Chapter Seven:
Options
Imagine walking into a bookstore, hoping to find a good mystery or historical novel, and discovering that the store carries nothing but Westerns. Upon inquiry, a clerk points out that they do actually carry some mysteries, but those few he shows you, crowded on a bottom shelf together with the other non-Western titles, are printed on cheap paper without color covers. The bookstore is out of the particular mystery you want, the clerk informs you. They only ordered two copies of it, he adds, because, as everyone knows, mystery book readers don't go into bookstores. Of course, logic tells you, mystery book readers won't go into bookstores that carry only Westerns.
For roughly thirty years, this has been the situation in American comic book stores. Most people over the age of forty remember buying comic books at a drugstore or candy store, but since the 1970s, most comic books have been sold only in comic book stores. While there are exceptions, the majority of comic book stores tend to carry super her comics by the major comic publishers, Marvel and DC, with a smaller stock of super hero comics produced by independent publishers. Some of these tores may grudgingly display a few underground or experimental comics, some of which include women among their contributors. The stores are even more grudging about stocking comic books which specifically appeal to women or young girls, rightfully reasoning that girls and women don't come into comic book stores. The reason why? Mystery readers won't bother coming into a store that stocks only Westerns.
In today's comic book industry, the majority of women cartoonists are either self-published or published in black and white comic books from small presses. This is another way or saying that the majority of today's women cartoonists need to have day jobs. Self-published cartoonists consider themselves lucky if they break even, and many, like Jane Fisher, who produces the full-color girl-friendly comic WJHC, lose money with every issue, even though WJHC was picked by the MS Foundation as a comic to distribute on their Take Your daughter To Work Day.
Despite the fact that small press and self-publishing can be such a heartbreaking labor of love, there are now more women cartoonists then ever before, and their work spans the styles and genres. The commonly accepted stereotype has been that women cartoonists produce autobiographical comics. Indeed, a good many of them do, and much of their subject matter ranges from vaguely depressing to very depressing. Debbie Drechsler and Catherine Doherty even employ somber colors to compliment the moods of their stories, while Penny Moran Van Horn's tales of working-class madness are rendered in dark scratchboard. Medical illustrator Phoebe Gloeckner puts her precise drawing techniques to work in dismal tales of child abuse, while Madison Clell presents a more expressionist take on the same subject in her story of living with multiple personality disorder, Cuckoo.
Not all autobiographic comics are dark. Ellen Forney's I Was Seven in
'75 is a cheerful memoir of all the baggage that comes with growing up with hippie parents, including pot busts (the baby sitter turns in her parents) and visits to nudist camps. French Canadian cartoonist Julie Doucet relates her life adventures in a charmingly fractured English, and Canadian cartoonist Leanne Franson uses loose pen lines and subtle humor to tell stories of Montreal bisexuals. And Mary Fleener offers the reader glimpses into the life of a surfer girl/ artist/bass player in an all-girl band, all in her unique cubist style.
Artist Jill Thompson, who drew Wonder Woman for two years, follows the tradition of Gladys Parker and Tarpe Mills when she puts herself into striped purple-and-green tights, a witch's hat, and a tutu in the title role of her beautifully drawn and colored series, Scary Godmother. In her comics, which appeal to adults as much as to children, little Hannah Marie has learned how to get up on the Fright Side of her bed, and wind up on the Fright Side, where her orange-haired Scary Godmother lives, and it's always Halloween. As charming as Scary Godmother is Elizabeth Watasin's ongoing series, Charm School, about a high school for witches, fairies, and vampires, who also all happen to be lesbians.
Since Roberta Gregory and Mary Wings produced their first lesbian comic books in the 70s, lesbian cartoonists have entered the field in growing numbers, and it would be a mistake to think that they are all alike. Two of the most well known, Alison Bechdel and Diane DiMassa, work in completely different styles. Alison Bechdel's Dykes to Watch Out For are the lesbians next door, a lesbian sitcom, drawn in a warm, friendly style that would appeal to anyone except perhaps Jesse Helms. On the other hand, Diane DiMassa's Hothead Paisan, Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist, might prove a bit of a test for the average heterosexual male. In a riot of revenge fantasies, DiMassa's manic character slices, dices and purees symbols of male supremacy. Another cartoonist who is not particularly kind to heterosexual males in her comics is Jennifer Camper. Her SubGurlz are mutant lesbian superheroines who live in the New York City subways.
