ladydrawers_catalogue by A+D Gallery

THE LADYDRAWERS (OF CHICAGO, Ill.)

LUCIA ANAYA + SARAH BELL + BLIZZARD BABIES + NICOLE BOYETT + JACINTA BUNNELL + ROBYN CHAPMAN + DANIELLE CHENETTE + MORGAN CLAIRE + MAY SUMMER FARNSWORTH + MELISSA GIRA GRANT + CLAY HARRIS + GRETCHEN HASSE + LYRA HILL + FRANNY HOWES + SARAH JAFFE + DELIA JEAN + ELLIOTT JUNKYARD + TERRI KAPSALIS + NIA KING + VIÊT LÊ + JAMIE DAVIDA LEE + EVER MAINARD + MARINAOMI + CAROLINA MAYORGA + NICOLE MARROQUIN + KATIE MCVAY + GABRIELA MENDEZ + SARAH MORTON + CORINNE MUCHA + YASMIN NAIR + JULIE NOVAK + LIZ RUSH + FAINA STEFADU + FRAN SYASS + LINDSEY SMITH + RACHEL SWANSON + LAURA SZUMOWSKI + BONSOVATHARY UOEUNG + ESTHER PEARL WATSON + LAUREN WEINSTEIN + SARAH WELCH + ELIZABETH WHITE + MARA WILLIAMS + CAITLIN YATES + POLLY YATES + ANDI ZEISLER

The Ladydrawers wish to thank Truthout, for regularly creating a commercial-free space to support comics journalism from a diverse range of creators; The nearly 50 students, volunteers, and interns who’ve worked with us over the years reading comics, filling out spreadsheets, and always asking questions; The artists we’ve worked with, who bring real vision to raw data, every month (or more); Haters, who likely don’t mean to be pointing out that we’re on the right track, but do; Maya Schenwar, Alex Dahm, Francis Kang, Terri Kapsalis, Ali Scott, Nicole Boyett, Joe Macare, Hannah Rodriguez, Delia Jean, Matthew Filipowicz, Nicole Boyett, Leslie

Thatcher, and Danielle Chenette, whose tireless efforts to widen the space available in cultural production for themselves and others has markedly improved our world already; And the staff at the A+D Gallery at Columbia College—particularly Meg Duguid and Julianna Cuevas—whose labor in putting this exhibition together was not infrequently compared to that of cat-herders, and not just because we like to talk about cats.

Dedication Page and Front Cover Illustrations were drawn by Andi Zeisler

DEDICATION

THE LADYDRAWERS “It is one thing to talk about feelings,” various Ladydrawers have said at one point or another, and in a variety of ways. “But it is another to prove them with math.” They have said this to each other, sometimes when they first meet. I have said it too. It can be tough to hear. A young person, or any person really, who feels frustrated and dejected already, is being told that his or her or their emotions are boring and repetitive and not enough. That alone may hurt. You may end up feeling even more isolated. Sometimes that happens. Yet more often what happens is this: Your shock wears off after a moment. You consider that we may have a point, that it may not just be about you after all. And you start to crunch numbers. Soon, you find yourself giggling at the fact that you are doing math with artists, or laughing at the blatancy of what you are discovering, or feeling what can only be described as joy over the documentation of oppression. Welcome to The Ladydrawers.

By 2011, I had been collecting interviews with and anecdotes from female comic-book creators for about a decade. I knew the world of comics was hostile to women—that wasn’t what bugged me. (Hostility rarely does.) But as the editor for the Best American Comics series from Houghton Mifflin, I had been one of the few people in the history of the form to be tasked with reading every single comic published in English, in North America, that I could get my hands on. So I could later refer to the breadth of the work we’d selected strips from, and so I could keep track of what I thought of them, I kept elaborate lists of all the minis, pamphlets, newspaper and magazine strips, graphic novels, online comics, and newly released collections that I read. What I began to notice was that, overall, about 40% of the work I was looking at was from creators with feminine names. And despite the reputation of comics being an all boys’ club, only about 60% of the

