Overview

Over 100 artworks by women cartoonists were shown at the Palazzo Merulana Museum, a former public health building in Rome two blocks from the Colosseum. It reopened in May 2018 after an extensive five-year remodel by the Elena and Claudio Cerasi Foundation to showcase their collection of masterpieces by Italian artists from the first half of the 20th Century (Giacomo Balla, Mario Sironi, Giorgio De Chirico, Antonio Donghi, Mario Mafai, Antonietta Raphaël and Giuseppe Capogrossi).

The Women in Comics exhibition celebrates art by three generations of women currently working in comics in the United States and Canada, providing a sample of the diversity of voices and the extensive variety of topics now available to readers.

Beginning with a wave of underground comix in the 1970s created by women such as Trina Robbins, Barbara Mendes, Lee Marrs, and Joyce Farmer, women have established a unique and personal voice in comics. The underground era was followed in the 1980s by a second generation of women cartoonists that emphasized innovative drawing and layout, biography, and personal observations, published in alternative newspapers and comics magazines like Weirdo, Arcade, and Raw. In the present day, women cartoonists are seen everywhere creating best-selling graphic novels and working in a wide range of genres, such as personal memoirs, children’s stories, superheroes, epic fantasy, graphic medicine, and editorial cartooning.

The exhibition is organized into 3 thematic sections:

Wimmen’s Comix of the 1970s: Jewelie Goodvibes, Barbara “Willy” Mendes, Trina Robbins

Ladies of the 80s: Ramona Fredon, Joyce Farmer, Lee Marrs, Lynda Barry, Fiona Smyth, Mary Fleener, Carol Tyler

Diverse Voices in Contemporary Comics: Gabrielle Bell, Colleen Doran, Trinidad Escobar, Margot Ferrick, Emil Ferris, Ebony Flowers, Noel Franklin, Jennifer Hayden, Alitha Martinez, Barbara Mendes, Summer Pierre, Afua Richardson, Raina Telgemeier, Ann Telnaes, Tillie Walden, and Kriota Willberg. Please scroll down the page for artist bios. (Floor Plan Rome)

The ARF Festival organized a substantial program of events, there was a student cover drawing contest, a series of talks between US and Italian artists, and a series of talks by Italian artists on the museum’s roof garden. There was also a curator talk conducted as part of the US Embassy’s Transatlantic Thursdays program. The pillars seen throughout the gallery featured articles in the Italian comics magazine Fumettologica on Trina and the undergrounds as well as Escobar, Martinez, Flowers, Doran, and Ferris (translation here).

When asked about the show, Italian comics journalist and ARF! board member Francesca Torre said: “The meetings of Women in Comics have been very important for the Italian public to introduce several American artists of great historical value. Not all their stories have been published in Italy so, for many Italians this was the first approach with these artists. For this reason, ARF! Festival can say that it has taken an important step in spreading the culture of international comics while also making known the great contribution of women in this culture.”

Video: interview with ARF Festival director Stefano Piccoli on la repubblica at the exhibit (2 min). video: Curator talk with Kim organized by the US Embassy in Rome. Discussion of the show and the role of women in comics with artists and Italian students (in English & Italian).

Women in Comics Naples

Women in Comics was seen by an entirely different audience at the Foqus Corte dell'Arte, an important event space in the heart of the Spanish Quarter of Naples. The Corte dell'Arte is a multifunctional space inside an elegant sixteenth-century cloister at the heart of the former Montecalvario Institute. The Corte dell'Arte houses a bar and restaurant with a wood-burning oven, the cinema, the Contemporary Art Gallery, and the Neighborhood Library (this venue displayed reproductions).

Artist Bios

Below are bios for the artists featured in the show.

Lynda Barry

Lynda Barry has worked as a painter, cartoonist, writer, illustrator, playwright, editor, commentator, and teacher and found that they are very much alike. She lives in Wisconsin, where she is associate professor of art and Discovery Fellow at University of Wisconsin Madison.

Barry is the inimitable creator behind the seminal comic strip that was syndicated across North America in alternative weeklies for two decades, Ernie Pook’s Comeek, featuring the incomparable Marlys and Freddy. She is the author of The Freddie Stories, One! Hundred! Demons!, The! Greatest! of! Marlys!, Cruddy: An Illustrated Novel, Naked Ladies! Naked Ladies! Naked Ladies!, and The Good Times are Killing Me which was adapted into a Broadway play.

She has written three bestselling and acclaimed creative how-to graphic novels for Drawn & Quarterly, What It Is, which won the Eisner Award for Best Reality-Based Graphic Novel and R.R. Donnelly Award ; Picture This; and Syllabus: Notes From an Accidental Professor, and In 2019 she received a MacArthur Genius Grant.