Like the X-Men, they each have their special powers: Liver can bring back the dead, but because she grew up underground, she needs huge amounts of toxic chemicals to keep going. Byte is so brilliant that no hair can grow on her head. When one day she wakes up with one single hair on her head, she obsesses about it for days, tying ribbons on it, trying new shampoos. The third SubGurl, Swizzle, described as "bartender and reluctant killer," is the strongest person in the world. When a man bothers her on the street, she snaps his neck, then sobs out the story to her friends: I didn't mean to! I only meant to push him away! But then his neck snapped sob! I hate it when I kill people. I always think how sad their mothers will be...
There are women cartoonists whose work doesn't fit into any categories at all. When I told Linda Medley I thought that in her comic, Castle Waiting, she stood the brothers Grimm on their heads, she added, "And I shake the loose change out of their pockets." The castle of the title is the Sleeping Beauty's castle, after the fairytale princess has departed with her prince, leaving behind various fairytale characters. In issue #3, Medley injects a note of early Christian feminist mythology into the mix, retelling the story of Saint Wilgeforte, the bearded woman saint, "Patron saint of unhappily married and independent women."
Younger and newer women cartoonists can often be found in zines, self-published comics that run the gamut from simple Xeroxed pamphlets to slick booklets produced by computer, but that all have in common very small print runs, often under one hundred. The word comes from fanzines, small self-published magazines that were originally produced by science fiction fans as far back as the 1930s, and moved into comics fandom around the late 1950s. Zines, often sold through the mail or traded for other zines, are an excellent way to get your work out to the public, as long as you don't expect to make any money at all. Multitudes of artists and writers of both sexes must indeed care more about reaching an audience than earning a living, because, according to Seth Friedman, publisher of the zine review, Factsheet 5, in 1998 there were approximately 50,000 zines being published.
The worldwide web is the newest option for cartoonists of both sexes who are less concerned about making money than with getting their work in front of the public. In an e-mail interview, Jenni Gregory echoes the problems women have in trying to get their comics into comic shops, when explaining why she puts her comic, Abby's Menagerie, online for free instead of selling it in stores: "...I'm telling this story on the web because I can't LOSE money doing it that way. From late 1995 through late 1999 I produced seventeen issues of a creator-owned print comic called DreamWalker...I didn't lose any money on those, but I didn;t make any either. I was very frustrated by the direct market (comic book stores)...the reviews were very positive (but) I just couldn't get stores to bite."
Compared to comic books, the world of newspaper strips is on another planet. The benefit of newspaper strips for women cartoonists is obvious: Women do read newspapers. There are also drawbacks: It is difficult to get accepted by the largest syndicates, which often have their own prejudices against or for certain styles. The syndicates also take as much as 50% of the cartoonists' earnings. Once accepted, the artist must often sign away the rights to her comic creation. Although the number of syndicated strips by women has risen from a low of about four in the early 90s to about twenty in 2,000, the subject matter tends to remain comparatively conservative for the above reasons, and a good many of the strips are still about families. Granted, however, that while For Better or Worse, which had its start in the 1970s, revolves around a nuclear family, today's family strips are about single, working mothers and non-traditional families, and their creators are not afraid of the F word: feminism.
One of the more creative syndicated strips is Six Chix. Six different women cartoonists, Isabella Bannerman, Margaret Shulock, Rina Piccolo, Ann Telnaes, Kathryn LeMieux, and Stephanie Piro, all share the same space on the comics page. In a comic strip version of job sharing, each cartoonist's strip appears one day a week and they take turns on Sundays.
