Mazer Archives November 2022 Newsletter | Out of the Archives: Our Comics Collection

Even though I grew up in a relatively progressive college town in Illinois, and even though I had been totally in love with my best friend in middle school and was greeted with “well. I knew that” when I told mother I was gay in my bedroom in school, I still felt unsure about who I was, what being gay really meant, and where to go from there. I worked at the library as a shelver, had a crush on the girl that sat in front of me and played flute in band, and every Friday night sat with a good friend at a restaurant over cokes and chicken fingers talking about it all, careful to avoid using the actual word.

In the evenings after school, I’d go to the library and sort books by genre, alphabetize them onto carts, and return them to the stacks. It was there, shelving the 741.5 section, that I discovered Alison Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Out For. I looked at Mo, with her short dark hair and her black framed glasses and I thought wow, she looks just like me.

Panel from Alison Bechdel’s “Union Maids” published in Curve, 1991.

Queer representation in popular media has always been important, but it hasn’t always been available. From gay media being labelled “perverse” by the US postal service, to societal rules giving lesbians terrible fates in pulp novels, to the Comics Code Authority barring “sexual abnormalities,” queer people had to find creative solutions to form community and share their experiences.

Comic by Jennifer Camper from the lesbian comics anthology Dyke Strippers, 1995.

Independent, underground comics, those that would never meet the criteria and gain the seal from the Comics Code Authority, thus began to fill this gap. Alternative press comics rose in popularity in the 1960s, with the San Francisco Bay Area often credited as the epicenter of the movement. The Mazer holds many of the feminist and lesbian comics from this era. There are runs from the anthology series Gay Comix featuring Alison Bechdel (Dykes to Watch Out For), Roberta Gregory (Naughty Bits), Mary Wings (Come Out Comix), and Jennifer Camper (Juicy Mother). There are two issues of the anthology Wimmen’s Comix (featuring Trina Robbins, Patricia Moodian, Lynda Barry, Aline Kominsky-Crumb and many others), single issues of Come Out Comics by Wings, two anthologies of feminist cartoons Pork Roast and Dyke Strippers, copies of Dynamite Damsels and Winging It by Gregory, and the one-shot It Ain’t Me Babe edited by Robbins. As well as so many more tucked into collections waiting to be found.

A letter from Joan Hilty responding to a survey from Denueve (now Curve) magazine sent in 1994.

Comics became an outlet to talk about life as it actually was for queer people: in my case, with Dykes to Watch Out For, I learned a lot about feminist bookstores, and protests, and how to assess if a movie is worth watching. It was an important part of developing my identity as a queer person, and evident from the popularity of gay and lesbian comics, it was important for lots of people. Independent comics provided a space to talk about sex and love and queer counterculture, as well as to image life as superheroes or space travelers. Imagination and art have long been forms of resistance and our comics collection is no exception.

Panel from Come Out Comix by Mary Wing, 1973.