. Oh Jesus passed the Lane cuisine. Let's just eat chocolate, dude, And before we go, I wanted to add a maya culpa to our last episode. I quoted a writer named Robin Morgan, who a listener graciously informed me is a notorious transphobe. I was not aware. I feel very foolish for not knowing, and I apologize for the oversight and anyone that it may have upset. Fuck that at Cast is an I Heeart radio production hosted, written, and researched by me Jamie Loftus. The show is executive produced by the wonderful Sophie Lichterman, edited by the wonderful Isaac Taylor. Music is from Zoey Blade and the slapper of a theme comes from Brad dick Art. Voices you heard today include my Mommy, Joel Smith, not my my mom, Comma Joel Smith. Joel Smith is not my mom. It would be cool. Also Caitlin Toronte and Jackie Michelle Johnson as Kathy, see you Wednesday,