Welcome back to ac cast. I am your host, Jamie Loftus, and I've made it three whole nights without a large two D Kathy cartoon appearing at the foot of my bed and threatening my one human life. We'll take the winds where we can get them. In Part one of this episode, we explored the women who preceded Kathy, guyswhite in the comic strip industry, who were frequently erased, as well as the radicals who worked in underground comics that's c O, M, M, I X, thank you very much, while Kathy was getting her start in the far more restrictive national funny pages. In Part two, I want to feature four of her contemporaries, all boomers with one exception, whose strips had missions similar to Kathy's, with very different approaches that goal to document the day to day struggles of the boomer generation. The difference is all about who is being put into focus on that mission. Our first artist came straight out of the women's comic scene, far from the mainstream funny pages. So let's get the theme song going right. She burst into the world in nineteen seventy six. She's at what she's out on dates and she don't like politics from Mama and herb and two with feminist friends. She's fighting all the stands with some chocolate and hair. Cathe she's fighting back to stressed with success. Let's call her some slack oh Cathey my Cathy, fun Cather, She's gotta like going on. The biggest star to come out of women's comics was, hands down, Alison Bechtel, who's now a MacArthur Genius Award recipient. She's the author of books like fun Home and Are You My Mother? Fun Home was turned into a huge Broadway musical also, but that ascent to the top was a slow and challenging one, and one that women's comics helped lift Early in her career. She first appeared in issues in the nineteen eighties. Beckdel established herself as a cartoonist through her independent comic strip Dikes to Watch Out For, which ran in local feminist newspaper Woman News beginning in nineteen eighty three and was eventually syndicated in other all weekly papers beginning in nineteen eighty five. Most famously, a comic of two characters discussing the lack of women speaking to each other in popular movies led to the coining of the Bechdel Test, popular media metric that requires that two women need to speak to each other about something other than a man for two lines of dialogue to pass the test. Some people we've even started podcasts about this, I've heard. Although it is just a jumping off point for discussion, I'm sure it's funny because the context of that comic is two lesbian characters frustrated that women I ever speak to each other in movies, meaning that lesbian audience members couldn't ship them together. So it's also a strip about a lack of queer representation as well. Anyways, here's Bechdel and an introduction for a two thousand and eight publication of the comics entire run, explaining why she started the strip. Readers seemed to like it and egged me on. But to be honest, it was so comforting to see my queer life reflected back at me. I would have kept drawing these dikes to watch out for just for myself. Let me tell you, my friends, those were benighted times. Despite what my mother thought about my lesbianism, being an Outdike was not an easy row to hoe. We had no L word, we had no lesbian daytime TV hosts. We had no openly lesbian daughters of the creepy vice President. We had personal best and we liked it. I saw my cartoons as an antidote to the prevailing image of lesbians as sick, humorless, and undesirable, our model, like Olympic pent athletes, objective fodder for the mail gays. By drawing the everyday lives of women like me, I hope to make lesbians more visible, not just to ourselves but to everyone. If people could only see us, how could they help but love us. Dikes To Watch Out For has an expansive cast of characters who aged in real time for the twenty five years that the comic ran in a fictional city whose world reflected the reality of the US at that time. The comics protagonist is mo Testa, a radical leftist lesbian who's trying to navigate building a life for herself while upholding her values. Her achilles heel is a tendency to complain about everything, and she works at a lesbian feminist bookstore where we meet most of our other characters. There's Clarice, an environmental lawyer, and most college x who's in a long term relationship and eventually marries Tony, a CPA. They later have a kid together as well. There's Lois, a drag king who encourages everyone to be more accepting. There's Ginger, the eternal grad student Sparrow who runs a battered women's shelter and eventually comes out as a by sexual lesbian. There's Moe's girlfriend Sidney, and there's Jisanna, who owns and runs the bookstore. Not only is this comic really good, it touches on so many issues, issues relevant to queer people, to women, to boomers in general. Just like Kathy chronicled the week to week worries of a number of white, middle class boomer ladies, Beckdel's work does the same for the lesbian community over the course of decades, and while Beckdel herself is a white lesbian, she makes a concerted effort to show the diversity of her community in race, gender, sexuality, and ability. One of the early taboo topics that newspaper comics wouldn't have been able to touch with a ten foot poll was the AIDS crisis, which Beckdel has her characters talk about frankly in the eighties and even works to correct some of the popular myths around the disease. Here's a strip from nineteen eighty seven with Moe and Lois. Lois has just had unprotected sex, Mos as Lois, you can't just go around betting every woman you meet. Haven't you heard there's an epidemic going on, ah, Mo, relax. Lesbians are a low risk group. I'm not going to get AIDS from sleeping around with other women, Lois. Being a doesn't mean you can't get AIDS. This conversation continues, with Mo overreacting and demanding Lois b celibate. Lois refuses. Then Ginger shows up and diffuses the situation by telling Lois that of course she can have sex, but while gay men were at higher risk for AIDS, that didn't mean that she wasn't obligated to practice safe sex. And it all manages to be funny somehow. It's great Mo and her friends experience the world in real time. The whole gang goes to a kiss in to protest anti gay laws at the Real March on Washington in nineteen eighty seven. Clarice and Tony struggle to have their union formally recognized four years whether it's issues allowing Clarice to formally adopt her son that they have through artificial insemination, or by having their eventual marriage recognized in states where gay people still could not marry at that time. Trans characters enter the story as well. Mo is stupendously turfy at the start of one storyline that's short for trans exclusionary radical feminist and they can say it with me flock right off to hell. In this storyline, a transwoman new to the bookstore wants to join Moe's book club, and mo Is hesitant to include her. Lois educates Mo and tells her that she's being a bigoted asshole, and Mo changes her perspective much later in the comic. There is also a trans teen coming out story from the early two thousands in which Lois's partner's daughter navigates gender dysphoria, coming out to her mom, and becoming a young transactivist. The economic trends of these years are shown as well, when the independent bookstore that everyone works at closes due to a big box store coming to town. Mo's girlfriend survives breast cancer. They attend anti war protests for every war that takes place between the eighties and the late two thousands, so quite a few. Because Bechtel's characters had all kinds of different opinions on politics and pop culture, Dikes to Watch out For was able to challenge schisms within the queer community, within political parties, within friend groups. Here's a conversation between Ginger and Lois from nineteen ninety three about their frustration with white gay men being quicker to be embraced by pop culture than queer women. Ginger says, news flash. A recent sex survey of twenty somethings revealed that among men who fantasize about celebrities, Cindy Crawford and Demi Moore rank high. Women opt for Luke Perry and President Clinton, while gay men tapped Markie Mark and Tom Cruise period end of paragraph. Do you think that means lesbians don't fantasize about celebrities or they don't answer surveys? How come men get to be totally queer but women don't. I'm sick of being portrayed as some straight slob's porno fantasy and on paper, Kathy and dikes to watch out For sound and are extreme different, but at their core their goal is pretty similar. It's for their authors to pull from their own lives as boomer women to comment on the world around them, on the changing politics and standards of the US at the end of the twentieth century. It's their perspectives and where they published that are different. While Alice and Bechdel, an outspoken queer, feminist and leftist, could talk about almost anything she wanted and addressed topics that were still a taboo in the mainstream, the tradeoff was that less people would see it, and she would make a fraction of the money her funny paid colleagues dead. Kathy was always beholden to the editors of the United Press Syndicate and the individual papers that carried her work. The