Tag Archives: Women Underground

Tits & Clits

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Note: Quotes from Joyce Farmer and Lyn Chvli are from interviews with the post’s author.

While Wimmen’s Comix can be linked to the feminist newspaper movement of the early 1970s through It Ain’t Me Babe Comix, its arrival was foreshadowed by another all-women underground comic out of Laguna Beach. The first issue of Tits & Clits, by Joyce Farmer and Lyn Chevli, was published just weeks  before the first issue of Wimmen’s Comix in 1972.  Lyn Chevli had first learned about underground comix through the bookstore Fahrenheit 451, which she owned with her husband. Chevli said, “I took one look at one and it blew my mind. I thought, ‘Oh my god, this is incredible.’ And it just stirred in me, for maybe two weeks, and then I came up with this thought, ‘If I ever sell the store, I’m going to do an underground comic.'” When Chevli parted ways with her husband, the store was about $20,000 in debt, so she decided the time was ripe to start her comic.

Accounts of the anthology’s founding differ between its founders. Chevli said,

I put a little sign in the store, in the window, saying “artists wanted.” And Joyce [Farmer] worked right next door to us [and she] showed up and said, “I’m answering the ad for an artist.”So I said, “Ok, fine, let’s get together and show me some of your work, and let’s see what happens.” She had never seen an underground comic before. She came over to my apartment and I said, “Draw me some stuff,” and she did. And I said, “Ok, draw me something dirty.” Eventually she drew me a woman sitting down on the floor with her legs spread and a rat nibbling at her vulva. And that did it. I said, “That’s perfect. I love it.”…So we got together and we started to work…we had to invent ourselves. We were two nice little girls, college graduates and everything, and here we were getting into the sleaze pit.

Joyce Farmer remembers the meeting a little differently, saying that the comic was Chevli’s idea and that they were put in touch by a mutual friend.
 

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The actual idea for the comic book occurred spontaneously while they were working on the first issue. Chevli said, “One day we were sitting there, drawing, and she shouted it out, ‘Tits & Clits!’ and I just about fell off my stool. I knew it was perfect. I hated her guts for that, but I knew it was a very good idea.” The name was a play on the phrase “tits and ass” often used in men’s magazines. Farmer and Chevli, as well as many of the women who later submitted to Tits & Clits, viewed female sexuality as fertile grounds (pun intended) for the expression of radical sentiments.

From its inception, Tits & Clits was a fundamentally different anthology than Wimmen’s Comix. Not only was it more single-minded thematically, it completely lacked the collective structure and underlying democratic ideology of Wimmen’s Comix. Whereas Wimmen’s Comix at its inception was a collaborative effort aiming to unite all of the women currently in the underground comix world (and to bring in even more women), Tits & Clits began as a partnership between Joyce Farmer and Lyn Chevli, who created all of the material for Tits & Clits #1 and #2, Pandora’s Box, and Abortion Eve by themselves. (Farmer and Chevli produced seven issues of Tits & Clits between 1972 and 1987.)
 

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Their location in Laguna Beach, removed from the hubbub of San Francisco, meant that they were initially isolated from the other artists in the underground. Farmer recalled, “The weird thing was that we just decided independently to do a comic book and we didn’t discuss it with anybody in San Francisco.” The two artists worked in close conjunction, often trading the work of drawing and writing the stories. Only having two artists doing the work meant that only about one issue was published a year, if that. Chevli and Farmer did eventually bring in other artists from Wimmen’s Comix in order to get their comics published more frequently, but the decision was possibly more practically than ideologically motivated. Chevli preferred not to draw and stopped drawing when they had other artists to do the stories. Tits & Clits tended to feature the same roster of artists rather than purposefully working to include new artists, although Farmer noted that they were open to submissions by new artists.

Chevli and Farmer define Tits & Clits as one of the first (if not the first) self-published underground comic by women. Since they both understood the way in which underground comix worked from reading them — 32 pages of black-and-white content (“guts”), and a front and back cover in color — they simply mimicked the form. Chevli and Farmer self-published their early works (including Pandora’s Box, Abortion Eve, and Tits & Clits #1) as Nanny Goat Productions before ultimately partnering with Ron Turner of Last Gasp for Tits & Clits #2-7 to improve the anthology’s distribution and circulation.

At the outset, Nanny Goat was able to get their work into circulation through Chevli’s bookstore connections. Chevli knew one of the underground comix publishers in Los Angeles, and the artists figured that if they produced their own comic, they could distribute it through that publisher. Chevli commented, however, that other publishers were initially hesitant to be involved in Tits & Clits.

