Minority Report: A Brief History Of Women In Comics, Part 2

The Three Faces Of Eve: Where did women turn as creators and as readers when offered few opportunities by the claustrophobic comics market of the 1970s? Rob Vollmar looks at three possible paths; ELFQUEST, Archie comics and the female superhero fans.
13 January 2003

To read the first part of this essay, looking at the presence of female creators and the market for girl's comics through the 1940s, 50s and 60s, click here.

The 1970s were a decade, in all facets of Western culture, characterised by upheaval in gender roles and identities, as the inequitable treatment of women world-wide became the civil rights issue on nearly everyone's mind. University campuses, previously polarised by race issues and concerns about the Vietnam War, now became the debate floor (and, some would say the battleground) for what would come to be known as the War Between the Sexes - poetically encapsulated for history, if not resolved, by the infamous tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs, which saw his bluster crushed by the reality of her ever-consistent ground game.

Not surprisingly, the generation of women who had been excluded from the great comics boom of the 1960s both as readers and as creators seized upon this era of women's liberation to create comics distinctly their own. The underground comics of the late 1960s had opened doors toward the public perceiving comics as a product intended only for mature audiences (as opposed to adult ones) which left a wide schism between comics fit for general audiences (the mainstream) and comics with nudity and hardcore sex (the alternative).

As feminism surged off of college campuses and into the popular culture, underground comics grew a new branch, or perhaps we should say the other half of the dysfunctional one they already had, populated this time by women. Pioneers like Trina Robbins (WIMMEN'S COMICS, GO GIRL), Lee Marrs (IT AIN'T ME BABE), and Sharon Rudahl (UNDERGROUND CLASSICS STARRING...) found receptive audiences in the growing number of bookshops and catalogues that specialised in feminist and/or lesbian materials.

While other cartoonists, some still active in the industry today, like Debbie Dreschler or Roberta Gregory, found either forum or inspiration in these landmark comics, the continued paucity of opportunities for women in mainstream comics during the 1970s is obvious when compared with the financial and cultural juggernaut that shoujo manga was becoming during the same period in Japan.

As the Direct Market and resultant comics shops began to spring up in the middle 1970s, new possibilities for women in comics suddenly became available. While this claustrophobic arrangement that saw all comics, regardless of content, housed and disseminated to the public in one place proved less than invigorating to the more graphic feminist comics, it wasn't long before a female cartoonist, self-publishing a story she'd co-written with her husband, hit it big.

Wendy Pini is probably the most influential female cartoonist of a generation for a thousand reasons, most of which go unremembered in an industry that thrives on novelty. As co-creator and principal artist of ELFQUEST, begun in 1978, Pini delivered one of comics' first grown-up fantasy stories, which had warped the mind of many youngster with its pagan values by the time they were coloured and collected into gorgeous oversized volumes in the middle 1980s.

Unlike her contemporaries in the more radical underground feminist comics, influenced as they were by the angry and often messy visual style of their less enlightened and slightly older brothers-in-arms, Pini's elven epic was immediately friendly to the eye. A manga enthusiast before manga enthusiasts were cool, Pini appropriated elements of shoujo manga's outlandishly fashionable design sense (right down to the giant eyes and blatant androgyny) and applied it to Western comics in a way that had never been done before.

Most importantly, though, ELFQUEST was subversive in that its creators recognised the limitation of the audience in the market that they were selling to (the Direct one) and balanced that beauty with lots of violence, both physical and emotional, that went beyond the constraints of the mainstream. The series, after a few difficult years, became a cult favourite in markets that hadn't thought about comics since childhood.

It isn't merely ironic that the first version I owned of this book came as a reprint from Marvel Comics a decade later, when Marvel wisely chose to tap the diverse potential audience it presented in its wake. It is representative of the vast, untapped potential readership that comics shaped by a feminine vision did not satisfy for a decade previous.

This void also created noticeable differences within segments of the audience of women still reading and thinking about comics by the late 1970s. Some, like Robbins and others influenced by the underground, shared that generation's reactionary voice against the establishment Comics Code itself, echoing in their often bawdy satires the bold voices that were suddenly stifled near the end of the 1950s.

Having wrested even the smallest degree of control from mainstream companies like DC and Marvel, which were perceived (and perhaps justly) as the primary instigators of this historical auto-lobotomy, these underground cartoonists were often reluctant to relinquish financial control of their individual mini-empires to create an economic force that could truly compete, let alone topple their ideological competition.