trade off for her more money and more eyeballs. But good luck if you happen to want to vote for Michael Ducaucus. The mainstream papers were not ready for Alice and Bechdel, and certainly not for the women of women's comics, but they hold a very important place in women's comic art, and in the case of Bechdel and Trina Robbins, are finally getting their inside note. Even Alison Bechdeal made a jab at Kathy and a strip of hers Mo's ex Harriet is like reading a newspaper in the Sunday Funnies with a Kathy comic and the four panels Beckdal puts in our Kathy saying diet by over read ak yeah, yeah, take a number. That is so insulting. I am so sorry she did that. Kathy. Alison Beckdale has spoken about the power of telling one's own story and her similarities to her protagonist Mo and a talk in twenty fifteen. I didn't see images anywhere of women who looked like me and my friends, so I decided I would just make them myself. Another thing I really liked about working with words and pictures together was the fact that cartoons were lowbrow. They were accessible and populist, and they didn't get scrutinized the way that fine art or literary writing or criticized in the same way. I was very insecure as a young person after all those rejection letters. I always liked being an outsider as a lesbian. It gave me a certain objectivity about how the world worked that I would lose if I were on the inside and benefiting tremendously from the system. But I also, of course yearned on some deep level to just the normal, to just have everything. That'd be such a big deal for my queerness to be seen as normal. Indics to watch out for. Alison Bechdel and Mo aren't the same person, but Moe is a tool for Bechdel to say what she thought. Same guest for Kathy. Guys white and Kathy, I want them to hang out. I'd consider it. Okay, Relax now, I want to take a look at some of Kathy's contemporaries from inside the Funny Pages. All from the Universal Press indicate Gary Trudeau of Douansbury, Lynn Johnston of For Better or for Worse, and Aaron McGruder of The Boondocks. All three of these writers made strides in the Funny Pages, and as you know by now, it's not really an easy medium to take strides in. We're talking mostly about strips that pushed against the norm in this series, but it's important to remember what that norm was. It's indisputable that for the majority of American comic strip history there have been more strips about household pets by white guys. However, beloved Garfield stand here, than there were marginalized people working in the Funny Pages. Well, into the nineteen eighties. Even when comic strips were not actively hostile to women, queer people, and non white people, they were disproportionately centered around white boys and men or traditional family values. Family Circus is a comic that I'm pretty sure is completely built around white children misunderstanding various words. Andy Kapp was a character famous for beating his wife. Dilbert had some commentary on nineteen nineties office culture while also serving as a proto in cell Beetle Bailey was war propaganda with gags. Oh, and there was The Farside, which still fucking rocks. But most beloved strips like Peanuts and Calvin and Hobbes are classic childhood tales with larger casts, but centered on the childhood experiences of white boys in the middle class, which, to be fair, is how Gary Trudeau's Dunesbury starts. Dunesbury is the rare comic strip that has been pretty intellectualized since it debuted back in nineteen seventy. Creator Gary Trudeau is the son of a legacy family of doctors from Saranac Lake, New York. Went to a private New Hampshire High School and then Yale, where he started writing a comic strip called bull Tails, which was an early version of Doonesbury. While Doonesbury would later become synonymous with political commentary and satire, it started and in many ways remained semi autobiographical and pulled from the life experiences of the people Trudeau was surrounded by. Here's what he said to PBS News Hour in twenty ten about the beginnings of Dunesbury. Well, I think what it began as a kind of diary of my generation coming of age became the main driving force behind it. It's just inherently fun watching a generation evolved, to see to see what it's meant. That's what you've always thought about it. I'm going to watch my generation evolved, I think. So. I don't think it was I had quite such a grandiose take on it. I was just trying to get through the day and create a series of jokes and meet a series of deadlines. But I think looking back on it, that's that's that's pretty much what it became. It was certainly marketed that way. What's that do you say? Another comic strip that was a chronicle of boomer life over the course of decades. In nineteen seventy, at age twenty two, the Universal Press indicates signed Trudeaux On had him change the name of the comic from bull Tails to Dunesbury, and it was off to the races. Dunesbury began with a relatively small casp that would expand rapidly in the fifty years that followed, and much like Alice and Bechdel's characters in Dice to watch out for, Trudeau's characters aged in real time and some of them even die. Even as someone who would rather cut my own head off than hand it an ivy league educated white guy from a rich family, I do have to hand it to Gary Trudeau. Dunesbury is maybe the riskiest, boldest work in the funny pages in the twentieth century. It's pretty punk and you don't need to just take my word for it. Aaron Recruiter, creator of The Boondocks, who we'll be talking about in a bit, has regularly credited Trudeau as his biggest influence. Its beginnings are pretty innocuous. We meet Mike Dunesbury, a hippie womanizer of a college student, b d the quarterback, Mark Slackmeyer, the radical, and Zonker, the stoner student who joins the football team and pisses bad off endlessly, so kind of another strip for the boy, it seemed like at first, but the comic made political commentary right away. Many of the students at Trudeau's fictional Walden College were firmly anti Vietnam Smoked Weed, and Trudeau commented on his strong anti war feelings and criticism of protest and activism through his different characters. As the comic continued, the cast widened and became more inclusive to better comment on the movements that were on fire in the seventies. Commentary on Black American activism told through the law student turned congressional candidate Jinny, Feminist activism through Jinny and her eventual roommate Joanie, who left her husband and children when Mike and Mark drove past on their motorcycle and offered to let her live on their commune. Joanie's one of my favorite characters, and she's featured heavily in the Dunesbury special from nineteen seventy seven, where we see her working to make ends meet at a day care center with a bunch of young girls who were reacting to the second wave feminist movement and feeding them and picking a back of them mostping to fight. Yes, but I'm getting paid for it? How much not? In Nut Honey, the strip touches on boomer women who were raised to be housewives discovering their personal power through the character Boopsie b D's quote unquote cheerleader bimbo girlfriend who goes on to build a successful career as an actress and remains very happy in her marriage. B D enlists in Vietnam thinking he was being patriotic in his early twenties, only to befriend a member of the Vietcong and questioned the war himself. Andy Lippencott was an early out gay character in the comic from Og character Mark later in the strip. In its heyday, Doonesbury caused a lot of controversy, either for its political commentary or by representing people who were simply not accepted by the media of the day. In the newspaper Funnies a shortlist of Doonesbury controversies, Let's get the Music started. The Washington Post ran an editorial criticizing Doonesbury character Mark for calling Nixon guilty, guilty, guilty during Watergate. Trudeau got in trouble for implying that two forty year olds were having premarital sex. In nineteen seventy six, he got busted for criticizing tobacco companies for refusing to acknowledge the link between cancer and cigarettes. John McCain once said on the floor of the Senate in nineteen ninety five, suffice it to say that I hold Trudeau in utter contempt. When Doonesbury criticized Bob Dole, Hunter s Thompson, Santa Gary, Trudeau a bag full of his own shit and a classic. He got in trouble for saying son of a bitch. So yeah, it was a lot, and there were a few misfires thematically from Doonesbury, but for the most part, the strip does a great job at pissing off government conservatives. So a victim was crime. So yes, Trudeau had dealt with his comic being moved from the funnies to the op ed page of newspapers repeat seatedly over his fifty year tenure, usually when his subject matter went against the political leanings of the paper it was being printed in, or upset readers. But you don't have to cry for him. Trudeau is maybe one of the most decorated comic strip artists of all time. In fact, he became the first strip cartoonist to win the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning for his Watergate series, and was a Pulitzer finalist again in nineteen ninety, two thousand four, and two thousand and five. That nineteen seventy