Gender and sexuality have figured prominently in the development of comic books and comic strips, and women cartoonists—though relatively rare at times and in places—have been active from the earliest days of cartooning. One of the earliest strips in the world, Britain’s Ally Sloper, was drawn by Marie Duval in the 1870s.
DEVELOPMENT OF COMICS IN THE UNITED STATES
In the United States, women drew newspaper funnies within six years after the appearance of The Yellow Kid (1895), generally recognized as the first American comic strip. The works of these early “queens of cute” usually portrayed pet animals, cherubic children in nineteenth-century clothing or women decked out in curls, ruffles, and lace. Among these comics were Rose O’Neill’s Kewpies (1909), after which the famous and lucrative doll was named; Louise Quarles’s Bun’s Puns, Grace Kasson’s Tin Tan Tales for Children, and Agnes Repplier III’s “The PhilaBusters” (all 1901); and Kate Carew’s The Angel Child (1902). Other pioneering women cartoonists included Grace Gebbie Drayton, Fanny Y. Cory, Jean Mohr, Marjorie Organ, and Nell Brinkley.
Women’s cartooning skills were not isolated to newspaper funny pages; they were also visible in many of the advertisements and fashion designs of the day. One of Drayton’s accomplishments, for example, was the creation of the Campbell Kids (for Campbell Soup) advertising icons, and Brinkley’s elegant women characters set fashion trends in real life. Curlers and hair wavers were named after her, and in Broadway’s Ziegfeld Follies, a Brinkley Girl was featured. Cartoonists’ style renditions often hit a chord with women, Charles Dana Gibson’s “Gibson Girl” hairdos being a prime example. For decades, several comic strips drawn by women carried cut-out paper dolls that readers could dress.
The heyday of women’s strips coincided with or more likely resulted from, the fast, free-wheeling jazz era, a period when women won the right to vote and entered the workforce, chiefly as office workers, and the flapper epitomized one of the early sexual revolutions.
The earliest working girl comic strip was A. E. Hayward’s Somebody’s Stenog, which appeared in 1916 and featured Cam O’Flage, who worked for a nuts and bolts company. Other working girl characters were Martin Branner’s Winnie Winkle the Breadwinner(1920), Russell Branover’s Tillie the Toiler(1921), and Larry Whitington’s Fritzi Ritz (1922), a flapper turned working girl. All three were drawn by men, as were most of the flapper strips, whose female characters only had men and good times on their minds. Among the early ones, all generated by men, were The Affairs of Jane (1921), Beautiful Bab (1922), Dumb Dora (1924), Boots and Her Buddies(1924), Etta Kett (1925), Merely Margy (1929), and Blondie (1930). The flapper strip also coaxed more women into the profession. Virginia Huget did several flapper strips, including Molly the Manicure Girl (1929), Campus Capers (1928), and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, a 1926 adaptation of Anita Loos’s bestseller. A more successful woman cartoonist was Ethel Hayes with Flapper Fanny Says. Hayes passed her character on to Gladys Parker, known later for the long-lasting Mopsy. Another feature, Duley, the Beautiful Dumbbell, set in Hollywood, had its continuity credited to actress Constance Talmadge. The flapper strip faded in the 1930s when the grimness of the Depression put high fashion, flappers, playboys, and a frivolous lifestyle out of reach. They were replaced by unglamorous characters dealing with real problems, such as poor, big-hearted Apple Mary (1932) by Martha Orr, and the cheerful orphan girls, Little Orphan Annie (1924), Little Annie Rooney (1927), and Little Miss Muffet (1935).
Women cartoonists began to trespass on male terrain in the 1930s and early 1940s, when they began drawing dramatic continuity strips (Apple Mary was the first) and featuring female heroes. In the newspaper funnies, Dahlia Messick adopted the male name Dale and in 1940 created Brenda Starr, an attractive red-headed girl reporter, and in the new genre of comic books, Taupe Mills and Paddock Munson drew heroines for Adventure Comics and Amazing Mystery Funnies. Mills’ costumed Miss Fury preceded William Moulton Marston’s enduring Wonder Woman by a few months in 1941 as a comic book superheroine. Mills and Munson assumed sexually ambiguous names, as did other women (C. M. Sexton, Odin Burvik, and others) who drew action characters.
