The missing link: Women Comic-Book Artists 



The current issue of Art News Online asks a relevant question: 
 
Why Have There Been No Great Women Comic-Book Artists? 
With a dual-venue exhibition in Los Angeles, comics by masters such as Winsor McCay, Chris Ware, and Charles Schulz have been elevated from pop culture to fine art. But as these artists receive their due, the show has sparked debate over the rightful place of women in the comic canon... 
 
"...The appeal of “male” comics to women—and of “women’s” comics to male readers—was limited until the genre began to evolve beyond such distinctions, becoming more narrative and more focused on recognizable realities and emotions than on fantasies about spaceships and superheroes. It is a nice irony that Crumb, whose pneumatic women and lascivious hippies have been called misogynistic, may have inspired more women to enter the field. The ranks of well-known comic artists now include such women as Lynda Barry (One Hundred Demons and other graphic novels), Gregory (“Naughty Bits”), Marisa Acocella (“Cancer Vixen”), Sue Coe (a former contributor to Spiegelman’s RAW) and Aline Kominsky-Crumb, who coauthored, with her husband R. Crumb, Dirty Laundry, about the travails of modern cohabitation. 

There are so many women now in the field that the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art (MOCCA) in New York will mount an all-female exhibition called “She Draws Comics,” running from May through September 2006..." 


Roz Chast’s Five Minutes to Deadline, watercolor and pen on paper, 2002.
JULIE SAUL GALLERY, NEW YORK 
 

Posted: Tue - November 29, 2005 at 08:04 PM        

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