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
01
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
02
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
03
04
WHAT WE DO
ILLUSTRATED BY LAUREN R. WEINSTEIN
05
06
WHAT WE DO
ILLUSTRATED BY LAUREN R. WEINSTEIN
07
08
WHAT WE LOOK LIKE
ILLUSTRATED BY ROBYN CHAPMAN
09
10
EARNINGS & YEARNINGS
ILLUSTRATED BY CORINNE MUCHA
11
12
EARNINGS & YEARNINGS
ILLUSTRATED BY CORINNE MUCHA
13
14
THE SUPER NOW
ILLUSTRATED BY DANIELLE CHENETTE
15
16
THE SUPER NOW
ILLUSTRATED BY DANIELLE CHENETTE
17
18
THE SUPER NOW
INTRODUCING. ILLUSTRATED BY MARINAOMI
19
20
FUNNY BECAUSE IT’S TRUE
ILLUSTRATED BY LYRA HILL
21
22
FUNNY BECAUSE IT’S TRUE
COPYWRONGS!
23
24
COPYWRONGS!
ILLUSTRATED BY CLAY HARRIS
25
26
SANITARY NAPKIN DISPOSAL BAGS
ILLUSTRATED BY LAURA SZUMOWSKI
27
28
SANITARY NAPKIN DISPOSAL BAGS
FEMININE HYGIENE & IP
29
30
FEMININE HYGIENE & IP
ILLUSTRATED BY LAURA SZUMOWSKI
31
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
32
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.