it aint me babe

Last Gasp July 1970
It doesn’t matter that you’re a good artist (spoiler: these gals ain’t) or even if your boyfriend is one of the men who gets regular work in underground comics, women are simply not welcome in this boy’s club. Not only that, but many of the comic books produced by the men are loaded with sexism and violence against women. You want a chance to be heard, for your work to be seen, to be given the opportunity to counterbalance all these chauvinist comics with a woman’s perspective. You are Trina Robbins, Barbara Mendes or Nancy Kalish. And no one will give you that chance.

“Breaking Out” is a parody of mainstream female comic book characters waking up to the Women’s Liberation movement. Little Lulu, Juliet Jones (from The Heart of Juliet Jones), Betty and Veronica (from Archie), Supergirl and Petunia Pig all achieve feminist nirvana simultaneously, rejecting their former subservient roles and changing their lives forever. The irony of course is none of these characters (with a couple suggestions) could sustain a comic book on their own and needed the male characters to even exist.

Whatever obstacles women overcame to build their own soapbox in underground comic books, they did finally build it and used the freedoms won by the movement to express their own ideas without censorship. So even as Trina Robbins points a finger at Robert Crumb and declares him a misogynist, she should also look back over her shoulder to see the doorway that Crumb built for her to walk through. Even if the bastard didn’t build the doorway for the likes of her.

One thing the Comixjoint critic above doesn’t mention is that the art is horrendous. There is no Spain Rodriguez or Robert Crumb or Gilbert Sheldon or any of the great comic artists of the day. Not even close. None of the artists here has any conception of proportion, character modeling, composition or even the rudiments of drawing. This series (and Tits and Clits, another ‘feminist’ comic) represents some of the most amateurish and hideous art of the day. Crumb’s wife Alina Kaminsky is just as horrible, and probably only got gigs because of her much more talented husband. None of these female artists deserved a job as an artist, sexism not-with-standing. In fact, the reason for the sexism may have been these pushy broads demanding a job when they didn’t have the art chops. I find all these comics terrible in the extreme and not worthy of the genius of the male artists who were their contemporaries. As a side note, the writing blows as well.