Cartoonists, Female

Diversity, Representation, and Authorship

As more women became cartoonists, artists, and authors, women in comics transitioned from being represented as sexualized objects to taking on more diverse, realistic, and heterogeneous representations in the genre. Women cartoonists subsequently began to engage with more diverse story lines by drawing and representing their own and other women's experiences in semiautobiographical and autobiographical story lines. Many of these have focused on femininity and the diversity female experience, identity, and sexuality.

Jennifer Camper, whose portrayal of women's diverse experience has appeared in a wide range of queer comics, but comes to the fore in Juicy Mother (2005; 2007), her anthology which includes a variety of queer comic authors, representing a range of masculinities, femininities, and sexualities as an alternative to the straight world of comics writ large. Among the artists featured is Alison Bechdel, American author of the long-running, Dykes to Watch Out For since 1983, and author of award-winning graphic novel, Fun Home (2006). Bechdel's work is noteworthy for both form and content innovations: her comic series and subsequent published collections are some of the most comprehensive, long-running, and diverse representations of lesbians in the comic book world. This series, and her graphic novel, both address the diverse experiences of lesbian, bisexual, and heterosexual women from comedic and semiautobiographical, historical, and political vantage points.

Lynda Barry, whose work won the Eisner Award in 2009, is an artist, cartoonist, and author whose work represents not only abstract personal experience but also a diverse range of women's and especially young girls’ and adolescents’ identities and experiences in the contemporary U.S. context. Her work in comics, notably Ernie Pook's Comeek, and her popular and award-winning graphic novels, What It Is and One! Hundred! Demons! are decidedly outside the mainstream-her belief in the power of the image, and her idiosyncratic writing/drawing/creating method connect her representation of emotional and personal experiences with the page in ways more associated with the studio arts than the comic book or graphic novel genres.

What It Is is primarily an exploration of her technique, which hinges on bigger philosophical questions as well as image-making and representational techniques that have been credited with expanding the genre. Like Barry, Carol Tyler, author of Late Bloomer (2005), not only helped define the early underground women's involvement in comics but went on to anthologize women's contributions as authors and artists in comics. Her work on the power of autobiography, story and women's life trajectories and the place of creativity in women's identities can be seen as an outgrowth of Barry's forays into narrative style and the primacy of personal experience.

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