Colleen Doran

Colleen Doran is the New York Times bestselling artist for the Neil Gaiman graphic novels Troll Bridge, Snow, Glass, Apples, Sandman, American Gods, and Stan Lee’s autobiography Amazing, Fantastic, Incredible Stan Lee. Books she has illustrated have won Eisner, Harvey, and International Horror Guild Awards. Vector: The Journal of the British Science Fiction Association declared Doran’s A Distant Soil, which she created at age twelve, “…groundbreaking science fiction comics… ahead of its time.”

In 1992, Doran drew one of the first mainstream comics covers featuring a trans character for Legion of Super-Heroes #31. Chivalry, Doran’s latest adaptation of a beloved tale by Neil Gaiman, tells the story of an elderly widow who finds a small goblet in a thrift store. It turns out to be the legendary Holy Grail and she gets periodically visited by a knight hoping to obtain it (expected from Dark Horse September 2021). We will be showing these pages as well as a two-page spread from Snow Glass Apples and a page from Wonder Woman #750.

Joyce Farmer

Joyce Farmer has been creating comics since 1972. The series Tits and Clits (1972-1987) explored women’s adventures regarding sex and cultural expectations. Controversial at the time, Joyce is now recognized as a pioneer in underground comix.

Her graphic memoir Special Exits (2010) depicts the universal problems of the elderly and treatment of the extremely vulnerable by the medical community. She won a Reuben and was nominated for an Eisner the same year. The book has been translated into five languages. Each summer, Joyce travels to Greece to work, swim and practice the language.

Emil Ferris

Emil Ferris is a graphic novelist whose first book My Favorite Thing Is Monsters has been praised by critics since its publication in 2017. Her book - which presents itself as the lined notebook diary of a pre-teen self-avowed werewolf who questions her sexual identity - is set in Chicago in the 1960’s. The book is autobiographically infused as Emil - like her protagonist Karen Reyes - was witness to the highly charged political and social climate of that time.

In 2002 at 40 years of age Emil was bitten by a mosquito and infected with West Nile Virus. She suffered lower body paralysis as well as the substantially diminished use of her dominant drawing hand. Consequently, Emil enrolled at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and while studying, Emil recovered much of her mobility. She left SAIC with a Bachelor’s in Art, a Graduate degree from The Writing Program, as well as the first 24 pages of what would become My Favorite Thing is Monsters.

My Favorite Thing is Monsters has now been published in nine languages and has been honored with numerous awards, among them: The Lambda Literary Award, the Eisner, the Ignatz and the Fauve d’or at the Angouleme Festival, France.

Ebony Flowers

Ebony Flowers is a cartoonist and an ethnographer. She was born and raised in Maryland. She holds a BA in Biological Anthropology from the University of Maryland College Park and a PhD in Curriculum and Instruction from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  Ebony is a 2017 Rona Jaffe Award recipient, a 2020 Ignatz Award recipient for Outstanding Graphic Novel, a 2020 Eisner Award recipient for Best Short Story and a 2020 Believer Award recipient for Fiction. She was also nominated for a 2020 NAACP Image Award for Literacy (Young Adult Fiction). She lives in Denver, CO.

Ramona Fradon

Ramona Fradon started her career in 1950. She worked for DC Comics drawing Aquaman and she co-created the character Metamorpho. She drew other DC titles such as Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Super Friends, and Plastic Man. In 1980, she also took over the Brenda Starr newspaper comic strip after the creator of the strip, Dale Messick, retired.

Lee Marrs

Lee Marrs was the first woman to work for both DC Comics AND Marvel simultaneously, Lee Mars was one of the founding mommies of Wimmen’s Comix. A 1982 Inkpot Award winner and 2016 Eisner Award nominee, Lee’s wide-spectrum art styles have ranged from illustrative (Heavy Metal magazine, Epic Illustrated, Star*Reach, Prince Valiant, Lil’ Orphan Annie) to humorous (DC’s Plop, Weird Mystery and House of Secrets, Marvel’s Crazy Lady and all of her underground comics. She’s best known for her book The Further Fattening Adventures of Pudge, Girl Blimp, and her most recent work is in Drawing Power, edited by Diane Noomin, Abrams Comicarts.

Drawing Power has many mothers: some of the stories of Wimmen’s Comix and Tits N’ Clits covered this horrifying, traumatic subject matter. But each new generation has its own stories. With the #MeToo movement, these personal experiences can be told to an even broader audience. We are showing Lee’s entire four page story from Drawing Power.