WORLD WAR II AND POST-WORLD WAR II
When American men went to war in 1942, the number of women doing comic books tripled and stayed at that level until the end of the 1940s. Some drew male superheroes, others wartime heroine characters such as Ann Brewster’s Yankee Girl or Jill Elgin’s Girl Commandos. Most exemplary in its positive treatment of women at the time was Fiction House, which had the largest female staff, many of whom were also given writing assignments. Female characters in Fiction House stories were different in that they were in charge and not just decoration or foils for heroes to admire or rescue.
After World War II, women cartoonists moved into the burgeoning fields of teen girl strips and romance comic books. Teen comics usually portrayed young girls in the family and school environments and their perpetual quests for boyfriends; they also exhibited their artists’ keen awareness of fashion and, on occasion, touched upon the gender inequality issue. Popular teen strips were Ruth Atkinson’s Patsy Walker (1944), Hilda Terry’s Teena (1941), Linda Walter’s Susie Q. Smith (1945), and Marty Links’s Bobby Soxer (1944). Characters in the workforce were cast in traditional jobs, such as Tessie the Typist (1944) or Nellie the Nurse(1945). Romance comic books, which often portrayed women desperately seeking romance or being humiliated and jilted in love affairs controlled by men, were very popular in the 1940s and 1950s; Valerie Barclay and Ruth Atkinson created many of them.
In short supply during the first half-century of U.S. comic art were black women cartoonists and female editorial cartoonists. Jackie Ormes was the first black woman cartoonist (and one of only four black cartoonists total) with her strip Torchy Brown (1937), carried in fifteen African-American newspapers. Until much later, Edwina Dumm was the only woman editorial cartoonist, beginning in 1916 on the Columbus (Ohio) Monitor.
With the drop in the comics market in the 1950s, (because of claims the books were harmful to children) and the return of women to fulltime household duties after the war, the number of women in the field dropped considerably. By the mid-1960s, when the major companies were reduced to Marvel and DC, and both concentrated on superheroes that appealed to young boys, only Marie Severin and Ramona Fradon remained in mainstream comics. In some cases, women artists would not compromise their style to draw the violent action that superhero comics demanded.
FEMINISM AND COMICS
The underground press movement of the late 1960s and 1970s brought women back to comics, although not directly. At first, women were excluded from underground comics, which sparked them to start their books, the first of which was It Ain’t Me, Babe in 1970. The Wimmen’s Comix Collective was set up, and in 1972, Wimmen’s Comix and Tits ‘n’ Clitswere published, the latter as a reaction to the sexism women saw in male-created underground comics. Much of the women’s anger was directed at Robert Crumb, whose oversized black character Angelfood McSpade was subjected to all types of unimaginable indignities.
During the last quarter of the century, women continued to draw their own stories in comic books, strips, or graphic novels. Some were very personal memoirs discussing normally taboo subjects such as menstruation, lesbianism, rape, and incest, and other sexual abuse. Others expressed women’s anger toward men, even showing scenes of castration, or detailed the mundaneness of daily life. Prominent artists among these types were Roberta Gregory, Aline Kominsky-Crumb, Alison Bechtel, Diane DiMassa, and Canadian-born Julie Doucet. Titles of some of their works, such as Dirty Plotte, Dykes To Watch Out For, Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist, and Bitchy Bitch: World’s Angriest Dyke!, left no doubt about these women’s emotions.
In the 1970s, Women’s Liberation reached mainstream comics with a new batch of superheroines such as Valkyrie, the Cat, Ms. Marvel, and Spider-Woman, but women’s readership of superhero/superheroine comics never reached appreciable heights. For example, a 1994 DC Comics survey lists only 5.9 percent female readership compared to 92.9 percent male. During the last quarter of the twentieth century, many superheroines were male-hating protagonists, professional assassins, or hyper-sexed, bloodthirsty killers. Many contemporary women comics creators opted to draw for small press publishers, such as Fantagraphics, Drawn and Quarterly, Last Gasp, and Rip Off Press, but some also draw for the mainstream. Among the latter are June Brigman, a mainstay penciler and cover artist for Marvel for more than twenty-five years; Jan Duursema, lead artist of Star Wars since 2000; Barbara Kesel, a writer, letterer, and editor since 1981; Devin Grayson, who consistently appears in top comics writers’ lists as a contract writer for DC; Gail Simone, writer for DC’s Birds of Prey, mainstream comics’ longest-running female-led comic book after Wonder Woman, and other veterans such as Ann Nocenti, Marie Severin, Colleen Doran, Amanda Conner, and Louise Simonson.
