 Starting it with me at five, thank you. Starting it with me at five in my kindergarten class, naturally I'm at the drawing board. That's Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater, in case you're wondering. OK, this is the East Village Other, which is an underground newspaper from the 60s from the Lower East Side in New York. That cover is not by me, it's by Art Spiegelman. But this is where I started getting my comics published. And this is the very first comic that I ever had published. As you can see, it's kind of an or comic. It's one picture and a lot of words in a speech balloon. I'll let you read it. Everybody read it? OK. It's very 60s. It's a comment. OK, the stuff I was doing in those days was very designy and didn't necessarily make sense. But most of the, you know, you could count the underground cartoonists on the fingers of one hand, and most of us didn't make sense. At that point it was like you had to ingest some substance to understand what we were doing. But we didn't care yet, because it was just, it was a new field, it was something different. However, wait. Oh, sorry. OK, so I was doing this stuff, and it was very pretty. And it was not political, it was just pretty. This is the most political I got, in fact. This is from 1968. And it's my comment on, you know, Kid Karma. It's my comment on the Hare Krishnas and the others who just sit and meditate instead of being political. Because this was at the time, of course, of the Chicago, the protests in Chicago. And there's this woman who's run all the way from Chicago being chased by the Chicago cops, and he sits and meditates. So that's as political as I got. But the other guys, see, the whole point of underground comics was we could do whatever we wanted. Ordinary comics like Marvel and DC were constricted because they had a comics code. And there was only so much they could say. Unfortunately, I soon discovered that when the guys could say whatever they wanted, an awful lot of times what they were doing and what they were saying was extremely misogynist, violently misogynist. Now, there's no kids in the audience, so I can show this. This is not the worst by any means. But I just want you to see what was being done and what was being considered funny in those days. And when I said rape and murder and torture and humiliation of women is not funny, they said, you have no sense of humor. I'm so grateful that times really have changed. In those days, the word rape culture, the term rape culture, did not exist yet. This is a comic by Robert Crum in which this is the last page of it, in which he's being interviewed by Lark Clark for a radio show. Now, Lark was a real person, is a real person, and was and is a friend of mine. And you can see, if you read this, that he is admitting to the misogyny and the sadism in his comics. In fact, it ends with him killing her. And by the way, Lark is wearing a dress that I made for her. So she's a very real person. So this is how I reacted. I'll go back to this. This is how I reacted. Zap comics. This is, again, probably around 1971. Zap comics was busted for pornography. And I was asked, as was every other cartoonist, to do a comic, to do something for a comic book to make money for their defense. So this was my statement. I'll let you read, and then we'll go on to the next page. May I go on? No. No. Let me know. Next page. So that woman is kind of a stand-in from me. And they're calling her Sensor and Bookburner. When I objected to the misogyny in these comics, I was called those things. This is the Berkeley tribe. At this point, and again, the cover is not by me. It's by Dave Sheridan. At this point, this is about 1970 or 71. I had come to San Francisco. And because of my objections to the sexism and the misogyny in underground comics, I was not popular with the underground comics crowd. So they did not publish me in their comics. They didn't invite me to their social gatherings. But I have to stress that it was only the cartoonists. Publishers published me. There was never any problem. And the underground newspapers, when I came to San Francisco and they heard I was there, they phoned me and they asked me to participate and to do drawings for the newspapers. So this is one of them, the Berkeley tribe, which as a matter of fact, was an offshoot of the Barb. This is an example of just a little spot illustration I did for them. Again, talking about women's liberation from the tribe. OK, so somebody showed me a copy of It Ain't Me Babe, which was the very, very, very first underground newspaper in the country. I'm a feminist underground newspaper in the country. I at the time thought it was the first feminist underground paper in the West Coast. But I've been told by Robin Morgan that it was the very first in the whole country. And I, of course, was, wow, I can do comics for these people. So I joined the crew. And this is a cover I did. Soon I was doing covers for It Ain't Me Babe. This was a back cover. Is there anyone here who doesn't know who Angela Davis was? Is. OK. So she was wanted by the cops in those days, as I'm sure you all know. And this my romantic fantasy was you put this up in your window and there she is with her coat collar turned up on the lamb. And she sees the poster telling her she's welcome and knocks on the door. And you take her in and you sit her down and you give her tea. And people did. I don't know about taking her in and giving her tea. But people did put this up. They did put this up in their windows. The Good Times, another newspaper, underground newspaper that I worked for. This is 71. When they asked me to work for them, I was delighted to do drawings for them because they were in San Francisco. And the other papers were all in Berkeley, which meant I had to take the bus to Berkeley all the time. So here they were in San Francisco. It was easier for me. And for them, I created this character, Fox, who is actually based on Angela Davis. Let's face it. But she also was really the first black woman in underground comics, not in newspaper strips because Friday Foster was a great heroine in the 60s in newspaper strips. And because I was working with the staff of It Ain't Me Babe, I was brave enough because I had their moral support because I was not alone anymore. Because I was working with them, I got