I went to Bob Rita [at the Print Mint] who was a big publisher [and] showed him the book. He looked through it very slowly and very seriously. He said at the end, “Why do you think any woman in her right mind would buy something like this?” I said “Well, because I’m a woman.” He said, “I’m sorry.” He pushed the copy I had given him back to me and said, “I can’t print this. It’s too bad. It’s horrible.” Later on, we were invited to a huge party that he gave, at his home, and he was blushing. He was sorry that he said that. But he didn’t want to show the magazine to anyone else, to any woman. “No, heavens, we have to protect our girls.” That kind of thing. But everybody understood eventually.

For Farmer and Chevli, publishing a book that was so objectionable was a radical act of defiance against what women were supposed to be doing at the time, particularly college-educated women with children. Despite (or because of) its controversial nature, Tits & Clits sold fairly well when it could get distributed, according to the artists. Chevli said, “Our first edition we sold out in 8 months, I think it was. We produced 9 books in ten years and caused all kinds of ruckuses in the county and elsewhere. We sold over 100,000 comics during the 9 years and were relatively successful.” Farmer agreed, “Tits & Clits sold like wildfire when we could get distributed.”  Both artists note that they never made very much money off Tits & Clits, however, since each issue only sold for $0.75 to $1.50.

Tits & Clits, as a sex comic produced by women, provoked a great deal of uproar within and beyond the comix community. According to Farmer, Tits & Clits made people uncomfortable and therefore was not widely read or distributed. Even just the name of the anthology was often considered obscene;  the book was often left out of magazines or newsletters as it simply could not be put into print. Farmer said,

[It was controversial because it was] sex from a woman’s point of view, a woman’s body from a woman’s point of view. Hustler didn’t even come out until 1973 or so, so we were saying things about women and women’s bodies that had just not been said in print…Women have been considered dirty for so many centuries that we were just breaking into that and saying, “Yeah, we’re dirty, ha ha, here, have some.”

Chevli added, “What could be worse than telling the truth about female sexuality, and how men treat women … In that age, it was not considered nice for women to do [that]. And that’s what exactly we wanted to pull out and show and exhibit and push in people’s faces.” The confrontation of Tits & Clits was not only that it talked about women’s sex lives truthfully, but that it did so from a woman’s viewpoint. Tits & Clits, in significantly eroding the private/public boundary, delved deep into the realm of the personal, so deep that it went well beyond mainstream feminist thought at the time, at least according to Farmer and Chevli.

Between Feminism and the Underground

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From “Breaking Out,” the central story of It Ain’t Me Babe Comix.
Image courtesy of lambiek.net.

In explaining the rise of Wimmen’s Comix, Terre Richards, one of the founding mothers of the anthology, reasoned in a 1979 interview with Cultural Correspondence, “As a result of the Women’s Movement, there was a growing awareness of women in all areas of the arts as well as a newly developing market for women’s work in publishing, so the time was right for an all-woman’s comic.” But when the number of women in mainstream comics would shrink to just two in 1974, what was it about 1972 that made the time right for an all-women’s comic anthology?

Financially at least, the answer is fairly obvious: Wimmen’s Comix owes its existence to It Ain’t Me Babe Comix, the first American all-women comics anthology, published in 1970 by the underground comix press Last Gasp. It Ain’t Me Babe Comix, in turn, owes its existence to Trina Robbins, and to It Ain’t Me Babe, a short-lived but influential feminist newspaper where Robbins worked.

When it comes to Wimmen’s Comix relationship with the “Women’s Movement,” though, the answer is less straightforward. To extricate any creative work from its sociopolitical context is laborious; the belief that it can be done at all is often laboring under a delusion. Scholars like Paul Lopes have argued that early women’s comix represent a “feminist intervention” into the misogynist world of underground comix, a framing which suggests that women were “outsiders” to the counterculture from which comix emerged, in addition to misunderstanding the varied motivations of women underground cartoonists. In fact, though there were only a handful of women actively creating comix before Wimmen’s Comix, many more were involved in “the underground” as a whole. The delayed acknowledgement of women’s existence in the underground comix movement in the early ‘70s mirrors the experience of women in the counterculture more broadly. In each case, women were involved in some way for a number of years before their presence and participation was fully recognized. In each case, women’s cultural separatism contributed to this process of recognition, though it was and remains a hotly contested feminist strategy.