THE LADYDRAWERS

work appeared to come from dudes. But that wasn’t what bugged me either. What bugged me was that the vast majority of the work by female creators was self-published, and the vast majority of the work that was coming out from big-name, medium-name, or any-name-atall publishers was by male creators. So what? You may be saying. This is America! Everyone has the right to express themselves. That’s what counts. Yet the difference between scrounging to put out self-funded work to whatever audience you can muster on your own and being supported in those efforts and paid for your output in the labor-intensive world of comics is vast. Most female cartoonists I knew early in my career had dropped out within five years. It took a few more years, however, before we could figure out what to do about it. I was teaching a class on gender and comics at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and had gathered some preliminary data from women creators through online polls of my array of contacts in the industry, and from tallying bylines and character counts and page numbers in comics anthologies. The poll, later turned into two comics—one with Esther Pearl Watson for Bitch Magazine, and another with Lyra Hill for the Truthout Ladydrawers series— told us a couple interesting things: that 60% of female creators in comics were asked about, or overheard discussions of, sex or their own sexuality while working. That most creators earned less than 25% of their income from comics—substantially less than a living wage and less, still, than minimum wage. That about half of the female creators polled had been misgendered either in person or on the Internet. And that female creators often choose gender non-specific names to publish work under. These things may not appear unusual on their own, but in combination they point to the possibility that women in comics have identified their gender identity as a barrier to earning money from their creative output. That no one balked at the high rate of what

in more traditional work environments could be called sexual or gender-based harassment does not mean that it’s not keeping more sensitive (or less traditional) creators from entering the field at all. But the data was only the bare bones of the story. As we compiled it, the anecdotes mounted—read them in “Funny Because it’s True,” in this catalog. The anthology count we did in 2010 was even more interesting. The average number of female characters in comics anthologies as published by decade had 4% female characters in the 1980s, 5% female characters in the 1990s, and 25% female characters in the 2000s. Over twice as many female characters as male were presented without benefit of clothing in the ‘80s, just a few more than male in the ‘90s, and even more lady characters got clothed in anthologies in the 2000s (although these numbers haven’t evened out yet, by a long shot). Still, we found that women in comics anthologies were more likely to appear naked in the pages of a comic than to be asked to draw one, by a ratio of 181 to 147. And maybe most significantly, we found that having a female anthology editor more than doubled the opportunities for women to have their work published. We had all this information gathered in 2011, but the crew I ended up working with that semester, and then over the summer, and now up until today, finally figured out what to do with it. We took the 30 most recent books from the top 12 publishers in North America and we ran the numbers. We counted pages, creators, characters, editors, nakedness, and prices, and we discovered something shocking. In 2011, female characters made up 40% of the total, male characters made up 57%, and non-gendered, trans*, or unidentified characters made up 3%. But these were being made by a creator pool of 84% male creators and 16% female creators (as identified by name and background research) in the best case scenario. The numbers changed when one publisher, particularly supportive of female creators, went out of business. In the worst case scenario—and two of my favorite independent comic-book publishers were among these—female creators never got more than 8% of the creative gigs on offer.

We broke this down even further: were female creators’ books priced the same as male creators of equal length? No. Were books across gender given equal marketing support? No. Were female creators given the same number of pages in anthologies as male creators? No. As good answers do, these just led to more questions—mostly about the nitty gritty of who was being paid to do what in our culture and why. But we’d gathered enough information that we thought we should share it. So we created a series of postcards, each detailing and illustrating a single fact, stat, or finding, drafted up a list of folks in the industry we thought would be interested, and mailed them off. “Shitstorm” is probably not too strong of a word to describe what happened next, as articles and queries and rage ensued. More feelings were discussed, and generated. We made comics about them, and puppet shows, and laughed. What’s the point of doing stuff if it’s not fun? We created Unladylike that summer, and kicked off the Truthout column with the MariNaomi strip included in this booklet. Then, the next year, we did it again. Well—not the same thing, exactly. But the data collection and the counting and the sharing. The findings from our survey in 2012 were even more gut-wrenching. This time we polled every creator we could find—men, women, transfolk, nonbinary people—even people who wouldn’t have called themselves comics creators, but wanted to participate in the form anyway. And we found that, of the folks we polled, only 54% identified as male, while 39% identified as female, and 7% identified as genderqueer, trans* or other. This alone challenged the assumption that comics are a male-dominated form—in fact, male creators make up only slightly more of the field than anyone else. But here’s where it gets interesting: equal rates of women and men—slightly over half of each— submitted work to publishers, while only 37% of trans* and nonbinary creators had done the same. But even more than that percentage of males—75%—said they’d been published, while female creators were published at around the