seven Doonesbury special I played a clip of that was nominated for an Academy Award in nineteen seventy eight. So for all the risks that Trudeau took, a lot of them paid off, and the strip is still well regarded today. Doonesbury was so much the intellectual's comic strip that Kathy Geiswite references it in a strip from the late seventies of Kathy. Kathy is talking to Andrea and the strip and says, this man happens to be very bright. He says he reads Doonesbury every day. Andrea shrugs and says, big deal. Millions of people read Sberry every day. Kathy melts, She's like in full crush mode, and she says, yeah, but he understands it every day. So this was like smart people content, and I could talk about Dudesbury for much longer. How Trudeau taking a hiatus in eighty three and eighty four and returning with his characters aged up as boomers who would shed their activists past and become sellout adults. Was completely inspired or how I can't stand the illustration style, or how early the strip was to denouncing Trump, or Janie's radical career, or Mike Doonesbury's turn as a single father, or the comics pivoting to the millennial children of the original characters over time. But what Doonesbury does stand for is proof that the Funny Pages could say a lot in the seventies. As a white Ivy League guy, Trudeau had less to lose than many of his counterparts, He took a lot of risks, He moved the medium forward in many ways, and he was rewarded handsomely for it. By ninety nine there had been a lot of boundaries pushed in comics. Doonesbury made political commentary in The Funny Pages Pulitzer worthy and inspired many impostors and women cartoonists like Kathy and Lynn Johnston had found a foothold in the industry and the money to back it up. But the Funnies were and always had been extremely white and center liberal, too conservative in their politics. Enter the Boondocks by Aaron McGruder, a comic about black socialist nine year old Huey Freeman and his brother, the gangster rap obsessed Riley, moving to a predominantly white neighborhood in Maryland with their granddad. Other characters regular in the strip are Jasmine, a naive by racial child of lawyers, one black and one white, who believe in the democratic establishment and are constantly at odds with Huey, and Michael Caesar, who is Huey's best friend, also a black socialist, but has a brighter outlook on the future of the world. And if you haven't read The Boondocks, which ran in papers with the Universal Press indicate from nineteen ninety nine two thousand and six, just turn off the podcast and go read some or the animated series, which is also great, is streaming on HBO Max. This is a clip from the pilot of that show, which is also pulled from the comics. Excuse me, everyone, I have a brief announcement to make Jesus was black, Ronald Reagan was the devil, and the government is lying about ninety eleven. Thank you for your time, and good night dad. That's the tone of the Boondocks, black radicalism is in its DNA, and as much as his readers loved it, old guard comic publishers were afraid of it. Aaron mcgruder's journey into the newspaper was distinctly gen x. He began publishing it online at hitlist dot com in nineteen ninety six, and it was extremely popular. But when the still college student wanted to take it nationally, he was met with a ton of resistance from the traditional comic syndicates. This is from a Washington Post piece on the topic by Lena O'Neill Parker in nineteen ninety seven, almost two years before the Universal Press Indicate finally gave it the green light. Now he wants to take it national, but things are a little too edgy in the Boondocks to suit the cartoon syndicators. McGruder has submitted The Boondocks to seven of the nine major comic strip syndicates and has gotten some praise and encouragement in return, but six, including the Washington Post Writers Group, have turned him down so far. Too angry, too college oriented, one syndicator said, too confrontational, said another. Amy Lago, executive editor for Comic Art at United Media says it's a conservative market. There are complaints among edgier readers or cartoonists who would like to do edgier material that everything on the newspaper comic page is milktoast. It becomes very difficult for newspapers to take chances anymore. Lago says there's too much chance that enough readers will come playing about the subject matter of the strip and they'll threaten to cancel their subscription. The real criticism McGruder believes is that his strip is too black, and it doesn't seem like McGruder was wrong. All of the syndicates who rejected the Boondocks told him not to change a thing. It's just that the world wasn't ready for it, as if these people had no control over whether they could syndicate the strip or not. In nineteen ninety seven, there were only four nationally syndicated black cartoonists, and those numbers have not improved that much over time. After years of this rejection and patronizing responses from the white higher ups who refused to carry a black socialist cartoon in spite of its huge audience, the Universal Press syndicate Home of Dunsberry and Kathy, Finally we picked it up. Unlike Gary Trudeau, Aery mcgruder's journey to being a comic strip star was met with constant barriers to entry, in spite of the fact that their missions to talk about issues that affected them in an explicit and political way weren't dissimilar at all. But the Boondocks took off in the papers, immediately criticizing the then massive culture of gangster rapp through Riley's character, the hollow nationalism and warmongering the came after nine to eleven, the entire concept of working within the system and the different ways that Huey, Riley and their granddad navigated a world of racist, micro and macro aggressions at school, in their neighborhood, and in the media they consumed, and McGruder had a lot of controversies as well. Let's cue the music again. Newspapers pulled a strip of Huey calling a tipline to report Ronald Reagan for funding terrorism after nine to eleven. The strip was also pulled for a calling Condoleeza Rice a quote female Darth Vader type that seeks a loving mate to torture. Unquote. Strips got pulled or moved to the op ed section when Huey criticized black Conservative commentator Larry Elder Beet got mad when the Boondogs made fun of their repeated failures to connect with black audiences, and one of my favorites. There was a lot of criticism of mcgruder's ribbon and flaggy propaganda comics made after nine eleven to mock strips that were going whole uncritical nationalists instead of examining the war that George W. Bush was starting for no reason. Okay, we can stop the music. And again, there were some misfires within the strip. For example, the way that the strip treated Whitney Houston through her addiction was very cruel. But mcgruder's controversies generally mirror Trudeau's in that they intentionally pissed the establishment publishing his work all the way off. But he didn't get the Pulitzers or establishment recognition that Trudeau had, and given how much racism he'd been subjected to in the pursuit of getting published nationally in the first place, it is easy to guess why that may be. What the establishment couldn't take were the sheer number of people who loved the comic and Huey Freeman, and much of this has to do with its successful marketing crossover into an animated series on Adult Swim that ran from two thousand and six to twenty fourteen, with mcgruder's close involvement, including a role as head writer. That was a major component of mcgruder's choice to not return to the strip in two thousand and six, in spite of the universal press indicate begging him to return. Here he is in nineteen ninety nine, as the comic was becoming a cultural phenomenon. On Charlie Rose, Sorry, and he's speaking about the challenges of working in the medium. That's a tough question. I mean some people said, well, did you get were you just picked up because it was a black strip? And is that why it's I'm just positive that's all these other things first, right, No, I mean, but does it breakthrough because of that? But you know, I mean, let's we had you know, this is a it is certainly a black strip. You know, there is nothing in comics history to indicate that it is at all benefit to be a black cartoonist or to do a black strip. Those cartoonists that I mentioned again, Rob Armstrong is the biggest and distribution. He's in over three hundred papers, and he's been doing it for over ten years. And you want to compare that to the Peanuts or Calvin Howes, which each which are each in two thousand, two hundred papers. So there has been no hugely successful black strip in the over one hundred year history of the medium. So in that sense, it would the argument would be, you know, no, it's probably successful in spite of it being a black strip. The Boondocks is a classic, and black cartoonists, non white cartoonists in general, are routinely passed over for wide syndication awards and recognition to this day. Again, for every time that a comic syndicate has taken what they consider to be a risk, they take ten boring comics by white guys about household pets or literally nothing. Finally, I want to discuss the comic that was most directly influenced and was