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.