same rates they were submitting work. (So were trans* and nonbinary gender folk.) This was backed up by two studies we cite in the strip “The Super Now” with Danielle Chenette that proves that the so-called “ambition gap”—the idea that women aren’t asking for more at the same rates as men, often used to explain away the gender pay gap—doesn’t exist. What does that mean? That, in comics, the primary reason more men are published than women is because their work is being sought out by editors and publishers. About one-fifth of it, in fact. Looking at the places folks are being published matters, too—especially in terms of how much money creators are pulling in. And while dudes are appearing in magazines, comics pamphlets, and newspapers, ladies are more likely to have work in self-published zines or periodicals. It tends not to add up as fast, and we learned, in fact, that only around 65% of both male and female creators earned money from comics every year. About 30% broke even, and about 5% lost money. (This percentage is slightly higher for women—less of whom broke even.) Only 17% of trans* and nonbinary gender creators, however, made money. Half broke even, and over a third lost money. Yet when we look more closely at how much money we’re talking about, things get even crazier. Ninety-two percent of the creators who earned incomes over the poverty line in 2012 were male, and 8% were female. No single trans* or nonbinary gender creator earned more than $600 per year.

Women have been working more, and harder, and longer hours than men for a really long time, but this isn’t reflected in the media we are given to consume partially because those are jobs women don’t tend to get. They’re also not represented in political office (one of the reasons that, in 2012, we had to go handdeliver our sex ed comics and copies of Our Bodies Ourselves to Todd Akin after he started talking about “legitimate rape”). This means that the laws that govern our country tend to be biased toward their creators—and in intellectual property rights laws, we can see, fairly clearly, how this fosters economic inequity. And when, finally, our struggle for gender equity only includes two groups of producers, male and female—as opposed to all people—we can see how quickly some folks get left behind. Strips in this book with Lauren Weinstein, Robyn Chapman, Clay Harris, and Laura Szumowski will draw a clearer picture for you (ha ha)—but the exhibition also includes many of our past collaborative projects (including Unladylike, Women’s Comics Anthology, our postcard series, Hand Job: A Labor of Love, and some of the sex ed comics from Nicole Boyett and Rachel Swanson) as well as new projects. Some of these are created for the exhibition space and some are works by artists working along similar lines elsewhere. The workshops, too, while didactic, will also be open-ended, exploratory, and fun. You are likely to be challenged. You will probably have feelings. But you might also figure out how to turn visceral emotional reactions into information. Share it with us. We’ll make something out of it, together.

To break that down even further, for every dollar a male creator earned, a female creator took home 27 cents. A trans* or nonbinary gender creator took home 3.5 cents.

The reasons for this, however, are rooted in how deeply our culture and capitalism are invested in misogyny and transphobia—curiosity about which led to our more recent work as well as the creation of the rest of the strips in this book.

ANNE ELIZABETH MOORE

WHAT WE DO

ILLUSTRATED BY LAUREN R. WEINSTEIN

WHAT WE DO

ILLUSTRATED BY LAUREN R. WEINSTEIN

WHAT WE LOOK LIKE

ILLUSTRATED BY ROBYN CHAPMAN

EARNINGS & YEARNINGS

ILLUSTRATED BY CORINNE MUCHA

EARNINGS & YEARNINGS

ILLUSTRATED BY CORINNE MUCHA

THE SUPER NOW

ILLUSTRATED BY DANIELLE CHENETTE

THE SUPER NOW

ILLUSTRATED BY DANIELLE CHENETTE

THE SUPER NOW

INTRODUCING. ILLUSTRATED BY MARINAOMI

FUNNY BECAUSE IT’S TRUE

ILLUSTRATED BY LYRA HILL

FUNNY BECAUSE IT’S TRUE

COPYWRONGS!