originally picked up off of Cathy's success, Lynn Johnston's For Better or for Worse, launched in nineteen seventy nine in the Universal Press Syndicate, partially off the strength of Kathy's success in that same syndicate, starting in nineteen seventy six. Johnson was a trained Canadian artist that had worked in animation and as a medical artist, and got her start in strips while she was pregnant and drew single panel cartoon for her obstetrician's office. This collection later got published as a book called David We're Pregnant in nineteen seventy three, leading to a contract with the Universal Press Indicate that was for twenty years. That is some scientology shit. An early friend and mentor to Johnston was Charles Schultz of Peanuts. He was also an early advocate for Kathy Guyswighte and was known to mentor younger comic creators and provide support for people who were relatively new to the medium. Upon accepting her twenty year contract, one of the first people who called Lynn Johnston was wait for it, it was Kathy. Kathy called her. Here's Lynn Johnston talking about that in twenty nineteen to interviewer Bob Andelman, I mean, what a great group of people, and we all got to know each other quite well. In fact, Kathy was the first person I talked to. Lee gave me her home phone number, and she was gracious enough to have a nice long conversation and sort of tell me how she worked the way she managed. I mean, coming up with ideas is the one thing we all ask each other about. I mean, how do you do it? Where do you do it? Sparky Schultz used to sit and doodle on yellow legal pads, but I like to sit on a couch with a coffee and a pad on my lap. And Kathy said the thing that helped her the most was to write vignettes as if she was writing for a play, like a short, a short, four panel play. And I found that work the best for me. And you want to just make clear what Kathy we're talking about. Yeah, the guys who has done called Kathy for many, many, many years and also suggested I not call the strip the Johnston's because she said, I have really wondered if it was a good idea to call the strip Kathy because she was so closely connected to it. And really, I mean, even if the characters look like you or your family's all, it's all pretty well made up. I love it. I love Kathy. Okay, for better or for worse follows. The Patterson family primarily stressed out matriarch Ellie Patterson who is the wife to Sweetie Pie, dentist John and mother to Michael, Elizabeth, and eventually April Patterson. In nineteen ninety one, Lynn Johnston takes a pretty different tack to Kathy guys White when exploring the anxieties of boomer women, though many of those anxieties are the same. For Better or for Worse was much more mellow and realistic in tone than Kathy's more manic achisms. Ellie Patterson goes through periods of feeling bad about her body, often postpartum. There's a strip from the eighties that shows three silent panels of Ellie trying to put on her pre pregnancy pants, looking at herself in the mirror, looking at herself in a bathing suit, and in the final strip, her well meaning husband looks at a vacation brochure and says, yes, sir, if there's one thing I'm looking forward to when this cruise were taken, it's the bood. Ellie looks at him blankly, knowing that he doesn't get it. I've read quite a bit of For Better for Worse and I like it. Ellie Patterson is more or less the woman that Kathy was told she needed to be. She's a supermom, a loving wife and daughter who is trying to have a career on top of it all, and this seems pretty firmly rooted in Johnston's own experiences as a wife, mother, and career woman. But Ellie's career is very start and stop, depending on the state of her family. At the beginning of the strip, she works as a dental assistant in her husband's office, then gets a job at a library, loses that job, starts a part time job at a bookstore, and her husband eventually buys the bookstore for her to run. Things end well for her, but unlike Kathy, Ellie is a family before career woman, not too uncommon for the funny pages, but again it's Lynn Johnston's lived experience that gives the strip dimension. Ellie is constantly second guessing her life choices in spite of being generally pretty happy. Is she not being a good enough modern woman? Is wanting more for herself? Inherently selfish, She's by no means a passive, happy housewife. She's constantly trying and often failing, to find a better balance in her life. Here's a strip from the early nineties to that effect. Ellie is returning to work after having her third child and thinks to herself the following, I haven't reviewed a book for weeks. I wonder how my typing is. I wonder if the girl who's replaced me as doing a good job. Is she doing better? Do they miss me? I feel lost at work. I had my identity, I had a title that meant something. Her daughter, Elizabeth walks up to her desk, says, hi, mom, and hugs her. Ellie thinks this to herself in the final panel, and again, maybe I still do. And Lynn Johnston did more than just the comic strips. She also served as the president of the National Cartoonist Society in the nineties. You know that organization that refused to admit women at all until nineteen fifty one. And you won't believe this, but she wasn't always treated with respect there. Here's how she describes her experience with the old Guard of Cartoonists in that twenty nineteen interview. Well, at one point I was actually president in National Cartoonists Society, and they would draw naked pictures of me as I'm trying to conduct a meeting, right, But I drew a few naked pictures of my own and got back at them. But you know, it was hard. They kind of preferred that I would make them coffee and serve them tea and not really run the meeting. In the long run, sorry, in the long run, when it comes right down to it, we really like each other, We really care for each other, and I know that they like me. So it's water under the bridge. But at the time, if you're trying to conduct a meeting, put that pencil down. Johnston went on to become the first woman and Canadian to ever win the Reuben Award in nineteen eighty five, a full thirty nine years after it started to be given out. The second woman to win that award was Kathy Geiswhite in nineteen ninety two. Johnston was also a finalist to win a Pulitzer Prize for a coming out story that ran in the comic strip in the early nineties at the height of the AIDS epidemic, when no other artists in the Funnies besides maybe Gary Trudell would touch it. She's spoken out over the years on being a survivor of child abuse, domestic abuse, and feeling unprepared to have a child for the first time. For Better for Worse was a well loved, quietly subversive comic with a well loved, quietly subversive creator, and the work still holds up. Two conclude where Kathy falls in boundary push and comics very much depends on what lens you're using. On the pages of the Funnies, she represented the beginning of a resurgence of women in nationally syndicated strips talking about their own experiences, a surge that hadn't been seen for around fifty years. If you use women's comics as a yardstick, it's a reminder that Kathy was far from one of the radical voices that shaped the underground movement. Again, the role to Kathy character serves was as an observer of how things were for women like her at the time, not an attempt to shift the norm. Okay, Kathy, you can come out now. You didn't talk about Dalebird? No, I didn't. I decided to love myself again? Or Ziggy? Is he cool? We fucked? Don't talk much anymore, Kathy. You really do fuck, don't you? I really do, I really really do. Okay, we'll be talking more about the comics and comic artists who came after Kathy in a future episode, and the explosion in new voices that came to the forefront when zines and the Internet became the norm, and how the Funnies lagged so far behind that they've arguably become kind of irrelevant in their time and the format where they appeared. Kathy and for Better or for Worse found their strength in showing women who were not particularly subverting expectations, but we're doing their best in a world where they were never supposed to have at all. But for all the airtime Boomers were given in the newspapers, they went on to become one of the country's most despised generations of all time, by me specifically, but by others too. And that's what we're talking about next episode, Kathy and the boomer generation's journey from young radicals to Reagan era yuppies to a generation that even now can't let go of power. We'll talk about the generation at large and to a series of boomer women your Mommy's about their journey in the workplace, and of course we'll talk to our girl, Kathy. That's in two weeks on ac Cast. Ac Cast is an iHeartRadio production hosted, written and researched by me Jamie Loftus. The show is executive produced by the wonderful Sophie Lichtermann, edited by the wonderful Isaac Taylor. Music is by Zoe Blade and our theme from Brad Dickert. Voices you heard today include my Mother. Also includes Joel Smith, Caitlin Durante, and Jackie Michelle Johnson as Kathy. This has been the first half of Act cast. We are taking next week off for you to just soak it in, and we'll be back with the remainder of the show a week from Monday. Bye.

