The Complete Wimmen’s Comix

published by @fantagraphics

Let us begin with a quick history lesson.  The late 60s and early 70s were a fantastic time for comics.  I’m talking about the peak years of the mainstream Silver Age where we were introduced to some of our most beloved characters including but not limited to Spider-Man, The Fantastic Four, and The Incredible Hulk.  But those fights-in-tights books weren’t all that was happening.

While in New York the good ol’ DC & Marvel gave us our favorites while following the strict guidelines of the Comics Code, some very bored cartoonists were making some very different work in the San Francisco Bay area.  We had fellows like S. Clay Wilson making his “Checkered Demon” stories.  R. Crumb, easily the most famous of them making his “Mr. Natural” and so many others being the compulsive sketch artist that he is.  Those are two of the more widely remembered, but there was work coming out from Spain Wilson, Gilbert Shelton, Rick Griffin, and so many others! It was a good time for comics.

Albeit as fun and prolific as these artists tend to be, most of the work had a tendency toward the overly violent and misogynistic adhering to a primarily male perspective.  This happened only because it was mainly a boys club that made up the underground scene. It wasn’t their fault, they just didn’t know any better.  But that’s where Wimmen’s Comix came in!  Comics made by women for EVERYBODY.

In this collection (with a foreward by the dazzling Trina Robbins) we are given an entire retrospective of the series run starting with possibly the most famous all-female anthology in American comics history: It Ain’t Me, Babe from 1970.  This series had artists like Patricia Moodian, Aline Kominsky(-Crumb), Melinda Gebbie, Diane Noomin, and so many others!  And they all appear in this book!

It is that level of completeness and attention to detail that really sells me on this book.  There is more to take away from it then a few feminist lessons and some pretty artwork (and the art is very pretty) as many dudes seeing this review will write it off as.

This falls under my heading of required reading.

This anthology collection puts an entirely new spin on a time that was otherwise dominated by a male perspective.  It can even be said that we can learn from these stories how far as an industry we’ve come (which isn’t as far as many might think) and how far we have left to go.

Matthew Burbridge is a Digital Editor at ComiXology that’s coming to the conclusion that his current book is gonna take a little over three weeks to finish at this rate.  He’s really gotta buckle down, dig deep, and just finish it.