Female comics creators
Although, traditionally, female comics creators have long been a minority in the industry, they have made a notable impact since the very beginning, and more and more female artists are getting recognition along with the maturing of the medium. Women creators have worked in every genre, from superheroes to romance, westerns to war, crime to horror.
In certain countries, like Japan and South Korea, women creators have shaken up the traditional market and attained widespread mainstream success.
Americas
United States
Newspaper comics
In the early 20th century, when the U.S. newspaper comics market was in its infancy, William Randolph Hearst brought the artist Nell Brinkley over from the competing Denver Post, and although not doing comics herself, her romantic and glamorous imagery became an inspiration to a generation of female comics artists.Another style popular around the time was cute comics with doll-like round-cheeked children. In 1909, Rose O'Neill created The Kewpies, a series continuing for decades and widely used in various marketing purposes.
Another cartoonist, Grace Wiederseim, worked in a similar vein and, from the 1910s until the 1930s, created a multitude of series with cherubic children bearing names such as Toodles, Dimples, Dolly Dingle, and Dottie Darling. She was also the creator of the "Campbell kids," which Campbell Soup employed for marketing purposes up until the 1930s. Her sister, Margaret G. Hays was also a frequent collaborator with her on several of her works.
In the 1910s, newspaper cartoonist Fay King was drawing early autobiographical comics in The Denver Post and Cartoons Magazine.
Edwina Dumm created a long-lasting series in 1918 about a boy and a dog called Cap Stubbs and Tippie, although the frisky dog Tippie soon took over the strip as its most popular character. The series ran until the 1960s.
In the 1920s, the USA underwent an economic boom and widespread social change, leading to the appearance of the "flapper", a female subculture receiving a lot of media attention at the time. Flappers enjoyed partying, jazz music and free dating, and defied many of the social norms surrounding women at the time. Several female cartoonists picked up on the flapper stereotype, often working in a stylish art deco style, including Ethel Hays, Virginia Huget, Gladys Parker and Marjorie Henderson Buell.
In the 1930s, the Great Depression had struck the US, and stories about poor but happy families, and their stoic struggles to make a living, became popular reader fare. Martha Orr created one of the most successful series, Apple Mary, about an old lady selling apples around the neighborhood, in 1932.
The accounts on the series' final fate differs. Most sources state that in 1938, she left it to her female assistant Dale Conner, who renamed it Mary Worth, although King Features Syndicate's own account claims that Apple Mary folded and Mary Worth was its replacement. In 1940, a new writer Allen Saunders was brought in, and Conner and Saunders began signing the strip with the joint pseudonym "Dale Allen", which remained after Conner left the series. Mary Worth has proven a successful concept, and is still syndicated around the globe.
In 1935, Marjorie Henderson Buell created the comic panel Little Lulu, later spawning a successful comic book series by John Stanley and Irving Tripp. This character inspired the name for the organization Friends of Lulu, an organization promoting reading and authoring of comics to girls and women.
In 1940, veteran artist Dale Messick created the comic strip Brenda Starr, Reporter, about a glamorous reporter with a soap opera-like love life. After Messick left the series, it was continued solely by other female artists.
In 1941, Tarpé Mills created the superheroine strip Miss Fury for the Sunday pages. Striking a chord among the readers, she was drawing the strip until 1951.
Jackie Ormes was the first nationally syndicated female black cartoonist with her series Torchy Brown, created in 1937 as a humoristic adventure strip lasting for three years, and picked up again in 1950 as Torchy Brown's Heartbeats, basically revamped as a black version of Brenda Starr, Reporter, with the young black eponymous character stumbling onto adventure after adventure, and going from one love interest to another, although the series also took up more serious subjects such as racial bigotry and environmental pollution. The series never became a widespread success, since it was only picked up by black-owned newspapers.
In the 1940s, teen comics became a popular genre. This was a rather down-to-earth genre, mostly comedy-inclined and marketed towards young teenage girls, where young, often gangly, teenagers went through different problems with the opposite sex and dating. Notable artists to mention include Hilda Terry, Marty Links and Linda Walter. These three artists all had earlier works in the fashion field. In 1951, after some internal arguments within the organization, Terry became the first female cartoonist to be accepted to the National Cartoonists Society.
