Alison Bechdel’s renown has been building since the success of
(2006). While scholars have focused on her contemporary production, her comics work within grassroots periodicals, including her ...long-running strip,
(1983–2008), has received comparatively little attention. By focusing on the grassroots context of
, this essay demonstrates how Bechdel’s participation in grassroots periodicals shaped her work. Through the development of new reading practices and the notion of queer comics archives, I show how queer communities influenced Bechdel’s visual rhetoric in the pages of
, the grassroots periodical where Bechdel first published her work and participated as a member of the collective. Informed by archival research, this analysis embraces grassroots contexts as an overlooked venue for exploring queer histories and tracing the development of queer comics.
Wimmen's Comix, an underground comix series, featured the contributions of roughly 100 women in its two decades of existence: 1972-1992. Its preservation in physical and digital archives often ...prioritises prolific creators, effectively erasing the contributions of a majority of the women, nearly half of whom contributed just once to the series. Through an analysis of this series and its status in archives, this essay examines how archival practices bury visual media. Through studying how this series is organised across a number of archives, I suggest better ways to archive these works that echo their collective politics and honour women's hybrid media forms. In critiquing physical and digital archives, I argue that a feminist politic must govern the structuring of such spaces. To represent this media better, I propose that we embrace the idea of the network as a method for organising these materials in archives.
This article examines the career of lesbian cartoonist Jennifer Camper and how she has fostered queer community both in her comics and in real life. Archival research in LGBTQ archives and in ...Camper's own personal papers evidences how Camper begins developing her comics in the 1980s by participating in various grassroots LGBTQ publication spaces. From this foundation of support, she engages in comics activism with her representations of these communities during the midst of the AIDS crisis. Through these analyses, this article theorizes how Camper foregrounds intersectionality and counterpublics in her work on and off the page.
In foregrounding diverse sexualities, the comics bildungsromane of both Lee Marrs and Roberta Gregory presciently revise rhetorics and forms, but, as outsider feminist theorists, they were also ...interested in exploring the pressures of the time in the space of the page. As examples of that, both produced dystopian comics about the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) as the state ratification process started to slow down. Gregory included her three-page "Liberatia" as a postscript in Dynamite Damsels, while Marrs produced the four-page "Equal Rites" for Wimmen's Comix #8, an issue that was very explicitly thinking about time: the cover not only included an image of a cyborgian twenty-first-century woman but also reminded the reader that this was "the return of" Wimmen's Comix, which had been dormant for seven years. Both comics imagine the cultural change around the ERA as erupting into apocalypse, and both tales are told by female narrators from the distant future who, along with other women, have escaped to form a peaceful, monogender society.
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