Daily newspapers and syndicates continued to have a few popular strips with women as dominant characters into the twenty-first century, notably, For Better or For Worse (1979) by Canadian Lynn Johnston, and Cathy by Cathy Guisewite (1976), both of whom have won the National Cartoonists Society’s Reuben Award. Because of the limits of mainstream syndication, some women self-syndicate with weekly newspapers, such as Lynda Barry and Nicole Hollander, or with the few comics tabloids, such as Alison Bechtel with her lesbian-focused strip.
Women’s comics in the United States have gained in stature in recent decades, not just in terms of numbers of artists, but also by the fact that women have held top executive positions (Jenette Kahn as president of DC; Diana Schutz as one of the heads of Dark Horse). The genre now has a website, Sequential Tart (www.sequentialtart.com), started in 1998; an association, Friends of Lulu, begun in 1995 by Trina Robbins; and its historian (Trina Robbins, who prefers to be called a herstorian).
OUTSIDE THE UNITED STATES
In other parts of the world, women and comics are bound together, although, for the most part, the profession is predominantly a male domain. Nearly every country of Europe has female comics creators. Claire Bretécher of France has drawn very popular satirical works, especially the strip Le Destin de Monique, started in 1983; and her countrywoman Chantal Montpellier is famous for her album Blues (1979), a critical analysis of society. In Sweden, Cecilia Torudd became an important cartoonist with her strip Ensamma Mamman (The single-parent mother) recounting her own parenting experiences in the 1970s, and Lena Ackebo is noted for her satirical comics.
Women often have been the major subjects of European comics. In England, girls and teen comic books flourished in the late 1960s and early 1970s, with as many as thirty weekly and monthly titles appearing simultaneously. By 2000, only Bunty (founded 1958) survived. Individual female characters stood out over the years, such as Jacques Tardi’s Adèle Blanc-Sec (1976), a French daily strip and graphic novel depicting a freelance writer, a character who served as a stepping stone to very real women characters later; Guido Crepax’s Valentina (1968) in Italy, a young alluring photographer modeled after American actress Louise Brooks; and England’s Modesty Blaise and Jane strips.
Latin American comics have yielded some important female characters, perhaps the most well-known of whom is Mônica, a precocious little girl created by Brazil’s Mauricio de Sousa, who established a comics empire around her. Other characters dealt with gender politics, such as Aleida, a frivolous, petty female created by Venezuela’s Vladimir Flórez (Vlado), and raw sexuality, such as Argentina’s Flopi Bach (created by Carlos Trillo, Eduardo Macias, and Garcia Seijas) who presents a disturbing portrayal of women.
In a few places in the world has gender been as prominent in comics as in Asia. Women assume roles both stereotypical and equitably modern. In the Philippines, for instance, traditional love stories with pining lasses and happy endings are the bestselling komiks; Sri Lankan sixteen-page “comics papers” and the newspaper funnies also dote on romance, sometimes with rather daring portrayals of the dress and actions of female characters. As in many instances worldwide, women are pictured in the hackneyed either/or set of good mothers/wives or dirty prostitutes/vamps.
The Amar Chitra Katha comic books of India, known for their portrayals of Indian historical and mythological stories, took many hard knocks for their portrayals of women; the national university women’s group of India reported the series emphasized for women a “home syndrome,” self-sacrifice, obedience to men, and a high fertility rate. Generally, the criticism has been that Amar Chitra Katha‘s depictions were based on the ancient Hindu code of manu that stated “good” women were mothers and wives ready to sacrifice their all for their men; “evil” women were bold and arrogant adventuresses, all of whom came to a deserved end. Indian comics can be categorized as portraying women as goddesses, demon, warrior, victim, and companion.
Thai comics treat mothers and wives as non-sexual beings and men as desirous of multiple sexual encounters. A favorite topic of Thai comic books is domestic violence, a major problem in Thailand, but the abuse is committed by strong, sometimes enormous, women wielding Saks (pestles) as they beat or threaten weakly, emasculated husbands. In Thai, sak, and khrok (mortar) represent male and female sex organs, respectively; thus, a woman with a pestle suggests a phallus-wielding female. Also, wives are portrayed as short, stocky, unattractive women with big mouths; unmarried women have hourglass figures and gentle personalities. Gender problems are common topics of Indonesian comics (especially newspaper strips) because they and social hierarchy issues are safer topics than politics.
