By Vivek Nityananda
You may have read everything Marjane Satrapi has written – drowning in Persepolis before feasting on Chicken with Plums. You might not have paused for a break while Alison Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Out For hit you on the head and left you longing for more. You might be one of those lucky people whose cousins introduced you to Kate Beaton’s delightful Hark a Vagrant and Syndey Padua’s The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage. You might have delved deep into Amruta Patil’s Kari and Adi-Parva. You might even be one of those delighted with Manjula Padmanabhan’s Suki and Maya Kamath’s dose of humour in the papers. You know, you think, the world of comics made by women. Yet allow Ygritte to interject – you still know nothing, Mx Snow. There’s an exhibition to prove it.
Comix Creatrix, a recent exhibition at London’s splendid House of Illustration, aimed to set the record straight about women making comics. It set out to be a corrective to the often overlooked role of women in comics – to present a ‘herstory’ of comics from panelled strips to graphic novels to zines. The result was a treasurebox of discoveries from everywhere and everywhen. Here are 5 things I discovered:
1.Women have been making comics from the beginning
One of the first professional caricaturists was a woman. Mary Darly designed and sold prints about politics and fashion from 1762. She also published the first book on caricature drawing. She made for a perfect starting point to the exhibition. There were several more firsts through the exhibition. There’s Blackjack, rumoured to be a woman writing pornographic comics in the US in the 20s. There’s Tove Jannson, the first woman syndicated to make a comic strip – the Moomins – for the London newspaper The Evening News from 1954. And then there were more recent firsts – Lorna Miller, one of only two women political cartoonists for British dailies and Laura Howell, the only female artist for the popular British comics Beano and Viz. Howell was represented at the exhibition by a comic strip with the irresistible title, Sir Benjamin Britten and his Embittered Bittern.
2.Drawing, writing, inking, publishing – women have done it all
Through the decades, women have been involved in every stage of comic production. The bulk of the exhibition was dedicated to artists and writers. Yet the exhibition made a point of acknowledging the roles that women have played throughout the story of comics – inkers, editors, publishers. And that’s before we talk about the engravers, the printmakers and of course the readers.
3.Whatever your interest, there’s a comic for it
If there’s one thing that rapidly became clear, it was that there wasn’t any one thing that women write comics about. Graphic novel memoirs were of course well represented: Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, Miriam Katin’s memoir of fleeing the Nazis in Budapest, We Are On Our Own, written age 62, and several others. There were historical comics like Kate Charlesworth’s Sally Heathcote: Suffragette, which tells the story of the suffragettes from the point of view of Emmeline Pankhurst’s (fictional) maid. There was also Red Rosa, Kate Evans’ biography of Rosa Luxembourg. Sophie Standing’s Pain is Really Strange talked about the science behind understanding what pain is. There were superheroes, complete with bulging muscles and figure hugging costumes, like Ramona Fradon’s Aquaman and Angie Kincaid’s Slaine. There were political nurse comics – Torchy in Heartbeats by Jackie Ormes that tackled race and environmental issues. There were literary adaptations – Tamara Drewe by Posy Simmonds adapts Hardy’s Tess to modern times. There was satire of course but also pulp and surrealism and crime horror and a graphic novel about war (Child Soldier by Jessica Dee). There were even erotic comics: from Eleni Kalorkoti’s entertaining and brilliantly illustrated Greasy’s Guide to Nookie – an Alternative Sex Education, Comic Book Slumber Party to the male homoeroticism of Chie Kutsuwada’s King of a Miniature Garden. There was all that you could think of and more at the exhibition. All the more to discover and add onto the must-read list.
4.Women are making comics all around the world
The comics came from all over the world.
First, the contingent from South Asia:
The exhibition listed Manjula Padmanabhan but I couldn’t find any of her comics. I focussed my search instead on Zubaan’s anthology of women cartoonists from India: Drawing the Line. Published by Urvashi Butalia, this anthology attempts to highlight women fighting back through their comics. Two of cartoonists from the anthology were featured at the exhibition: Kaveri Gopalakrishnan -whose Blank Space imagines what she would do without fear of harassment – and Reshu Singh, who dissects the expectations daughters and mothers have of each other in her comic The Photo. The most delightful and entertaining comic from South Asia had to be Miss Moti by Kripa Joshi from Nepal. Miss Moti is an inhibited girl, a bit under pressure about her body size who ends up being an unlikely superhero – the perfect feel-good story.
Further afield there was Rutu Modan’s graphic novel Exit Wounds from Israel and Leila Abdelrazaq’s Baddawi from Palestine. There was Chie Kutsuwada from Japan and Hwei Lim from Malaysia. You could catch glimpses of Kenyan born Catherine Anyango’s wordless take on Heart of Darkness in stunning black and white drawings. There were plenty of artists and writers from Europe and the US. There were even cross-continental collaborations such as the beautiful Walled City trilogy by Anne Opotowsky, Aya Morton and Angie Hofmeister about three friends in Hong Kong. The drawn word seemed to be utterly international, perhaps even more so than the written word.
5. What is a comic anyway?
The sheer range of approaches to illustrated communication challenged all assumptions you might have had about what a comic ought to be. There were several examples of episodic comics and graphic novels of course. But if you wandered beyond these you would stumble upon some more unusual comics that abandoned the idea of story altogether. Liz Lunney’s comics had words spilling out of the frames to create surreal and very personal worlds. Jacky Fleming’s The Trouble with Women surrounded drawings in handwritten font to tell us stories of women from ‘the Olden Days’ – “Queen Victoria herself was a rare example of Early Woman” she tells us, tongue firmly in cheek. Una’s Becoming Unbecoming used abstract images and words that spilled all over them to talk about abuse and violence. Maria Stoian’s Take it as a Compliment had the drawings dissolving from frame to frame. Sarah Lightman’s The Book of Sarah simply focused on everyday scenes and objects. In this, it perhaps resembled Nadine Redlich’s ambient comics – where every frame showed the same scene or object in simple line drawings that changed ever so slightly from frame to frame. You might well have left the exhibition convinced that the comic form can be and is being endlessly reinvented.
After that taster you might be itching to get your hands on several of these comics to have a look for yourself. It’s a shame, after all, to go on about this fantastic selection of comics without any visuals of the actual comics. Luckily there’s an app for that. The entire exhibition is available for free on the Sequential Comics app (no android version, sadly). No more words are necessary. Go ahead, have a look and discover the world of women making comics. Also those cousins who introduced to this world? You’ve now got a vast array of comics to buy as gifts for them.
Vivek Nityananda researches animal behaviour and draws comics at www.stuffscientistssay.