Welcome back to ac cast. I am your host, Jamie Loftus, and I've made it three whole nights without a large two D Kathy cartoon appearing at the foot of my bed and threatening my one human life. We'll take the winds where we can get them. In Part one of this episode, we explored the women who preceded Kathy, guyswhite in the comic strip industry, who were frequently erased, as well as the radicals who worked in underground comics that's c O, M, M, I X, thank you very much, while Kathy was getting her start in the far more restrictive national funny pages. In Part two, I want to feature four of her contemporaries, all boomers with one exception, whose strips had missions similar to Kathy's, with very different approaches that goal to document the day to day struggles of the boomer generation. The difference is all about who is being put into focus on that mission. Our first artist came straight out of the women's comic scene, far from the mainstream funny pages. So let's get the theme song going right. She burst into the world in nineteen seventy six. She's at what she's out on dates and she don't like politics from Mama and herb and two with feminist friends. She's fighting all the stands with some chocolate and hair. Cathe she's fighting back to stressed with success. Let's call her some slack oh Cathey my Cathy, fun Cather, She's gotta like going on. The biggest star to come out of women's comics was, hands down, Alison Bechtel, who's now a MacArthur Genius Award recipient. She's the author of books like fun Home and Are You My Mother? Fun Home was turned into a huge Broadway musical also, but that ascent to the top was a slow and challenging one, and one that women's comics helped lift Early in her career. She first appeared in issues in the nineteen eighties. Beckdel established herself as a cartoonist through her independent comic strip Dikes to Watch Out For, which ran in local feminist newspaper Woman News beginning in nineteen eighty three and was eventually syndicated in other all weekly papers beginning in nineteen eighty five. Most famously, a comic of two characters discussing the lack of women speaking to each other in popular movies led to the coining of the Bechdel Test, popular media metric that requires that two women need to speak to each other about something other than a man for two lines of dialogue to pass the test. Some people we've even started podcasts about this, I've heard. Although it is just a jumping off point for discussion, I'm sure it's funny because the context of that comic is two lesbian characters frustrated that women I ever speak to each other in movies, meaning that lesbian audience members couldn't ship them together. So it's also a strip about a lack of queer representation as well. Anyways, here's Bechdel and an introduction for a two thousand and eight publication of the comics entire run, explaining why she started the strip. Readers seemed to like it and egged me on. But to be honest, it was so comforting to see my queer life reflected back at me. I would have kept drawing these dikes to watch out for just for myself. Let me tell you, my friends, those were benighted times. Despite what my mother thought about my lesbianism, being an Outdike was not an easy row to hoe. We had no L word, we had no lesbian daytime TV hosts. We had no openly lesbian daughters of the creepy vice President. We had personal best and we liked it. I saw my cartoons as an antidote to the prevailing image of lesbians as sick, humorless, and undesirable, our model, like Olympic pent athletes, objective fodder for the mail gays. By drawing the everyday lives of women like me, I hope to make lesbians more visible, not just to ourselves but to everyone. If people could only see us, how could they help but love us. Dikes To Watch Out For has an expansive cast of characters who aged in real time for the twenty five years that the comic ran in a fictional city whose world reflected the reality of the US at that time. The comics protagonist is mo Testa, a radical leftist lesbian who's trying to navigate building a life for herself while upholding her values. Her achilles heel is a tendency to complain about everything, and she works at a lesbian feminist bookstore where we meet most of our other characters. There's Clarice, an environmental lawyer, and most college x who's in a long term relationship and eventually marries Tony, a CPA. They later have a kid together as well. There's Lois, a drag king who encourages everyone to be more accepting. There's Ginger, the eternal grad student Sparrow who runs a battered women's shelter and eventually comes out as a by sexual lesbian. There's Moe's girlfriend Sidney, and there's Jisanna, who owns and runs the bookstore. Not only is this comic really good, it touches on so many issues, issues relevant to queer people, to women, to boomers in general. Just like Kathy chronicled the week to week worries of a number of white, middle class boomer ladies, Beckdel's work does the same for the lesbian community over the course of decades, and while Beckdel herself is a white lesbian, she makes a concerted effort to show the diversity of her community in race, gender, sexuality, and ability. One of the early taboo topics that newspaper comics wouldn't have been able to touch with a ten foot poll was the AIDS crisis, which Beckdel has her characters talk about frankly in the eighties and even works to correct some of the popular myths around the disease. Here's a strip from nineteen eighty seven with Moe and Lois. Lois has just had unprotected sex, Mos as Lois, you can't just go around betting every woman you meet. Haven't you heard there's an epidemic going on, ah, Mo, relax. Lesbians are a low risk group. I'm not going to get AIDS from sleeping around with other women, Lois. Being a doesn't mean you can't get AIDS. This conversation continues, with Mo overreacting and demanding Lois b celibate. Lois refuses. Then Ginger shows up and diffuses the situation by telling Lois that of course she can have sex, but while gay men were at higher risk for AIDS, that didn't mean that she wasn't obligated to practice safe sex. And it all manages to be funny somehow. It's great Mo and her friends experience the world in real time. The whole gang goes to a kiss in to protest anti gay laws at the Real March on Washington in nineteen eighty seven. Clarice and Tony struggle to have their union formally recognized four years whether it's issues allowing Clarice to formally adopt her son that they have through artificial insemination, or by having their eventual marriage recognized in states where gay people still could not marry at that time. Trans characters enter the story as well. Mo is stupendously turfy at the start of one storyline that's short for trans exclusionary radical feminist and they can say it with me flock right off to hell. In this storyline, a transwoman new to the bookstore wants to join Moe's book club, and mo Is hesitant to include her. Lois educates Mo and tells her that she's being a bigoted asshole, and Mo changes her perspective much later in the comic. There is also a trans teen coming out story from the early two thousands in which Lois's partner's daughter navigates gender dysphoria, coming out to her mom, and becoming a young transactivist. The economic trends of these years are shown as well, when the independent bookstore that everyone works at closes due to a big box store coming to town. Mo's girlfriend survives breast cancer. They attend anti war protests for every war that takes place between the eighties and the late two thousands, so quite a few. Because Bechtel's characters had all kinds of different opinions on politics and pop culture, Dikes to Watch out For was able to challenge schisms within the queer community, within political parties, within friend groups. Here's a conversation between Ginger and Lois from nineteen ninety three about their frustration with white gay men being quicker to be embraced by pop culture than queer women. Ginger says, news flash. A recent sex survey of twenty somethings revealed that among men who fantasize about celebrities, Cindy Crawford and Demi Moore rank high. Women opt for Luke Perry and President Clinton, while gay men tapped Markie Mark and Tom Cruise period end of paragraph. Do you think that means lesbians don't fantasize about celebrities or they don't answer surveys? How come men get to be totally queer but women don't. I'm sick of being portrayed as some straight slob's porno fantasy and on paper, Kathy and dikes to watch out For sound and are extreme different, but at their core their goal is pretty similar. It's for their authors to pull from their own lives as boomer women to comment on the world around them, on the changing politics and standards of the US at the end of the twentieth century. It's their perspectives and where they published that are different. While Alice and Bechdel, an outspoken queer, feminist and leftist, could talk about almost anything she wanted and addressed topics that were still a taboo in the mainstream, the tradeoff was that less people would see it, and she would make a fraction of the money her funny paid colleagues dead. Kathy was always beholden to the editors of the United Press Syndicate and the individual papers that carried her work. The