She Draws Comics vs. Masters of American Comics

Last week I was pleasantly surprised to learn I was included in the She Draws Comics: A Century of Women Cartoonists exhibit at the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art in New York. (Which is still up for a few months, so get down to Soho and check it out if you’re in the area). The show was curated by feminst cartoonist and self-described “herstorian” Trina Robbins in response to the all-male Masters of American Comics exhibit and book, which I blogged about not-too-long ago (see my piece “Silly Girl, Only Men Can Be Masters of Comics!”), which received quite a bit of (ill-deserved) fawning press and praise when it debuted earlier this year.

The above is a photo of Katherine Arnoldi, Tania del Reo, Raina Telgemeier, and me. See my full photo gallery for pictures of cartooning pioneers like Hilda Terry, still going strong at 92. And get more coverage and photos from the Beat.

One frustrating footnote to all this however—the same weekend I accompanied my boyfriend and fellow cartoonist Masheka Wood to the East Coast Black Age of Comics Convention (see my pictures and captions here). We had a great time, but I noticed there was no overlap between the two events–in other words, all the wonderful black cartoonists we met at ECBACC were men, and there were no black women cartoonists at the She Draws Comics exhibit opening. Which isn’t to say there aren’t black women cartoonists (such as Barbara Brandon, Yaounde Olu, and Spike, to name a few), but that it’d be nice if there were more overlap at these kinds of events in the future.

Anyway, I’m going to be doing interviews with various women cartoonists over the next few months, so watch this space.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 27th, 2006 at 7:20 am and is filed under Cartoons, Race, Humor. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.