The story of early women’s comix, like the story of underground comix, begins with newspapers. In the 1960s, as the underground press became a space for political radicals to air their grievances and rally support in a way that was purportedly open and democratic, certain voices were still being excluded from the discussion. As John McMillian notes in Smoking Typewriters: The Sixties Underground Press and the Rise of Alternative Media in America, experiences with sexism in the underground press were key turning points for many early feminists. Feminist organizations began starting their own papers in the late ‘60s, a few years after the “birth” of the underground press in 1965. The founding of the National Organization of Women (NOW) in 1966 and the subsequent establishment of feminist groups in at least 40 cities between 1968 and 1969 led to the creation of at least five feminist publications by 1968. These included a national newsletter, The Voice of the Women’s Liberation Movement, and NOW’s own first regular periodical, as Lauren Kessler details in The Dissident Press: Alternative Journalism in American History. Feminist newspapers and newsletters blossomed throughout the 1970s; just in 1970, 73 new feminist publications appeared, about a quarter of them affiliated with NOW chapters. It Ain’t Me Babe, first published by the Berkeley Women’s Liberation group in 1970, is considered to be the first real feminist newspaper.

Feminist papers showcased an array of political attitudes and beliefs, reflecting the diversity of thought of the nascent movement. Like New Left papers, about two-thirds of feminist papers were collective endeavors. According to Kessler, “none was headed by a male editor.” The woman’s-only or separatist quality of these papers was seen as a way to lend women the voice they had been denied in the New Left papers. Feminist papers retained the lack of editorial hierarchy and communal production of papers in the New Left, as well as their emphasis on equal access for all viewpoints, again with the same bent towards open, democratic circulation of ideas.Further, feminist newspapers often contained highly personal journalism or anecdotes as part of its project of “the personal is political” articulated by feminist writer Carol Hanisch. The feminist press helped the nascent movement communicate within itself, and to the outside world, and provided a knowledge-basis for the budding Women’s Movement. Women’s-only or feminist papers were often the only place for radical feminist thoughts to be expressed, as they were largely ignored or mocked in the broader press.

Through papers like It Ain’t Me Babe, women’s separatism emerged as a strong political stance for radical feminists, although it was not advocated by all, as feminist scholar Alice Echols notes. Separatism was generally seen as a “strategy for achieving social change, rather than as an end in itself.” When women’s voices were seen to be suppressed or silenced in the counterculture, radical feminists posited that one way to be heard as women was to create women’s-only spaces for free expression, until feminist ideologies became more pervasive. The fifth issue of It Ain’t Me Babe tackles this question head on in an editorial titled “Women … Towards a New Culture.”

We see the development of women’s culture as an essential part of the liberation struggle. The creation of a cultural ideology is a form of work; we have accepted male products in this area for too long … The cultures which surround us today in America, whose tenets we have internalized, have all been created by men. It is extremely oppressive for us to function in a culture where ideals are male oriented and definitions are male controlled. Our alternative is clear; we must develop a new culture, new images of ourselves and of the forces surrounding us. Yet the creation of a women’s culture must in no way be separated from the political struggles of women for liberation… Our culture cannot be the carving of an enclave in which we can bear the status quo more easily – rather it must crystallize the dreams that will strengthen our rebellion.

Thanks to Trina Robbins, the previous issue of It Ain’t Me Babe contains an attempt to create one such cultural project, in the form of a small note from the paper’s staff: a call for women cartoonists to work on a special comic book issue.

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Image courtesy of Schlesinger Library. 

In 1970, Trina Robbins moved to San Francisco to join in the comix revolution. Once there, she quickly learned that the mecca of underground comix was a boy’s mecca, one which she perceived as hostile to her and other female underground cartoonists. Early comix artists Lee Marrs, Trina Robbins, and Barbara ‘Willy’ Mendes have noted that it was initially quite difficult for the very first women to break into the ‘old boy’s club’ of underground comix, and that men initially would not accept women’s work into their anthologies, as Robbins notes in Pretty in Ink.

Discouraged, and without work, Trina joined the staff of It Ain’t Me Babe, drawing what she called “extremely unsubtle propaganda” for its covers, as well as a regular strip about the liberation of her character Belinda Berkeley.

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Image courtesy of Schlesinger Library. 