trade off for her more money and more eyeballs. But good luck if you happen to want to vote for Michael Ducaucus. The mainstream papers were not ready for Alice and Bechdel, and certainly not for the women of women's comics, but they hold a very important place in women's comic art, and in the case of Bechdel and Trina Robbins, are finally getting their inside note. Even Alison Bechdeal made a jab at Kathy and a strip of hers Mo's ex Harriet is like reading a newspaper in the Sunday Funnies with a Kathy comic and the four panels Beckdal puts in our Kathy saying diet by over read ak yeah, yeah, take a number. That is so insulting. I am so sorry she did that. Kathy. Alison Beckdale has spoken about the power of telling one's own story and her similarities to her protagonist Mo and a talk in twenty fifteen. I didn't see images anywhere of women who looked like me and my friends, so I decided I would just make them myself. Another thing I really liked about working with words and pictures together was the fact that cartoons were lowbrow. They were accessible and populist, and they didn't get scrutinized the way that fine art or literary writing or criticized in the same way. I was very insecure as a young person after all those rejection letters. I always liked being an outsider as a lesbian. It gave me a certain objectivity about how the world worked that I would lose if I were on the inside and benefiting tremendously from the system. But I also, of course yearned on some deep level to just the normal, to just have everything. That'd be such a big deal for my queerness to be seen as normal. Indics to watch out for. Alison Bechdel and Mo aren't the same person, but Moe is a tool for Bechdel to say what she thought. Same guest for Kathy. Guys white and Kathy, I want them to hang out. I'd consider it. Okay, Relax now, I want to take a look at some of Kathy's contemporaries from inside the Funny Pages. All from the Universal Press indicate Gary Trudeau of Douansbury, Lynn Johnston of For Better or for Worse, and Aaron McGruder of The Boondocks. All three of these writers made strides in the Funny Pages, and as you know by now, it's not really an easy medium to take strides in. We're talking mostly about strips that pushed against the norm in this series, but it's important to remember what that norm was. It's indisputable that for the majority of American comic strip history there have been more strips about household pets by white guys. However, beloved Garfield stand here, than there were marginalized people working in the Funny Pages. Well, into the nineteen eighties. Even when comic strips were not actively hostile to women, queer people, and non white people, they were disproportionately centered around white boys and men or traditional family values. Family Circus is a comic that I'm pretty sure is completely built around white children misunderstanding various words. Andy Kapp was a character famous for beating his wife. Dilbert had some commentary on nineteen nineties office culture while also serving as a proto in cell Beetle Bailey was war propaganda with gags. Oh, and there was The Farside, which still fucking rocks. But most beloved strips like Peanuts and Calvin and Hobbes are classic childhood tales with larger casts, but centered on the childhood experiences of white boys in the middle class, which, to be fair, is how Gary Trudeau's Dunesbury starts. Dunesbury is the rare comic strip that has been pretty intellectualized since it debuted back in nineteen seventy. Creator Gary Trudeau is the son of a legacy family of doctors from Saranac Lake, New York. Went to a private New Hampshire High School and then Yale, where he started writing a comic strip called bull Tails, which was an early version of Doonesbury. While Doonesbury would later become synonymous with political commentary and satire, it started and in many ways remained semi autobiographical and pulled from the life experiences of the people Trudeau was surrounded by. Here's what he said to PBS News Hour in twenty ten about the beginnings of Dunesbury. Well, I think what it began as a kind of diary of my generation coming of age became the main driving force behind it. It's just inherently fun watching a generation evolved, to see to see what it's meant. That's what you've always thought about it. I'm going to watch my generation evolved, I think. So. I don't think it was I had quite such a grandiose take on it. I was just trying to get through the day and create a series of jokes and meet a series of deadlines. But I think looking back on it, that's that's that's pretty much what it became. It was certainly marketed that way. What's that do you say? Another comic strip that was a chronicle of boomer life over the course of decades. In nineteen seventy, at age twenty two, the Universal Press indicates signed Trudeaux On had him change the name of the comic from bull Tails to Dunesbury, and it was off to the races. Dunesbury began with a relatively small casp that would expand rapidly in the fifty years that followed, and much like Alice and Bechdel's characters in Dice to watch out for, Trudeau's characters aged in real time and some of them even die. Even as someone who would rather cut my own head off than hand it an ivy league educated white guy from a rich family, I do have to hand it to Gary Trudeau. Dunesbury is maybe the riskiest, boldest work in the funny pages in the twentieth century. It's pretty punk and you don't need to just take my word for it. Aaron Recruiter, creator of The Boondocks, who we'll be talking about in a bit, has regularly credited Trudeau as his biggest influence. Its beginnings are pretty innocuous. We meet Mike Dunesbury, a hippie womanizer of a college student, b d the quarterback, Mark Slackmeyer, the radical, and Zonker, the stoner student who joins the football team and pisses bad off endlessly, so kind of another strip for the boy, it seemed like at first, but the comic made political commentary right away. Many of the students at Trudeau's fictional Walden College were firmly anti Vietnam Smoked Weed, and Trudeau commented on his strong anti war feelings and criticism of protest and activism through his different characters. As the comic continued, the cast widened and became more inclusive to better comment on the movements that were on fire in the seventies. Commentary on Black American activism told through the law student turned congressional candidate Jinny, Feminist activism through Jinny and her eventual roommate Joanie, who left her husband and children when Mike and Mark drove past on their motorcycle and offered to let her live on their commune. Joanie's one of my favorite characters, and she's featured heavily in the Dunesbury special from nineteen seventy seven, where we see her working to make ends meet at a day care center with a bunch of young girls who were reacting to the second wave feminist movement and feeding them and picking a back of them mostping to fight. Yes, but I'm getting paid for it? How much not? In Nut Honey, the strip touches on boomer women who were raised to be housewives discovering their personal power through the character Boopsie b D's quote unquote cheerleader bimbo girlfriend who goes on to build a successful career as an actress and remains very happy in her marriage. B D enlists in Vietnam thinking he was being patriotic in his early twenties, only to befriend a member of the Vietcong and questioned the war himself. Andy Lippencott was an early out gay character in the comic from Og character Mark later in the strip. In its heyday, Doonesbury caused a lot of controversy, either for its political commentary or by representing people who were simply not accepted by the media of the day. In the newspaper Funnies a shortlist of Doonesbury controversies, Let's get the Music started. The Washington Post ran an editorial criticizing Doonesbury character Mark for calling Nixon guilty, guilty, guilty during Watergate. Trudeau got in trouble for implying that two forty year olds were having premarital sex. In nineteen seventy six, he got busted for criticizing tobacco companies for refusing to acknowledge the link between cancer and cigarettes. John McCain once said on the floor of the Senate in nineteen ninety five, suffice it to say that I hold Trudeau in utter contempt. When Doonesbury criticized Bob Dole, Hunter s Thompson, Santa Gary, Trudeau a bag full of his own shit and a classic. He got in trouble for saying son of a bitch. So yeah, it was a lot, and there were a few misfires thematically from Doonesbury, but for the most part, the strip does a great job at pissing off government conservatives. So a victim was crime. So yes, Trudeau had dealt with his comic being moved from the funnies to the op ed page of newspapers repeat seatedly over his fifty year tenure, usually when his subject matter went against the political leanings of the paper it was being printed in, or upset readers. But you don't have to cry for him. Trudeau is maybe one of the most decorated comic strip artists of all time. In fact, he became the first strip cartoonist to win the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning for his Watergate series, and was a Pulitzer finalist again in nineteen ninety, two thousand four, and two thousand and five. That nineteen