ILLUSTRATED BY CLAY HARRIS

SANITARY NAPKIN DISPOSAL BAGS

ILLUSTRATED BY LAURA SZUMOWSKI

SANITARY NAPKIN DISPOSAL BAGS

FEMININE HYGIENE & IP

ILLUSTRATED BY LAURA SZUMOWSKI

HERE’S WHAT THE PRESS HAS TO SAY ABOUT US: “Beautifully illustrated intellectual ammunition.” —THINKPROGRESS

“Depressing news, but the comic makes it a little easier to swallow.” —BITCH

“Making an art form out of researching and publishing findings that others might write or talk about.” —WOMEN’S E-NEWS

“Wry.” —NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE

The Ladydrawers Comics Collective (“The Ladydrawers”) is an unofficially affiliated group of women, men, trans*, and nonbinary gender folk who research, perform, and publish comics and texts about how economics, race, sexuality, and gender impact the comics industry, other media, and our culture at large. Our data comes from original research conducted in the public realm by students, interns, volunteers, and supporters around the globe. Our content—including comic books, strips, posters, postcards, games, and various forms of media—is created by a range of folks interested in, and with a range of experiences in, the comics industry and the art world at large, including long-time, established professionals and recent enthusiasts. Our projects have been commissioned by the publications Tin House, Annalemma, and Bitch, and appear regularly in our monthly column on Truthout. We have also conducted projects in conjunction with Our Bodies Ourselves and other social-justice minded, information-disseminating organizations. Many of our collaborations begin in classes at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago or Ox-Bow School of Art. We have lectured at Northwestern University’s

Sex Week, at the Chicago Alternative Comics Expo (CAKE), at the Chicago Cultural Center (for the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Chicago Artists’ Resource), at the Cambodian Association of Illinois, and at the Pop Culture and World Politics Conference at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York. In addition, last summer we implemented a two-week experimental graduate program at the Adventure School for Ladies called the Comics Intensive. Other stories about The Ladydrawers have appeared in media outlets including: Jezebel, Express Milwaukee, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Our Bodies Ourselves, The Matthew Filipowicz Show, New City, Chicago Publishes, an unknown Dutch website, Examiner, Comics Beat, and on WBEZ’s Vocalo. We are a curiosity-driven, open-ended, exploatory body of friendly amateur researchers, concerned with who gets to say what in our culture and how they may or may not be supported in or compensated for saying it. Our monthly comic strip on Truthout, which draws

ABOUT THE LADYDRAWERS

between several thousand to nearly a hundred thousand readers, both documents and illustrates our findings for the public at large; it also pays underrepresented artists to make comics in a field where it can be difficult to make money as a woman or trans* person. In April of 2010, we also published our data on women’s comics anthologies in a pamphlet called Women’s Comics Anthology; conducted an internationally debated postcard campaign in May of 2011; released a limited-edition print anthology now available online in July of 2011 called Unladylike; and put out a book in conjunction with the Adventure School in June of 2012 called Hand Job: A Labor of Love. This summer’s exhibition and workshop program explores comics, art, and other forms of cultural production as vehicles for addressing gender, race, sex, and money. We are nice, and funny. We like, and want to work with, everybody. We want everyone to be happy. And we will work really hard with them to make sure that’s possible.