Inspired to stand up to male gate-keepers of underground comix, Robbins soon set out to create a comic book drawn and written entirely by women. Women underground cartoonists were scarce at the time, but she knew a few from other work in the underground. Nancy Kalish, for example, drew the strip Gentle’s Tripout (under the name ‘Panzika’) for EVO as early as 1965. Robbins, Nancy Kalish, and Barbara ‘Willy’ Mendes were featured in the first issue of Gothic Blimp Works in 1969, towards the very beginning of the underground comix movement. With the support of the It Ain’t Me Babe staff, Robbins put together a comic book entirely written, drawn, inked, and colored by women, the first comic book in the nation made that way. Because so few women were involved in the underground scene, experienced contributors were hard to come by. Trina and her fellow cartoonist Willy Mendes (short for Barbara) did most of the inking for the book, as they were the only ones who knew how. The other contributors were an eclectic bunch: Lisa Lyon drew cartoons for a socialist newspaper, Meredith Kurtzman was the daughter of Harvey Kurtzman of Mad Magazine fame, and Michele Brand simply knew how to draw, according to Robbins.

Once Robbins had collected the artwork, she called up Ron Turner, whom she had heard was interested in a “women’s liberation comic.” It Ain’t Me Babe Comix was quickly picked up and put into print by Last Gasp Eco Funnies, which paid Robbins $1,000, a huge chunk of money for a struggling would-be artist in 1970. The stories within the comics make several explicit references to ‘women’s liberation,’ the subtitle of the comic. Robbins described the central story in the book, called “Breaking Out” as a “comic strip, again written collectively, in which Juliet Jones, Daisy Duck, Supergirl, and other characters rebel against their sexist boyfriends. Just as women all over America were doing at the time, they form a consciousness-raising group.”

By 1972, It Ain’t Me Babe Comix had sold well enough to go into a second printing, prompting Turner to ask his employees Patricia ‘Patty’ Moodian and Terre Richards to advertise the fact that he wanted to print another women’s liberation comic. Moodian then called the first meeting of the group of artists who would produce the first issue of Wimmen’s Comix. Unmoored from It Ain’t Me Babe Comix’s ties to the feminist press, Wimmen’s Comix maintained its non-hierarchical collective production structure — the anthology employed a rotating editorship, which later became a rotating double editorship — but was no longer as closely associated with the feminist movement. As Richards correctly notes, the Women’s Movement helped birth Wimmen’s, as more and more women (and men) clamored to see women’s artistic work in all fields, including comix. But In fact, as founding mother Lee Marrs told Cultural Correspondence, the relationship between the feminist movement and Wimmen’s Comix was contentious at best.

One reason the women’s comic collective did not hold together in a commercial sense, to be able to do more books than just the Wimmen’s Comix that some of us could hack together, and that we didn’t get better distribution, was that the women’s movement in the beginning didn’t have any sense of humor in itself, which is sad but typical… We got totally rejected by the women’s movement for the most part. 

Over the next 20 years, the relationship between Wimmen’s Comix and the feminist movement would only get more fraught, as women’s cultural separatism slowly fell out of favor, and a new generation of artists eager to play on the same field as men began to grace the anthology’s pages. The feminist roots of Wimmen‘s  referenced by Paul Lopes and others cannot and should not be ignored, but they should be examined in their full complexity rather than posited as an ideologically uniform intervention. As feminist art critic Lucy Lippard writes about feminist art in the 1970s more generally, “It is useless to try to pin down a specific formal contribution made by feminism because feminist and/or women’s art is neither a style nor a movement, much as this may distress those who would like to see it safely ensconced in the categories and chronology of the past.”

Women Underground: An Introduction

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In 2011, inspired by Twitter, graphic novelist Renae de Liz turned to Kickstarter to seek funding for an all-female comics anthology. Womanthology: Heroic triumphed, surpassing its original funding goal within 24 hours. De Liz sought to unite a large number of women, from comic book veterans to complete unknowns, to create “something fun and positive,” hoping that the book would inspire and empower burgeoning cartoonists. Though some criticized the project’s execution, most celebrated Womanthology’s central premise: that women should be provided with a platform for publication in an industry where they have been (and continue to be) marginalized. As IDW editor Mariah Huehner said, “[The issue of women in comics] always seems like this problem that people want to solve.”

People hoping for a quick or easy solution are out of luck. Cartoonist-turned-comics-“herstorian” Trina Robbins notes in Pretty in Ink (2013) that while women have been drawing and writing comics in the U.S. since 1896, they have historically been a minority in the field. Today, sites like Bleeding Cool regularly “gendercrunch” the rosters of Marvel and DC Comics, and the numbers regularly fail to approach gender parity. A 2012 Ladydrawers comic by Anne Elizabeth Moore and Nicole Boyett notes that “even though they’re submitting work at rates equal to men and make up 46% of the creator pool, women, trans and non-binary gender creators are getting much less of it published.” This overt overlooking of non-male creators holds true for comics criticism, too, as Heidi MacDonald pointed out in her recent critique of The Comics Journal.