seventy seven Doonesbury special I played a clip of that was nominated for an Academy Award in nineteen seventy eight. So for all the risks that Trudeau took, a lot of them paid off, and the strip is still well regarded today. Doonesbury was so much the intellectual's comic strip that Kathy Geiswite references it in a strip from the late seventies of Kathy. Kathy is talking to Andrea and the strip and says, this man happens to be very bright. He says he reads Doonesbury every day. Andrea shrugs and says, big deal. Millions of people read Sberry every day. Kathy melts, She's like in full crush mode, and she says, yeah, but he understands it every day. So this was like smart people content, and I could talk about Dudesbury for much longer. How Trudeau taking a hiatus in eighty three and eighty four and returning with his characters aged up as boomers who would shed their activists past and become sellout adults. Was completely inspired or how I can't stand the illustration style, or how early the strip was to denouncing Trump, or Janie's radical career, or Mike Doonesbury's turn as a single father, or the comics pivoting to the millennial children of the original characters over time. But what Doonesbury does stand for is proof that the Funny Pages could say a lot in the seventies. As a white Ivy League guy, Trudeau had less to lose than many of his counterparts, He took a lot of risks, He moved the medium forward in many ways, and he was rewarded handsomely for it. By ninety nine there had been a lot of boundaries pushed in comics. Doonesbury made political commentary in The Funny Pages Pulitzer worthy and inspired many impostors and women cartoonists like Kathy and Lynn Johnston had found a foothold in the industry and the money to back it up. But the Funnies were and always had been extremely white and center liberal, too conservative in their politics. Enter the Boondocks by Aaron McGruder, a comic about black socialist nine year old Huey Freeman and his brother, the gangster rap obsessed Riley, moving to a predominantly white neighborhood in Maryland with their granddad. Other characters regular in the strip are Jasmine, a naive by racial child of lawyers, one black and one white, who believe in the democratic establishment and are constantly at odds with Huey, and Michael Caesar, who is Huey's best friend, also a black socialist, but has a brighter outlook on the future of the world. And if you haven't read The Boondocks, which ran in papers with the Universal Press indicate from nineteen ninety nine two thousand and six, just turn off the podcast and go read some or the animated series, which is also great, is streaming on HBO Max. This is a clip from the pilot of that show, which is also pulled from the comics. Excuse me, everyone, I have a brief announcement to make Jesus was black, Ronald Reagan was the devil, and the government is lying about ninety eleven. Thank you for your time, and good night dad. That's the tone of the Boondocks, black radicalism is in its DNA, and as much as his readers loved it, old guard comic publishers were afraid of it. Aaron mcgruder's journey into the newspaper was distinctly gen x. He began publishing it online at hitlist dot com in nineteen ninety six, and it was extremely popular. But when the still college student wanted to take it nationally, he was met with a ton of resistance from the traditional comic syndicates. This is from a Washington Post piece on the topic by Lena O'Neill Parker in nineteen ninety seven, almost two years before the Universal Press Indicate finally gave it the green light. Now he wants to take it national, but things are a little too edgy in the Boondocks to suit the cartoon syndicators. McGruder has submitted The Boondocks to seven of the nine major comic strip syndicates and has gotten some praise and encouragement in return, but six, including the Washington Post Writers Group, have turned him down so far. Too angry, too college oriented, one syndicator said, too confrontational, said another. Amy Lago, executive editor for Comic Art at United Media says it's a conservative market. There are complaints among edgier readers or cartoonists who would like to do edgier material that everything on the newspaper comic page is milktoast. It becomes very difficult for newspapers to take chances anymore. Lago says there's too much chance that enough readers will come playing about the subject matter of the strip and they'll threaten to cancel their subscription. The real criticism McGruder believes is that his strip is too black, and it doesn't seem like McGruder was wrong. All of the syndicates who rejected the Boondocks told him not to change a thing. It's just that the world wasn't ready for it, as if these people had no control over whether they could syndicate the strip or not. In nineteen ninety seven, there were only four nationally syndicated black cartoonists, and those numbers have not improved that much over time. After years of this rejection and patronizing responses from the white higher ups who refused to carry a black socialist cartoon in spite of its huge audience, the Universal Press syndicate Home of Dunsberry and Kathy, Finally we picked it up. Unlike Gary Trudeau, Aery mcgruder's journey to being a comic strip star was met with constant barriers to entry, in spite of the fact that their missions to talk about issues that affected them in an explicit and political way weren't dissimilar at all. But the Boondocks took off in the papers, immediately criticizing the then massive culture of gangster rapp through Riley's character, the hollow nationalism and warmongering the came after nine to eleven, the entire concept of working within the system and the different ways that Huey, Riley and their granddad navigated a world of racist, micro and macro aggressions at school, in their neighborhood, and in the media they consumed, and McGruder had a lot of controversies as well. Let's cue the music again. Newspapers pulled a strip of Huey calling a tipline to report Ronald Reagan for funding terrorism after nine to eleven. The strip was also pulled for a calling Condoleeza Rice a quote female Darth Vader type that seeks a loving mate to torture. Unquote. Strips got pulled or moved to the op ed section when Huey criticized black Conservative commentator Larry Elder Beet got mad when the Boondogs made fun of their repeated failures to connect with black audiences, and one of my favorites. There was a lot of criticism of mcgruder's ribbon and flaggy propaganda comics made after nine eleven to mock strips that were going whole uncritical nationalists instead of examining the war that George W. Bush was starting for no reason. Okay, we can stop the music. And again, there were some misfires within the strip. For example, the way that the strip treated Whitney Houston through her addiction was very cruel. But mcgruder's controversies generally mirror Trudeau's in that they intentionally pissed the establishment publishing his work all the way off. But he didn't get the Pulitzers or establishment recognition that Trudeau had, and given how much racism he'd been subjected to in the pursuit of getting published nationally in the first place, it is easy to guess why that may be. What the establishment couldn't take were the sheer number of people who loved the comic and Huey Freeman, and much of this has to do with its successful marketing crossover into an animated series on Adult Swim that ran from two thousand and six to twenty fourteen, with mcgruder's close involvement, including a role as head writer. That was a major component of mcgruder's choice to not return to the strip in two thousand and six, in spite of the universal press indicate begging him to return. Here he is in nineteen ninety nine, as the comic was becoming a cultural phenomenon. On Charlie Rose, Sorry, and he's speaking about the challenges of working in the medium. That's a tough question. I mean some people said, well, did you get were you just picked up because it was a black strip? And is that why it's I'm just positive that's all these other things first, right, No, I mean, but does it breakthrough because of that? But you know, I mean, let's we had you know, this is a it is certainly a black strip. You know, there is nothing in comics history to indicate that it is at all benefit to be a black cartoonist or to do a black strip. Those cartoonists that I mentioned again, Rob Armstrong is the biggest and distribution. He's in over three hundred papers, and he's been doing it for over ten years. And you want to compare that to the Peanuts or Calvin Howes, which each which are each in two thousand, two hundred papers. So there has been no hugely successful black strip in the over one hundred year history of the medium. So in that sense, it would the argument would be, you know, no, it's probably successful in spite of it being a black strip. The Boondocks is a classic, and black cartoonists, non white cartoonists in general, are routinely passed over for wide syndication awards and recognition to this day. Again, for every time that a comic syndicate has taken what they consider to be a risk, they take ten boring comics by white guys about household pets or literally nothing. Finally, I want to discuss the comic that was most directly influenced and was