Barbara "Willy" Mendes

Barbara “Willy” Mendes began doing underground comics as “Willy Mendes” in New York, with back covers for Gothic Blimp Works. In San Francisco, she collaborated with Trina Robbins on the first feminist comix and edited her own book, Illuminations. Ms. Mendes has shown epic narrative paintings in the U.S. and Israel. Her Biblical murals are on display in Jerusalem, Florida, and Los Angeles.

In 2016, the corner featuring her “Angel Wall” outdoor mural was designated “Barbara Mendes Square” and Ms. Mendes a Los Angeles Cultural Treasure. Mendes has recently returned to comics with Queen of Cosmos Comix #1, the first of a new large-format comix series from Red 5 Comics. We are showing the cover painting and her feminist version of the creation story.

Gabrielle Bell

Gabrielle Bell’s work has been selected for the 2007, 2009, 2010 and 2011 Best American Comics and the Yale Anthology of Graphic Fiction. She has contributed to The New Yorker, The Paris Review, McSweeneys, The Believer, and Vice Magazine. The title story of Bell’s book, Cecil and Jordan in New York, has been adapted for the film anthology Tokyo! by Michel Gondry. Her first graphic full-length memoir, Everything is Flammable, was named one of the best graphic novels of 2017 by Entertainment Weekly, Paste Magazine and Publisher’s Weekly. Her most recent book, Inappropriate, is a collection of humorous and weird short comics, usually involving animals. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Trinidad Escobar

Trinidad Escobar is a Filipina poet and cartoonist from the San Francisco Bay Area, California. She is a fellow of the MFA Comics program at CCA as well as the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. Her forthcoming graphic novel is Of Sea and Venom, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

We are showing Trinidad’s entire four page story All These Years from the anthology Drawing Power: Women’s Stories of Sexual Violence, Harassment, and Survival.

Margot Ferrick

Margot Ferrick was born in 1988 on Long Island and now lives in Chicago. Their published work includes Yours and Dognurse. Both were included in Best American Comics and were nominated for Ignatz Awards. Petso appeared as a webcomic on Vice.com in 2018 and will soon be expanded into a longer book. It depicts the lives of two creatures-- one desperate to become a submissive, pampered pet, the other desperate for freedom. We are showing Margot’s entire four page Petso story.

Mary Fleener

Mary Fleener was born in Los Angeles and attended Cal State University at Long Beach as a printmaking major but dropped out to pursue her interest in music. She started self publishing her own mini comics in 1984. Her first solo book was Hoodoo, a comic about Zora Neale Hurston, who inspired her to do her own autobiographical comics, and many of these were collected in her book, Life of the Party. In 2018, she finished Billie the Bee, and is currently working on a memoir of her bar band days called The Happy Hour.

Noel Franklin

Noel Franklin (12/20/1971, Died 5/29/2020) was a Seattle cartoonist known for her short-form comics journalism and autobiographical work. Both her past employment as an arc welder and her degree in printmaking informs her style: tight black-and-white work done with a Micron .005 that cartoonist David Lasky deemed “scribble noir.” 

Noel first published in 2014, with her stories soon exploding onto pages of international anthologies. She was awarded a 2017 Cartoonist Northwest “Toonie” Award. Her recent work can be seen online (Hollow Kingdom Trailer) and in print (Drawing Power, Not My Small Diary and Raven Chronicles). Sadly, Noel died in 2020 while Women in Comics was on display in New York. We are grateful to her mother, Jill Crawford, for letting us continue to share her work. 

Jennifer Hayden

Jennifer Hayden is an American graphic novelist based in New Jersey. Her Eisner nominated breast cancer memoir The Story of My Tits was published by Top Shelf/IDW in 2015 and was released in Italy as La Storia delle mie Tette by Edizioni BD. Formerly a writer and children’s book illustrator, Jennifer rediscovered comics while recovering from breast cancer. The Story of My Tits is on the curriculum of Princeton and Harvard and has also been translated into Spanish. Jennifer’s first collection Underwire was excerpted in The Best American Comics 2013. She is currently finishing a graphic travel novella called Le Chat Noir about her unrequited love for France, and a graphic anti-cookbook — her first work in color — called Where There’s Smoke, There’s Dinner.

Alitha Martinez

Alitha Martinez started working in the comics industry in the 1990s as an assistant to Joe Quesada on Azrael & Ash and Daredevil, then as an inker’s assistant on Aquaman. She got her first headlining role as artist on Iron Man, then moved on to X-men: Black Sun, Marvel Age Fantastic Four, Black Panther, World of Wakanda, Batgirl, and Voltron.

We are showing Alitha’s sketch and inked drawing for DC’s relaunch of the Wonder Woman character Nubia, and her pencil drawing for the final page of It’s a Bird! depicting George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and other Black people killed by police violence in the US.