And yet, for as long as there’s been an American “comic-books boys’ club,” women have demanded they be admitted. Some, like de Liz, have tried to open the gates for others. At The Millions, Andrew Rostan writes of Womanthology: “There is little doubt that all 300 artists were working with an ideal audience in mind — themselves in their youth — working to forge another generation of female creators.”

De Liz herself observed, “People probably label this a feminist book just because it’s a bunch of women are gathering [sic] in one spot. I don’t really mind if they do or not; feminism isn’t a dirty word.”

De Liz is right to link her project to the American feminist movement. Womanthology owes a huge debt to comics borne of nascent second-wave feminism and the burgeoning underground comix movement: It Ain’t Me Babe Comix (1969), the first American comic book created entirely by women, and Wimmen’s Comix (1972- 1993), a long-standing all-female underground comix anthology, which made a point of perpetually including new contributors. (It’s worth noting that Womanthology, It Ain’t Me Babe, and Wimmen’s Comix share an influential contributor –Trina Robbins.) Of these titles and others, sociologist Paul Lopes writes, “This first generation of female comic book rebels unquestionably laid the groundwork for future generations of women artists to intervene and attempt to transform the field of comic books.” Sound familiar?

In the late ‘60s, mainstream comic publishers were in free fall, sapped of their strength in part by the incredibly restrictive 1954 Comics Code Authority, which led to the untimely demise of many comics publishers. As the ‘60s gave way to the ‘70s, a new kind of comic book began to emerge. The underground comix movement of the late 1960s changed the comic field for everyone, but it was of particular importance in integrating women into a highly gender-imbalanced industry. (As Robbins notes, by 1974, at the tail end of the underground comix heyday, only two women remained at mainstream comics publishers.) To put it another way, the underground was like the internet: both offered new mechanisms for the production and distribution of comics, and allowed new creators (female and male) a chance to try their hand at the form. Wimmen’s Comix, like Womanthology, offered a platform for publication for artists who had never considered careers in comics (as well as many who subsequently failed to pursue such careers), featuring roughly 100 contributors over its 20-odd-year run.

Wimmen’s Comix, though seminal, was not necessarily a financial success. Along with other early underground comix by women, it is long out of print (though still for sale on EBay). It’s reasonable to expect that many supporters of or contributors to Womanthology have never seen a copy of Wimmen’s Comix, as it has not yet been collected in its entirety. This is, in fact, part of the issue of women in comics. The work of forging future generations is not difficult for lack of raw material. It is difficult, at least in part, because the work of generations gone by is often lost or hidden, to the detriment of those who would otherwise seek to learn from it.

Much has changed between It Ain’t Me Babe Comix and Womanthology. (Alternative spellings of “women” and “comics” have largely fallen out of style, for one.) And yet modern attempts to solve the “women in comics” problem resemble nothing so much as older strategies, including those of Wimmen’s Comix, that some now deride as passé.

Given that publishers and critics can more easily detect Wonder Woman’s plane than female comics creators, a project like Womanthology, capable of catching the comics gatekeepers with their guard down, seems like a strategic success. Certainly self-publishing, whether it’s a webcomic or a Xeroxed mini, ensures that women’s work gets printed. De Liz’s project further clearly demonstrated the commercial viability of anthologies like Womanthology. In 2012, IDW Publishing announced a five-issue comic book series titled Womanthology: Space!, collected as a hard-cover graphic novel in 2013.

Still, many will argue (or have argued) that women’s-only projects like Womanthology put women at a disadvantage. Comics blogger Rachel Fellman writes of Womanthology, “When I was a teenager, nothing discouraged me more than projects that made a point of supporting women’s artistic efforts. They reinforced the idea that it was an exception for women to make art — and that we needed special help because we rarely did it as well as men.” The fear that publishers may “make up for a lack of general diversity with occasional, themed anthologies,” as Greg Baldin put it at the Los Angeles Review of Books, is real. A single anthology, no matter how many artists it includes, can’t solve a systemic problem.

Solving the issue of women in comics is problematic, to say the least. An equally daunting challenge is to pay proper homage to the heroines and heroes who have sought change. In this and future columns, I will focus on the work of female-identified creators in a particular period of comics history (roughly 1968-1990), to better detail what exactly the problem has been, in the hopes that it will illuminate what it is today.