brave enough to decide I can do a comic book too, just like all those guys. So I got a bunch of women together. That's my cover. And we produced It Ain't Me Babe comics, which is the very, very, very first all-woman comic book. And I stress this because a couple of times people have written about me. And it's like they're hedging their bets. And they say, and she produced one of the first. Well, you know what? It's not one of the first. It's the fucking first. And two years later, 10 women got together and produced, this is the first issue. The artist by Patty Moodian, who was the first editor, produced Women's Comics, which was the very first again and longest lasting all-woman comic book anthology. And you can tell by the cover that we handled subjects the guys did not handle. Gonna give you some examples. Oh, and for the first issue, I did Sandy Comes Out, which at the time, oh, here's another first, I'm sorry. I didn't know it was the first comic about an out lesbian. But it was. It's the story of my roommate at the time, Sandy. And later, Mary's gonna come up, and she's gonna talk about how it so infuriated her that it inspired her to produce the very first lesbian comic. But here are some covers, some Women's Comics covers. And you can see that these, no guy would have done these. That's by Shelby Sampson. This is by Lee Mars. This is a cover I did. And this is the last issue of Women's Comics. The artist is Karen Leshen. So you can see we were very different from the guys. Okay, around 1985, at this point, mainstream comics like Marvel and DC were completely superhero comics aimed at boys. And I got really, really tired of hearing editors, not just editors, but male cartoonists say, oh, girls don't read comics. Women never drew comics. And I knew that wasn't true. So this was the first with Catherine Ironwood. I wrote the first history of women cartoonists. This is the first in a series that I did. Oh, what happened? We're back to there, okay. And in answer to the guys saying that girls don't read comics, I produced From Girls to Girls, which is a history of all the comics that girls have read. And at those days, we're not reading anymore because they just weren't producing comics that girls like to read anymore. This is the last of my histories. And final, because how many histories can you write? But this is the last one. It came out a couple of years ago, pretty in ink. I'm still writing histories of women, of specific women cartoonists. But this is the last history of all early 20th century women cartoonists. Okay, this is the women's comics collective. In 1976, we were having an exhibit for, it was our bicentennial issue. We were having an exhibit. That's Ron Turner in back. He was our publisher. Yes, Bravo, Ron, indeed. Because Ron also published, it ain't me babe, Ron published the first women's comics. And that's me peering in between two other women. The woman in white is Shelby Sampson, who did the one about why bother kissing a frog when you could eat it. And then, I'm sorry, what? Who are the other women? Oh, yes, sure. From your left to right? Yes. Becky Wilson, me, Shelby Sampson, sitting down as Melinda Gebbey and Lee Mars, standing up as Barb Brown and Dot Booker. There were many more, but these were, you know, because although we started in San Francisco, at this point, we had our contributing cartoonists from all over the country, and even later from Europe. This is San Francisco, yes. Yeah, we started in San Francisco. The whole, it's really interesting, you know. I wonder if there was something in the water or a watt. Hey, Trina. Ah, Lily Renee, we'll talk about that later. If you have questions, that's good. Did someone say Trina? Oh, I did. Oh, yeah. Well, just, it was so amazing because I know that the men just kind of published each other. Yes, they did. And you were the first, you had an open. Yes, yes. Submissions and acceptance policy. That's right, yeah, from the very beginning. We asked people to submit and they did. And, you know, very soon, we just got envelopes and envelopes full of submissions and we would have meetings and just stretch them all out on the floor. We really were a collective, by the way. It was called the Women's Comments Collective and we did make decisions collectively, although we did have an editor. Later, it was a rotating editorship. We never had the same editor. And later we had two editors so that really nobody could ever be, you know, a dictator. Okay, so, 40 years later and this is in, this is right here in the public library, right upstairs from 72 when it formed to 2012, we had an exhibit, a Women's Comics exhibit. And that's me, again, peering out from between two women. And the guy who looks like Santa Claus is, of course, Ron Turner. And, okay, from your left to right, that's Lee Binswanger. Uh-oh, Nancy Hussari, Karen Leshen, who did that great me, worry cover. Sharon Rudol, me, Terry Richards, Rebecca Wright, Lee Morris, and Becky Wilson. So some of these women are in that original 1976 photo. And in 2016, the Complete Women's Comics was published. That's a facsimile edition of every issue of Women's Comics in a two-volume boxed set. It's expensive, but you can get it cheaper, of course, on Amazon. And it's expensive because it weighs a ton and they charge by the pound. But this way, you know, this way, you can actually read all the issues of Women's Comics without the pages turning to dust in your hands. And finally, this is my memoir, just a minute. This is brand new. It literally just came out. And I only brought three copies with me, but after our talk, if anybody who wants to buy one may buy one, and of course I will sign it. And I believe it's Mary's turn now. Thank you. We'll do questions and answers. Oh, okay, no, I just want to mention that thing because the guys were really snotty and they didn't want anyone in their club. And you did exactly the opposite. It's true, no, of course, we were very inclusive. Because we knew what it was like to be excluded. Did we ever? Well, Trina's done a lot. I haven't done so much. But I guess my story is I wanted to have an orgasm. It was... That's a good beginning. Yeah. You know, I could give one to myself, but the guys weren't interested, didn't get it, and said, women will be spoiled if you do that. So, obviously I just went