In Japan and Korea, comics are bisected by gender, to the extent that there is even one Seoul comics store exclusively for women. Girl’s comics called shoujo manga in Japan and soonjung manhwa in Korea, also treat romance and sexuality but are concerned with much more, including every type of human relationship, as well as areas such as sports, everyday life, history, horror, and science fiction. Shoujo manga has more freedom than soonjung manhwa to deal with sexual taboos such as rape, sadomasochism, and the Lolita complex (sex associated with young girls). In Japan, comics for women and girls are prevalent enough to be subdivided into shoujo, redikomi (ladies’), and young ladies, or simply, those dealing with before marriage, after marriage, and before and after marriage, respectively, although the boundaries between the three are vague. Redikomi manga, which is increasing in number, appeal to the increasing number of career women, presenting women’s desires when they are no longer girls and offering them alternate role models. They differ from shoujo in that they give a realist perspective on women’s lives, for example, by visualizing the theme of sexuality using adult women’s bodies and sometimes dealing with social issues. Young ladies’ comic books, catering to women in the age group of late teens through twenties, came about in the late 1980s and 1990s. A favorite topic of these comics is the various types of love affairs a woman might have.
Shoujo and soonjung manhwa also are different from Western comic books in several ways, especially in that they are produced and consumed by women, some of whom have gained much respect and financial reward. Korea’s Kim Hyerin won the prestigious cartoonist of the year award in 2003; Rumiko Takahashi, who has sold more than 100 million copies of her manga, including Maison Ikkoku(1986) and Ranma 1/2 (1989), maybe the richest woman in Japan.
In both Japan and South Korea, women make up a large part of the comics’ audience. A 2000 survey in Japan found that 42 percent of women surveyed between the ages of twenty and forty-nine and 81 percent of teenage girls read manga regularly. More than 100 manga titles target the female audience; the largest, Ribbon, has a monthly paid circulation of more than one million. Popular are manga with homosexual content. A survey of 2,005 Koreans conducted in 2003 reported women were more experienced manhwa purchasers than men, that soonjung was the most preferred genre (21.6 percent), and that Korean authors (49.5 percent) were more popular than Japanese (46.4 percent). The figures show that still there is a considerable affinity for Japanese manga, which is understandable since Korean girls comics began with imitative copies or pirated reprints of shoujo.
The keen interest Japanese and Korean females have taken in comics has spread to girls and women in other parts of Asia—where, until recently, comics reading was mainly a male activity—and abroad, were girls, all but abandoned by U.S. comics publishers, have become voracious readers of Japanese (and now, Korean) girls’ comics.
Images of women in cartooning are expected to change considerably as more women enter the field. The number in Asia is slowly increasing, with many in Japan and Korea (women make up 40 percent of the Korean comic artists’ pool); until recently, fewer than a dozen in China, although the number is increasing as the manga wave crests; and others who have gained prominence in Malaysia (Cabai, who has a magazine namesake), Pakistan (Nigar Nazar), and elsewhere. The three most productive komiks (comic books) writers in the Philippines for years have been women—Elena Patron, Nerissa Cabral, and Gilda Olvidado.
Generally, the role of women in comics worldwide has not been a dominant one. Men usually have written and drawn the comics and have managed the corporations that produce them; they have also been the ones who created the often stereotyped female images. But there have been exceptions, such as in the post-1970 United States, in Japan and South Korea, and elsewhere, where women cartoonists have created their types of comics and characters and have attempted to give a more realistic perspective of the female psyche.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Franzen, Monika, and Nancy Ethiel. 1988. Make Way! 200 Years of American Women in Cartoons. Chicago: Chicago Review Press.
Horn, Maurice. 2001. Women in the Comics, revised edition. Philadelphia: Chelsea House.
Lent, John A. 2005. Cartooning in Latin America. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press.
Robbins, Trina. 1993. A Century of Women Cartoonists. Northampton, MA: Kitchen Sink Press.
Robbins, Trina. 1996. The Great Women Superheroes. Northampton, MA: Kitchen Sink Press.
Robbins, Trina. 1999. From Girls to Grrrlz: A History of Comics from Teens to Zines. San Francisco: Chronicle Books.
Robbins, Trina, and Catherine Yronwode. 1985. Women and the Comics. London: Eclipse Books.