Comics are Powerful ChiCago ComiCs and Quimby’s bookstore sell sweet-ass ComiCs and welCome the ladydrawers

Quimby’s bookstore

1854 W. North Ave. Chicago, IL 60622 773/342-0910 www.quimbys.com

ChiCago ComiCs

3244 N. Clark St. Chicago, IL 60657 773/528.1983 www.chicagocomics.com

A+D art

+ desi gn

AVERILL AND BERNARD LEVITON

GALLERY HOURS

A+D GALLERY

TUESDAY – SATURDAY

619 SOUTH WABASH AVENUE

11AM – 5PM

CHICAGO, ILLINOIS 60605 312 369 8687

THURSDAY

COLUM.EDU/ADGALLERY

11AM – 8PM

ROBYN CHAPMAN is the proprietor of Paper Rocket Minicomics. She is also a cartoonist and an educator. Her cartooning workshops have brought her to classrooms at the School of Visual Arts, The New School, Wellesley College, and the University of Iowa. She spent five years at The Center for Cartoon Studies, initially as their first fellow and later as their program coordinator and a faculty member. During her time at CCS she earned her MFA, having previously earned her BFA at the Savannah College of Art and Design. She is currently an assistant editor at Graphic Universe, the graphic novel imprint of Lerner Publishing Group. She recently wrote a book called Drawing Comics Lab. DANIELLE CHENETTE is an artist who lives and works in Chicago, IL.

Heavily influenced by Tao philosophy and Cosmology, Chenette’s work confronts the concepts of mortality, isolation, and humanity’s relationship to nature through simplistic comics and animations. She works primarily with pencil, brush, and ink. CLAY HARRIS is an artist and teacher living in Silver Spring, Maryland. He takes care of his mom and teaches cartooning on weekends. LYRA HILL is a filmmaker, comics artist, performer, and organizer living in Chicago. She is a member of Trubble Club, the collaborative comics collective, and the founder and organizer of Brain Frame, the performative comix reading series. Lyra is interested in the unconscious drives, questionable humor, and the avant-garde. MARINAOMI is the Los Angeles-based creator of the graphic memoir Kiss & Tell: A Romantic Resume, Ages 0 to 22 (Harper Perennial) and the self-published Estrus Comics (est. 1998). Visit her website at marinaomi.com.

ANNE ELIZABETH MOORE is a Fulbright scholar, a UN Press Fellow, the Truthout columnist behind Ladydrawers: Gender and Comics in the US, and the author of several award-winning books including Cambodian Grrrl (Cantankerous Titles 2011) and Unmarketable (The New Press 2007). She founded The Ladydrawers Comics Collective after a decade in the comics industry and was recently called “one of the sharpest thinkers and cultural critics bouncing around the globe today” by Razorcake. She writes criticism for The New Inquiry, The Baffler, and Dissent and has two WHOLE cats. CORINNE MUCHA is a Chicago based author, illustrator, and teaching artist. Her work includes the Xeric-funded My Alaskan Summer, the Ignatz-award winning The Monkey in the Basement and Other Delusions (Retrofit Comics, 2012), and the YA graphic novel Freshman: Tales of 9th Grade Obsessions, Revelations and Other Nonsense (Zest Books, 2011). See more of her work at www.maidenhousefly.com. LAURA SZUMOWSKI is an illustrator and writer living in Chicago. She is the author of several nonfiction guidebooks, and is best known for her work concerning women’s health such as Tip of the Iceberg: A Book About the Clitoris and Cycling: A Guide to Menstruation. See more of Laura’s work at lauraszumowski.com. LAUREN WEINSTEIN is a cartoonist whose books include Girl Stories and The Goddess of War, and her work has been published in Kramer’s Ergot, The Ganzfeld, An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, and The Best American Comics of 2007 and 2010. Her work has also appeared in the New York Times, Glamour, and Heeb magazines. She is currently working on a sequel to Girl Stories. ANDI ZEISLER is the cofounder and editorial director of Bitch Media, and a sometimes comic artist. She lives and draws in Portland, Oregon.

For a complete list of events, workshops and participant bios for this exhibition, please visit colum.edu/adgallery. This exhibition is sponsored by the Art + Design Department at Columbia College Chicago. This exhibition is partially supported by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency and support from Quimby’s Bookstore and Chicago Comics.