Other successful strips include Cathy Guisewite's semi-autobiographical Cathy, about a neurotic city woman and her problems with shopping and romance, and Lynn Johnston's For Better or For Worse, about the Patterson household and their family relationships.
Overtly feminist and containing much pointed social commentary in addition to character-based humor, Nicole Hollander's strip Sylvia is distributed nationally by Tribune Media Services, with 19 published books collecting strip selections. Sylvia's strong personality and forcefully critical views distinguish her from less assertive women cartoon characters.
Due to the syndicates' often strict demands on recurring characters and an unwillingness to risk offending readers, some cartoonists have gone into self-syndication to maintain control of their work. Some long-running self-syndicated comics are the feminist Maxine or Laughing Gas by cartoonist and author Marian Henley and the surrealist Way Lay or Story Minute by underground veteran Carol Lay.
Mainstream comic books
Comic books, as well, have been produced by a number of female artists.One publisher in particular, Fiction House, used many female cartoonists, both on staff and through Eisner & Iger, one of the era's comics packagers that would supply comic books on demand to publishers testing the emerging medium. Action and adventure-oriented genres were popular at this time, and Fiction House's forte was capable and beautiful female protagonists, working as pilots, detectives, or jungle adventuresses. Women working for the publisher include Lily Renée, at the Lambiek Comiclopedia Fran Hopper and future romance artists Ruth Atkinson and Ann Brewster. These stories were frequently written by a female writer, as well: Ruth Roche, later an editor. Before finding fame as a crime novelist, Patricia Highsmith wrote for Black Terror and other comic books.
In the 1950s Marie Severin, sister of artist John Severin, was a frequent EC and Atlas/Marvel colorist, later drawing her own stories as well. Her cartoon style made her a frequent contributor to Marvel's Not Brand Echh satirical title of the late 1960s. Another prolific artist was Ramona Fradon, who drew Aquaman and was co-creator of Metamorpho.
Later artists and writers include Ann Nocenti, Louise Simonson, June Brigman, Gail Simone, Devin Grayson, Becky Cloonan, the first female Batman artist, Marjorie Liu, Sara Pichelli, G. Willow Wilson, Amanda Conner, Erin Williams, and Kelly Sue DeConnick at Image Comics.
Underground, alternative and independent
The underground comix movement attracted women artists, as it allowed more mature themes and personal work than the commercial newspaper and comic book industry of the time. A pioneer in this market was Trina Robbins, a driving force in the creation of the early all-female comix books It Ain't Me, Babe and All Girl Thrills, and later founder of the anthology series Wimmen's Comix. Robbins has written several books about female cartoonists and their comics.Another all-female comix book series was Tits & Clits Comix, founded by Lyn Chevely and Joyce Farmer, who were inspired by the honesty in the underground comix, but appalled by the frequent male sexist perspective and attitude. With the conviction that sex was political, the series was created with the focus of sex and sexuality from a female perspective.
Artists who grew out of this movement include Lee Marrs, Shary Flenniken, Aline Kominsky and Dori Seda.
After the underground scene turned into the alternative scene, women artists continued to focus on autobiographical work, such as Debbie Drechsler and Phoebe Gloeckner.
The scene's unapologetic attitude also inspired artists outside the US, such as Canadian Julie Doucet, whose surrealist semi-autobiographical series Dirty Plotte became a worldwide cult favorite in the 1990s.
The underground/alternative market allowed for a more open depiction of sexuality, and in the 1970s and 1980s openly lesbian and bisexual artists told their stories in comic book form, such as Mary Wings, Roberta Gregory and Alison Bechdel.
In the independent market, that began to appear from the 1970s, Wendy Pini, together with her husband Richard Pini, started the manga-inspired series Elfquest, which soon became a major sleeper hit.
Colleen Doran created her cult space opera series A Distant Soil which was published in the early-1980s in small press fanzines, then self-published by Doran in the early-1990s, before moving to Image Comics in 1996.
Other popular artists include Donna Barr, Jill Thompson and Linda Medley.