originally picked up off of Cathy's success, Lynn Johnston's For Better or for Worse, launched in nineteen seventy nine in the Universal Press Syndicate, partially off the strength of Kathy's success in that same syndicate, starting in nineteen seventy six. Johnson was a trained Canadian artist that had worked in animation and as a medical artist, and got her start in strips while she was pregnant and drew single panel cartoon for her obstetrician's office. This collection later got published as a book called David We're Pregnant in nineteen seventy three, leading to a contract with the Universal Press Indicate that was for twenty years. That is some scientology shit. An early friend and mentor to Johnston was Charles Schultz of Peanuts. He was also an early advocate for Kathy Guyswighte and was known to mentor younger comic creators and provide support for people who were relatively new to the medium. Upon accepting her twenty year contract, one of the first people who called Lynn Johnston was wait for it, it was Kathy. Kathy called her. Here's Lynn Johnston talking about that in twenty nineteen to interviewer Bob Andelman, I mean, what a great group of people, and we all got to know each other quite well. In fact, Kathy was the first person I talked to. Lee gave me her home phone number, and she was gracious enough to have a nice long conversation and sort of tell me how she worked the way she managed. I mean, coming up with ideas is the one thing we all ask each other about. I mean, how do you do it? Where do you do it? Sparky Schultz used to sit and doodle on yellow legal pads, but I like to sit on a couch with a coffee and a pad on my lap. And Kathy said the thing that helped her the most was to write vignettes as if she was writing for a play, like a short, a short, four panel play. And I found that work the best for me. And you want to just make clear what Kathy we're talking about. Yeah, the guys who has done called Kathy for many, many, many years and also suggested I not call the strip the Johnston's because she said, I have really wondered if it was a good idea to call the strip Kathy because she was so closely connected to it. And really, I mean, even if the characters look like you or your family's all, it's all pretty well made up. I love it. I love Kathy. Okay, for better or for worse follows. The Patterson family primarily stressed out matriarch Ellie Patterson who is the wife to Sweetie Pie, dentist John and mother to Michael, Elizabeth, and eventually April Patterson. In nineteen ninety one, Lynn Johnston takes a pretty different tack to Kathy guys White when exploring the anxieties of boomer women, though many of those anxieties are the same. For Better or for Worse was much more mellow and realistic in tone than Kathy's more manic achisms. Ellie Patterson goes through periods of feeling bad about her body, often postpartum. There's a strip from the eighties that shows three silent panels of Ellie trying to put on her pre pregnancy pants, looking at herself in the mirror, looking at herself in a bathing suit, and in the final strip, her well meaning husband looks at a vacation brochure and says, yes, sir, if there's one thing I'm looking forward to when this cruise were taken, it's the bood. Ellie looks at him blankly, knowing that he doesn't get it. I've read quite a bit of For Better for Worse and I like it. Ellie Patterson is more or less the woman that Kathy was told she needed to be. She's a supermom, a loving wife and daughter who is trying to have a career on top of it all, and this seems pretty firmly rooted in Johnston's own experiences as a wife, mother, and career woman. But Ellie's career is very start and stop, depending on the state of her family. At the beginning of the strip, she works as a dental assistant in her husband's office, then gets a job at a library, loses that job, starts a part time job at a bookstore, and her husband eventually buys the bookstore for her to run. Things end well for her, but unlike Kathy, Ellie is a family before career woman, not too uncommon for the funny pages, but again it's Lynn Johnston's lived experience that gives the strip dimension. Ellie is constantly second guessing her life choices in spite of being generally pretty happy. Is she not being a good enough modern woman? Is wanting more for herself? Inherently selfish, She's by no means a passive, happy housewife. She's constantly trying and often failing, to find a better balance in her life. Here's a strip from the early nineties to that effect. Ellie is returning to work after having her third child and thinks to herself the following, I haven't reviewed a book for weeks. I wonder how my typing is. I wonder if the girl who's replaced me as doing a good job. Is she doing better? Do they miss me? I feel lost at work. I had my identity, I had a title that meant something. Her daughter, Elizabeth walks up to her desk, says, hi, mom, and hugs her. Ellie thinks this to herself in the final panel, and again, maybe I still do. And Lynn Johnston did more than just the comic strips. She also served as the president of the National Cartoonist Society in the nineties. You know that organization that refused to admit women at all until nineteen fifty one. And you won't believe this, but she wasn't always treated with respect there. Here's how she describes her experience with the old Guard of Cartoonists in that twenty nineteen interview. Well, at one point I was actually president in National Cartoonists Society, and they would draw naked pictures of me as I'm trying to conduct a meeting, right, But I drew a few naked pictures of my own and got back at them. But you know, it was hard. They kind of preferred that I would make them coffee and serve them tea and not really run the meeting. In the long run, sorry, in the long run, when it comes right down to it, we really like each other, We really care for each other, and I know that they like me. So it's water under the bridge. But at the time, if you're trying to conduct a meeting, put that pencil down. Johnston went on to become the first woman and Canadian to ever win the Reuben Award in nineteen eighty five, a full thirty nine years after it started to be given out. The second woman to win that award was Kathy Geiswhite in nineteen ninety two. Johnston was also a finalist to win a Pulitzer Prize for a coming out story that ran in the comic strip in the early nineties at the height of the AIDS epidemic, when no other artists in the Funnies besides maybe Gary Trudell would touch it. She's spoken out over the years on being a survivor of child abuse, domestic abuse, and feeling unprepared to have a child for the first time. For Better for Worse was a well loved, quietly subversive comic with a well loved, quietly subversive creator, and the work still holds up. Two conclude where Kathy falls in boundary push and comics very much depends on what lens you're using. On the pages of the Funnies, she represented the beginning of a resurgence of women in nationally syndicated strips talking about their own experiences, a surge that hadn't been seen for around fifty years. If you use women's comics as a yardstick, it's a reminder that Kathy was far from one of the radical voices that shaped the underground movement. Again, the role to Kathy character serves was as an observer of how things were for women like her at the time, not an attempt to shift the norm. Okay, Kathy, you can come out now. You didn't talk about Dalebird? No, I didn't. I decided to love myself again? Or Ziggy? Is he cool? We fucked? Don't talk much anymore, Kathy. You really do fuck, don't you? I really do, I really really do. Okay, we'll be talking more about the comics and comic artists who came after Kathy in a future episode, and the explosion in new voices that came to the forefront when zines and the Internet became the norm, and how the Funnies lagged so far behind that they've arguably become kind of irrelevant in their time and the format where they appeared. Kathy and for Better or for Worse found their strength in showing women who were not particularly subverting expectations, but we're doing their best in a world where they were never supposed to have at all. But for all the airtime Boomers were given in the newspapers, they went on to become one of the country's most despised generations of all time, by me specifically, but by others too. And that's what we're talking about next episode, Kathy and the boomer generation's journey from young radicals to Reagan era yuppies to a generation that even now can't let go of power. We'll talk about the generation at large and to a series of boomer women your Mommy's about their journey in the workplace, and of course we'll talk to our girl, Kathy. That's in two weeks on ac Cast. Ac Cast is an iHeartRadio production hosted, written and researched by me Jamie Loftus. The show is executive produced by the wonderful Sophie Lichtermann, edited by the wonderful Isaac Taylor. Music is by Zoe Blade and our theme from Brad Dickert. Voices you heard today include my Mother. Also includes Joel Smith, Caitlin Durante, and Jackie Michelle Johnson as Kathy. This has been the first half of Act cast. We are taking next week off for you to just soak it in, and we'll be back with the remainder of the show a week from Monday. Bye.