248 GAY AND LESBIAN THEMES
Womanews in July 1983. Bechdel began syndicating the strip on her own in 1985. It has
since been collected in several volumes and was featured in dozens of papers. Th e strip
centers on a group of lesbian friends but includes a wide variety of characters, gay and
straight, and is marked by its astute, left-leaning political and social commentary. In
2006, Bechdel’s F u n H o m e , a critically acclaimed and commercially successful graphic
memoir , was published.
Diane DiMassa began publishing Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist
in 1991. Th e comic strip centered on Hothead, a strong lesbian-feminist fi gure who
castrated rapists. Hothead Paisan was an immediate success, and its main character
became a lesbian and feminist icon. Th e comics were collected in 1999 in Th e Complete
Hothead Paisan. Jennifer Camper, who since 2005 has been the editor of Juicy Mother ,
the fi rst gay and lesbian anthology since Gay Comix (in which Camper’s own work was
featured), published a collection of her comics in 1994 titled Rude Girls And Dangerous
Wo m e n. Camper also published her comic strip SubGURLZ in 1999.
Many of the pioneers of the 1970s and 1980s continued to publish works well
into the 1990s and beyond, and were joined by a host of new artists. Ralf König,
a highly successful German artist, had several of his works translated into English
during the 1990s. Robert Kirby edited an anthology called Strange Looking Exile in
1991, and in the same year began his strip Curbside which was published as a collec-
tion of the same title in 1998. Terry Moore’s Strangers in Paradise , begun in 1993,
was centered on two female characters without a rigidly defi ned sexual orientation.
In the same year, Gaze Magazine began to feature Paul Berge’s gay-oriented political
cartoons. In 1994, Jimmie Robinson published Cyberzone , whose leading character
was an African American lesbian. Glen Hanson’s and Allan Neuwirth’s Chelsea Boys ,
a strip about three gay roommates, began to be featured in New York’s Next Magazine
beginning in 1998. In 2000, Judd Winick created Pedro and Me: Friendship, Loss, and
What I Learned , an acclaimed graphic novel. Other notable artists from the 1990s and
early 2000s included Ariel Schrag, Belasco, Leeane Franson, Ellen Forney, Gordon
Spurlock, Sean Martin, Jon Macy, Craig Maynard, Chris Companik, Dave Brousseau,
Daniel Curzon, and Julian Lake.
Most of the above-mentioned artists, since their works were geared toward a spe-
cifi c readership and did not enjoy mass distribution (at least initially), were not nearly
as inhibited as artists working in the mainstream. Consequently, many of their works
engaged with radical politics and sex in ways unimaginable in mainstream publica-
tions. Conversely, the limitations imposed on mainstream comics by the Comics Code,
general public opinion, and the corporate bottom-line meant that the progress achieved
by independent and underground publishers and artists was not equaled by their main-
stream counterparts. Nevertheless, there were also occasional and notable changes in
mainstream publications beginning in the 1970s.
Don McGregor introduced the fi rst lesbian characters in mass-market comics in
Detectives, Inc: A Remembrance of Th reatening Green , published in 1980. McGregor
was also the fi rst artist working in the mainstream to show a gay kiss, which occurred