Thus, with the eventual crackdown on the head shops that sold these types of comics the most vigorously, and the inevitable diaspora of the counter-culture audience that bought them, the awareness of comics as a potent vehicle for social criticism receded for the time being into the annals of history, neatly folded into a distant memory of a man named Fat Freddie who, as it turned out, also had a cat.

But, as it turned out, not even Marvel and DC abandoning their faithful girl readers was enough to drive all of them away from the hobby. Though no women were working there in the capacity of writer or artist, Archie Comics still maintained a faithful female audience, broad as they were in their storytelling motifs, and easy as they were on the eye.

They also shared a common link with romance comics of yesteryear by rooting their stories in the everyday (extreme as it was often made by the constraints of formula writing over an extended period of time) as opposed to the fantastic worlds of atomic powered supermen and flying genies. I think it is safe to assume that titles like BETTY and VERONICA were intended for and consumed by an audience primarily composed of girls and women who liked to escape into the worlds of young teenagers who were pretty, smart, and, in Veronica's case, loaded.

The last portion of the audience created by this schism was the documented legions of girl superhero fans. While the visual bluster and overblown dialogue of Lee and Kirby's mini-operas were constructed and catered towards an assumed audience of boys, they still won their own share of female readers. In a recent interview for The Comics Journal (#249), conducted by editor Gary Groth, cartoonist Debbie Dreschler recalled her own experiences as a young reader

GROTH: You've said that when he had a drugstore in Cleveland you would go there and read comics. How old would you have been?

DRESCHLER: Well, I can remember doing it up until 10, but I don't know how long before that...

GROTH: So, if that was around '63 then you were probably reading DC superhero comic books.

DRESCHLER: Yeah, I was pretty much hooked on the Supers; SUPERMAN and SUPERBOY.

GROTH: I'm sure you've been told that that's a little unusual for a girl.

DRESCHLER: I have been. I was a real tomboy. I prided myself on playing with boys more than with girls because I liked playing, like, Cops and Robbers and that kind of stuff, more than dress-up. [85]

Dreschler is certainly not the first nor the last cartoonist of a serious ilk, of either gender, to express a fondness for capes-n-boots comics in their youth, but it is of note that she goes out her way to identify this interest in superheroes as part of her assumption of a perceived masculine value system.

Later in that interview, Dreschler makes what I think is an important conclusion about the end of her involvement with comics, at least in this phase of her life, that speaks volumes about how mainstream comics failed their female audience the most profoundly during this period.

GROTH: Now you stopped reading them when you were still young. That's what I mean when I say that you didn't become obsessive; reading more and collecting them.

DRESCHLER: Yeah, but that seems pretty typical of women in comics, compared to men in comics. It seems like more of the women were like me in that they kind of liked them when they were younger but - I'm pretty sure I gave them up because they were kids' stuff. [87]

There were no comics to turn to for the maturing young woman that did not ask her to accept an overwhelmingly male value system in the process, without sacrificing a natural instinct to read works of a reasonable complexity to satisfy an adult. Before someone out there thinks I'm talking about MAUS or even MONKEY FOOD, I hold up, without judgement, soap operas and romance novels as two media traditionally considered successful at this - light serial fiction that has the capacity, under the right creative impetus, to transform into something more remarkable than the sum of its parts.

In Japan, during the 1970s, shoujo manga developed new branches even as it was codifying its own unique styles. Women's manga was inevitable as huge audiences of girls reading manga about girls, often drawn by artists who were still girls themselves, all aged together into a new phase of life. As a generation, they explored taboos and in many cases discovered that they liked stories about boys who were in love with each other, dressed in bright costumes, and often came from foreign lands.

Some of them got more serious and brought conversations to dinner tables that had been forbidden since emperor-worship had spread like a virus throughout turn of the century Japan and eradicated the last vestiges of visual female power within their culture; conversations about marriage, abortion, adultery, divorce, and sexuality. Indeed, these were many of the same topics being addressed by the fringe women's comics in the US, only on an epic scale. Millions upon millions of women were connected by their eyes and minds through this common experience.

Many of the women responsible for these manga are retired millionaires today.

Almost none of the American women working in the 1970s mentioned in this article, with the exception of Wendy Pini, have a fraction of their life work in print today.

Rob Vollmar is the Eisner-nominated writer of THE CASTAWAYS and the recently released BLUESMAN: BOOK ONE.

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