From Girls to Grrlz : A History of Women's Comics from Teens to Zines

This collection is in many ways an indispensable history of women in comics since the 1940s. Author Trina Robbins used to hang out in comics shops with her boyfriend, waiting impatiently, assuming that comics was essentially a boy's medium. Looking closer, Robbins realized there was a hidden history within the comics world, one that reflected cultural shifts in ideas about women--if you look at how women are drawn, you learn a lot about how women are imagined. Robbins edited the first all-women comic book, It Ain't Me, Babe, and her insider knowledge is clearly encyclopedic. Before the grrrl comics like Ellen Forney's Tomato or Jessica Abel's ArtBabe, there was 1943's Girl's Life, narrated by a cartoon teenager named Patsy Walker who wants nothing more than to become a beautiful movie star. Then there are Betty and Veronica with their impossible breasts, and Wimmin's comics of the early '70s, in which the drawings pulse with angry life, druggy and hopeful.

From Girls to Grrrlz occasionally suffers from tunnel vision--analysis is not Robbins's strength. She's so immersed in the world she's documenting, she's never objective about it; she never rises out of the cartoon world for a feminist discussion of what it means for women to start drawing themselves, to start telling their own stories via this boy-dominated medium. Nevertheless, it is a well-organized, beautifully presented tribute to women as creators and characters. The full-page reproduction of "The Further Fattening Adventures of Pudge, Girl Blimp" is by itself worth the price of admission. --Emily White