Summer Pierre

Summer Pierre was born and raised in the Bay Area of California. She is the author of the autobiographical comic series, Paper Pencil Life, and the 2018 memoir, All the Sad Songs, which was nominated for an Eisner Award in 2019. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, newyorker.com, and Pen America among other places. She lives with her family in the Hudson Valley of New York.

Afua Richardson

Afua Richardson [ Pronounced Uh-FOO-wah] is an American illustrator best known for her work on the Eisner winning series Black Panther World of Wakanda. Her works influenced the CG team working on the film Black Panther. Her Other works include the reader’s choice award mini-series Genius written by Marc Bernardin and Adam Freeman and the American anthology for Attack on Titan for Kodansha. Afua has done various cover work on X-Men 92, Captain Marvel, Captain America and the Mighty Avengers for Marvel Comics, All-Star Batman, Wildstorm for DC Comics and Mad Max.

Ann Telnaes

Ann Telnaes creates editorial cartoons in various mediums- animation, visual essays, live sketches, and traditional print- for The Washington Post. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 2001 for her print cartoons and the National Cartoonists Society’s Reuben for Outstanding Cartoonist of the Year in 2017.

Carol Tyler

Carol Tyler is one of the most important and influential artists to come out of the Alternative Comics movement of the 1980s. She is known for her beautifully written and drawn autobiographical stories that have been in many publications and solo books, including Late Bloomer and Fab4 Mania.

On display here is an excerpt from her graphic masterpiece Soldier’s Heart: The Campaign to Understand My WWII Veteran Father, A Daughter’s Memoir (2015). These panels feature her Dad’s army tour in Italy, 1944. Soldier’s Heart describes the author’s damaged relationship with her Dad, and how his untreated PTSD shaped her childhood and affected her relationships into adulthood.

Carol was a 2016 Fellow at Civitella Ranieri, Umbertide, Italy. While there, Tyler wrote the script for her next graphic novel: The Ephemerata: Shaping the Exquisite Nature of My Grief. It describes the aftermath of losing her Dad, Mom, Sister, and other family members just as Soldier’s Heart was being published. Projected release date for The Ephemerata: 2023.

She Makes Comics Documentary

Trina Robbins

Retired underground cartoonist and current comics herstorian Trina Robbins has been writing graphic novels, comics, and books for almost half a century. Her subjects have ranged from Wonder Woman and the Powerpuff Girls to her own teenage superheroine, GoGirl!, and from women cartoonists and superheroines to women who kill. She's won an Inkpot Award and was inducted in the Will Eisner Hall of Fame at Comic-Con International: San Diego. She lives in a moldering, 100-ish-year-old house in San Francisco with her cats, shoes, and dust bunnies. Fantagraphics published her autobiography Last Girl Standing in 2017.

We will be showing 1970s work by Trina, Jewelie Goodvibes, Barbara “Willy” Mendes, and Ramona Fredon from Trina’s collection.

Fiona Smyth

Toronto feminist painter/illustrator/cartoonist/educator Fiona Smyth collaborated with sex educator Cory Silverberg on the kids’ books What Makes A Baby and Sex Is A Funny Word (Seven Stories Press), 2016 ALA Stonewall Book Award Honor book and 2016 Norma Fleck Award for Canadian Children’s Non-Fiction winner. She’s in Resist #1 and 2, a thirty-year collection of her comics Somnambulance (Koyama Press), and the anthology Theater of Terror- Revenge of the Queers with Mariko Tamaki. Fiona was inducted into the Doug Wright Awards’ Giants of The North Canadian Cartoonist Hall Of Fame alongside Alootook Ipellie in 2019. 

Tillie Walden

Tillie Walden is a cartoonist and illustrator from Austin, TX. She is the creator of the Eisner Award winning graphic memoir Spinning as well as the sci-fi graphic novel On a Sunbeam, which was an LA Times Book Prize winner and recent Top 10 title on the ALA Rainbow List. Her most recent graphic novel, Are You Listening? came out in 2019 from First Second Books.

Kriota Willberg

Kriota Willberg makes comics, illustration, and needlework investigating the body sciences, medical history, and bioethics. Her book, Draw Stronger: Self-Care for Cartoonists and Visual Artists, is published by Uncivilized Books. Her drawn and/or embroidered comics have appeared in: 4PANEL.ca, Spiral Bound (medium.com) SubCultures, Comics for Choice, The Graphic Canon, Intima: Journal of Narrative Medicine, and Strumpet 5, among others. Willberg writes a self-care column for the Comics Beat called Get A Grip!, teaches graphic medicine at NYU, and in 2017 was the inaugural Artist in Residence at the New York Academy of Medicine Library.