An option that hardly existed thirty years ago is self-syndication. Self-syndicated cartoonists have the freedom to say what they want in their strips, and they get to keep their earnings. By the mid-'70s, the underground papers of the 1960s had evolved into something known as "the alternative weekly," a free tabloid, usually paid for by ads from local merchants. Most large American cities and college towns have at least one weekly newspaper. These papers are often given away in local bookstores and coffee houses, attracting a more bohemian or intellectual readership than the average daily. Today even mainstream newspapers carry self-syndicated cartoonists, so the possibility finally exists of appearing in daily papers without having to work through a syndicate. Among the self-syndicated cartoonists are Lynda Barry, Nicole Hollander, Caryn Leschen, Nina Paley, Carol Lay, and Marian Henley.
Another major drawback to newspaper strips is the size limitation. Newspapers today run their comics strips in a much smaller format than they did thirty years ago, and the result is there's no room for more than four panels at the most. Cartoonists who want to tell stories still need the comic book format, and for women cartoonists who are storytellers, and who want to reach an audience, the most promising option is the graphic novel.
Graphic novels are comics that are published in book form, with a spine, and with far more than the usual thirty two pages that make up a comic book. Although they've been around since the 80s -- I produced a graphic novel adaptation of fantasy writer Tanith Lee's The Silver Metal Lover in 1985 -- they really proliferated during the 90s, and now scores of women cartoonists publish their work in graphic novel format, or collect their comics books into that format. Bookstores and libraries, which prefer not to carry flimsy comic books, are willing to carry graphic novels. And the books sell so well that a January, 2001 article in Publishers Weekly reports return rates for graphic novels from bookstores are extremely low. Return rates for graphic novels of the popular Japanese girls' comic, Sailor Moon, are less than 5%.
Interviewed in The Ottawa Citizen, Janet Hetherington explains why she compiled the best of her comic, Eternal Romance, into graphic novel form: "Girls don't go into comic book stores, so it wasn't being seen where they would buy it. On the shelf at Chapters (a local Ottawa bookstore), my book was going to get into the hands of women comic buyers."
Hetherington is right: girls and women do read books, and do go into bookstores. Gallup poles from 1998, 1999, and 2000, report that women tend to read more books than men do and are heavy book buyers, buying seven or more books in a three month period. They are more ikely to give a book as a gift then men, and are more likely to be in a book discussion group. As for teenagers, a 1998 survey, co-sponsored by Publishers Weekly and BookExpo America, found that twenty five percent of teenage girls read for fun vs. just nine percent of teenage boys.
Today aspiring women cartoonists can turn to two organizations, neither of which existed ten years ago, for inspiration and concrete help. The Xeric Foundation (http://www.xericfoundation.com/), established by Peter Laird, co-creator of The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, gives grants to those male and female cartoonists who are brave and hardy enough to attempt self-publishing their work. Since 1992, the foundation has awarded over $915,000 in grants to a list of cartoonists that includes over fourteen women.
Friends of Lulu (www.friends-lulu.org), named for Marge Henderson's spunky little girl comic character, is an organization formed to encourage participation in comics by women and girls, both as readers and as creators. The group formed in 1994, a time when women were all but invisible in mainstream comics and comic conventions. Today Friends of Lulu has a booth at most major comic conventions, and they also hold their own yearly conventions. In a male-dominated industry, where comics are aimed at and read by a mostly male audience, it should come as no surprise that most awards given out by the industry go to the guys. To balance this out, Friends of Lulu gives annual awards, The Lulus, to women creators.
And in 2001, Friends of Lulu produced a comics anthology in graphic novel form, showcasing girl-friendly and people-friendly work by its members. The book was funded by -- what else? -- the Xeric Foundation.
In the 1950s, a conservative society pushed women out of the comics Industry, as they were pushed out of all traditionally male industries,
and put them back in the kitchen. It took a good twenty years for them to emerge again, in greater numbers than ever before. A new conservative society may again try to take away the gains of women and minorities, and return America to the white, male-dominated world of the 50s, but this time it won't work. Women cartoonists, like women and people of color in all walks of life and all professions, are not about to go away.
Our voices are being heard, and this time we won't be silenced.