FEMINISM 213
prefers a career to romance, says, “I guess I was what they called a woman’s libber.” Yet
by the story’s climax, having met her true love, she decides, “I’ll keep my job... but my
marriage will always come fi rst!”
In 1970, editor Stan Lee brought women’s liberation to Marvel’s superhero line with
Th e Avengers #83, titled “Come On In... the Revolution’s Fine.” On the cover, Valkyrie,
a new superheroine in long blonde braids and metal brassiere, stands, along with Wasp,
Scarlet Witch, Black Widow , and Medusa, over the fallen (male) bodies of the Aveng-
ers superhero team. She says, “ All right , girls—that fi nishes off these male chauvinist pigs!
From now on, it’s the Valkyrie and her lady liberators!”
In the 1960s, Marvel comics superheroines had often been titled “Girl,” as in Invisible
Girl or Marvel Girl. It took Stan Lee fi ve years after the creation of the Lady Liberators,
but in 1977, he used the title “Ms.” for the fi rst time, when he came up with a superhero-
ine called Ms. Marvel. If Lee’s attempts at feminism seem either clueless of just funny
today, he was at least trying. One would think that the more politically hip genre of
underground comics, or comix , would do a better job of getting it right, but unfortu-
nately this was not so. In the early 1970s the predominantly male underground comix
movement was producing books that often graphically sexually objectifi ed women, and
all too often depicted women in terms of violent misogyny. Reacting to this situation,
in 1970 cartoonist Trina Robbins joined the staff of the West Coast’s fi rst Women’s
Liberation newspaper, It Ain’t Me, Babe , contributing a none-too-subtle propaganda
strip, “Belinda Berkeley.” Later that year, with the moral support of the newspaper staff ,
she produced the world’s fi rst ever all-woman comic book, It Ain’t Me, Babe , published
by Last Gasp.
At this time there were exactly two women cartoonists living in the underground
comix mecca, San Francisco: Robbins and Willy Mendes. Both contributed to It Ain’t
Me, Babe , after which, excluded from the male underground cartoonists’ books, they
went on to produce their own comic books, both solo and together. Mendes produced
Illuminations in 1971, Robbins’s solo book was Girl Fight Comics , 1972, and both
Mendes and Robbins, along with Santa Cruz cartoonist Jewelie Goodvibes, produced
All Girl Th rills in 1970.
In 1972, a group of eight women consisting of Robbins, Michelle Brand, Lee Marrs,
Lora Fountain, Patti Moodian, Sharon Rudahl, Shelby Sampson, Aline Kominsky,
Karen Marie Haskell, and Janet Wolfe Stanley, met at Patti Moodian’s San Francisco
home to form the Wimmen’s Comix Collective, and to put together Wimmen’s Comix ,
the second all-woman comic book to come out of San Francisco. True to the demo-
cratic principals of the women’s movement, the collective had a rotating editorship, so
that no one person ever had complete control of the book. By 1982, this changed to an
even more democratic rotating editorship with two women sharing editorial duties on
each book. At regular meetings, the group reviewed submissions together and made
collective decisions, although the editors had fi nal say on what was accepted.
Wimmen’s Comix lasted 20 years and is still the longest surviving all-woman anthol-
ogy comic book. Th e ever-growing list of contributors drew comics on subjects that
