FEMINISM 215
Metal Hurlant (published in the United States as Heavy Metal ) came out with the
all-woman anthology comics magazine Ah! Nana. Th e title is a French pun. Nana
is French slang for girl, and anana is French for banana. Th e magazine, which lasted
from 1976 to 1978, included comics from women all over Europe and also the work of
American cartoonists Shary Flenniken, Robbins, Mary K. Brown, and Sharon Rudahl.
Meanwhile, the Wimmen’s Comix Collective was returning the favor, including comics
by French, Italian, British, and Canadian women in Wimmen’s Comix.
In 1981, in conjunction with the fi rst ever exhibit of feminist cartoons at the UBC
Fine Arts Gallery in Vancouver, Canada, curator Avis Lang Rosenberg edited Pork Roasts ,
a selection of comics from the show. Included were both men and women from the United
States, Canada, Germany, India, France, England, New Zealand, Argentina, Mexico, and
Italy. Among the American women cartoonists in the book were Nicole Hollander, Debra
McGee, Lee Marrs, Betty Swords, Etta Hulme, Trina Robbins, Joyce Farmer, Ellen Levine,
and Martha Campbell. Feminist comics and comics by women had gone international.
Reacting to the 1990 Webster Decision passed by the Supreme Court, which put
abortion laws into the hands of individual states, Trina Robbins and Liz Schiller, trea-
surer of the Oakland, California, National Organization for Women (NOW) put to-
gether CHOICES , a benefi t book on abortion, with all profi ts going to NOW. After
two alternative comics publishers turned down the project, Robbins and Schiller formed
Angry Isis Press to self-publish the book, which sold over 10,000 copies. Th e pages were
divided among both men and women artists, with 23 women and 18 men contributing.
In the early 21st century, feminist comics and comics by women again went inter-
national, when Robbins curated a series of exhibits of American women cartoonists
throughout Europe. Th e exhibits began in Germany in 2002, moved to Portugal and
Spain, and fi nally later that same year, opened in the Secession Gallery in Vienna, Austria.
Instead of an exhibit catalogue, the Secession Gallery printed a graphic novel anthology
titled Secession. Edited and scripted by Robbins, the book contained work by 25 women
cartoonists all writing on the same theme: what it is like to be a woman cartoonist. Upon
its return to the United States, the exhibit traveled to San Francisco and New York.
Meanwhile, mainstream comics, in regard to feminism, had not progressed since
Valkyrie and her Lady Liberators in the 1970s. Mainstream superhero comics, aimed
at a primarily young male audience, often presented female characters in a hypersexual-
ized manner. Th rough the years, women characters in comics, as drawn by mainstream
male cartoonists, increased their breast size as their costumes grew briefer.
In the 1990s, women fans of mainstream comics, unhappy with such representation,
began to use the Internet as a tool of feminist comic criticism. Such Web sites as
Sequential Tart, a webzine formed in 1998, and the more recent Girl-Wonder.org,
started in 2005, provide a space for women comics readers, focus on women’s issues in
comics, and work to make the comics industry a more positive place for women both as
comics creators and readers.
Primarily because television employs living human women rather than artists’ fan-
tasies, representation of superheroines or action heroines on the small screen has been
