No, I don’t mean Jack Chick tracts, I mean comic strips with female main characters. It’s struck me as odd that a bunch are written by men; Luann, 9 Chickweed Lane, Betty, Rose is Rose and Sally Forth for example. Out of that bunch Betty is the only one I find interesting. One of the few exceptions to the male cartoonist rule is Stone Soup by Jan Elliot whiich is one of my favorites.
so what’s the deal with that? Is there a glass ceiling in the cartoon biz? Is cartooning a no girls allowed club?
confindetially I’m just padding my post count so I can have a big one for my second 2,000th post. I was well above that number when part of the board was purged.
I think it’s odd, too. Now that I think about it—I can’t think of any cartoons I’ve read before that were done by women. Maybe it’s because females have a more refined sense of humor.
Rose O’Neill (1874-1944) is considered the first great woman cartoonist. In the 1890s she was a featured artist with LIFE and PUCK magazines, and in 1909 she created the immortal “Kewpies” for LADIES’ HOME JOURNAL. (Some call them a blatant ripoff of Palmer Cox’s “Brownies,” but the Kewpies certainly were groundbreaking in the realm of merchandising.)
One of my personal faves was Zelda “Jackie” Ormes (1918-1985), an African-American cartoonist who created TORCHY BROWN – FROM DIXIE TO HARLEM in 1938. It ran in the Pittsburgh Courier, a black-owned newspaper, until the mid-1940s, and then again in the 1950s. Torchy faced racial prejudice and rape attempts, and was involved in a variety of adventures, including battling environmental pollution. She even appeared onstage at Harlem’s Cotton Club.
I did leave out some good examples but haven’t seen a daily paper with Sylvia or a weekly with Lynda Barry’s Ernie Pook’s Comeek in quite a while.
I did some online browsing and 9 Chickweed Lane is starting to grow on me. The characters are interesting and the drawings have a nice Al Hirschfeld quality. I can only speak from my neanderthal perspective but for a guy Brooke has a good feminnine sensibility.
Our local muckraking/adzine, the Houston Press, dropped Ernie Pook’s Comeek 2 or 3 years ago, apparently because the readership had dumbed down to much to “get” the comic anymore.
Salon.com has not only Lynda Barry but Carol Lay (who I knew from some work she did for SubGenius once), both of whom are sometimes too deep or female for my corrupt guy sensibilities.
How could I forget Rhymes With Orange? Hilary Price is a goddess! And Julie Larson (no relation to Gary, except she’s also wickedly funny) finally has a Dinette Set site up! Rumors that I am the inspiration for Burl have yet to be officially denied.
Or maybe they didn’t menyion her because, like me, they don’t know where she’s regularly published these days. She used to be in the NYPress (the alternative weekly that also carries the Straight Dope), but hasn’t been for years. She’s sorely missed.
Right on, Chaim…Carol Lay is GREAT! Years later I still remember some of her “Story Minutes”…
…particularly the one about the mystery writer who comes up with a foolproof murder method…shares it with a colleague to get his opinion on whether or not she should publish it…he kills her, using HER METHOD, and publishes the book under his own name…and a rash of “perfect murders” ensues as the book hits the bestseller list.
I’m not sure where to read Carol’s stuff in print these days (What the hell happened to the NYPress, anyway? They used to have lots of great comics, now they got SHIT), but her website is http://www.waylay.com
I had a slow afternoon at work and was able to view the entire archive of Story Minute, an excellent and bizarre strip. They had some interesting articles on Robert Crumb as well as Lynda Barry’s 100 Demons strip.