off with women and we gave ourselves fabulous orgasms. Does anyone remember a thing called notes from the first year of women's liberation? And they had the myth of the vaginal orgasm. Oh, God, I remember the myth of the vaginal orgasm. That was a huge deal, the myth of the vaginal orgasm. What an oppressive thing that was to try and accomplish. Good Lord. So, I just blew the whole thing off. I'm sorry, I'm having a hard time with this. It's kind of wiggly. I think this is okay, I'll just hold it in place. Go on. So... Who was that woman who gave women lessons in masturbation? There was, yes, you sat in a circle, her name was Betty. But anyway, there was lots of things there was the concoloring book, there was, it was just a huge explosion of things that were happening, but in a way, the turn that you took, I mean, cause you were in the, you were really punished. You were really oppressed. But I did just blew off that world and walked away. And that was quite a different thing to do. A friend of mine said lately, yeah, you blew off a whole gender. But it was interesting to me, these days are in quite a different place, but it was very interesting to me in those days, we were having discussions about why all women's colleges made more sense, you know, they were documenting that men got called on all the time, men are the ones who ask all the questions, and we were just being shorted on every single level. And talking to my peers here, you know what it was like. But it's interesting talking to much younger women, cause they don't remember, we couldn't have opened a checking account by ourselves, we couldn't buy a car, we couldn't get credit. We were chattel. If you wanted a job, and you went to the help wanted section of newspapers, there was help wanted women and help wanted men. And since I'm talking to my peers here, cause younger people are really shocked when they hear, you know, how different things were. But I always, people say, why did you become an activist that word didn't exist? We came from such a repressive era. It was so Victorian, I didn't know about sex until I was 14, and I just said, no, come on, that can't be true, right? There's no kid at 14 who doesn't know now, doesn't have an internet. So we were in a very economically sort of good to time relative for some people, and we were in extremely repressive time. And those two things created a tension that we just kind of burst out. And I loved us, you that said we took psychedelics and we realized that everyone was the same, that we are all beating with one big heart. I'm not sure anybody has really expressed a feeling of humanity for hundreds of years until that counter-culture moment and this being American, everyone is one big beating heart. That was an amazing thing. I can't imagine my parents endorsing such a thought. But yeah, it was a great time and I just wanted to pop out. So we became very radical, and I think there was a lot of groups, the Black Panthers of course, people were very seriously embracing separatism because we were just beginning identity politics, having been denied that for so many years. And so there were a lot of people just coming into this big, wonderful feeling of identity and trying things. You took acid and you wanted to kiss your girlfriend. It was really, everything that felt good and loving made so much sense. And the deaf movement also came in to being at that time. And that was a very exciting thing. We, I would not let Ron Turner publish my comic book because he was a man and his male hands could not touch the paper. We were, I remember there was some women who were having great wild sex and next door was a woman trying to do her dissertation thesis and she was told that she was working for the man while they were having the revolution next door. So don't tell them to be quiet. And I was hearing earlier about identity politics and I kinda do wonder if we don't need to sort of dump it and just get back to the one big beating heart. It was a great time for discovering those things and deaf culture was so exciting. And yeah, we had women's houses where men were not allowed in the door and men were very patronizing and awful. In many cases. So I feel like so much of that has really changed. It would be a very boring world without men. But it was what I needed to do at that time was to be real separatists and be too boring if I just stayed that way, that's for sure. And men have changed so much. Everyone's changing so much. I feel like people really learned. Oh no, it's amazing. Yeah, that's right. Wonderful, go. No, no, it's because I really, I never dreamed. I mean, you go to a comic book store, you go to a bookstore, you see all these amazing graphic novels by women now. And they're, God, they're so good. And you know, all I wanted in those days in the women's comics days was just a place where we could be published, you know? Just a comic to call our own. I never dreamed, I never dreamed that it would be like this. And what I said before about how in those days the word rape culture didn't exist. People are so much more aware now. I just wanted to take a minute because I was talking about It Ain't Me Babe and I want to introduce Alta, who's in the audience. Alta's a poet and please stand up. And she was part of the It Ain't Me Babe staff. She's a very, very good poet too. And I was always very impressed. My big memory of you, Alta, is there was a women's festival or something like that, a women's bee. And in Dolores Park, and you were sitting there with your top off. And I was so impressed by how brave you were. Oh, great. Alta's book, brand new, is out there on one of the tables. It just reminds me about how our generation and people say, when did you decide to become an activist? Did we think? We did it, right? Yeah. We just did it. Yeah, and you did, you didn't think this is the first. You just did it because no one else had done it and you needed it needed to be done. And we both wrote the books that we wanted to read and I'm sure that's true for you as well. I mean, these things just weren't being said and so that was really important. Maybe we should. Hey, you didn't talk about how Sandy comes out, got you so mad that you decided to do the first. Oh, I didn't wanna have that faux fight with you again. All right, next time. But Trina, Trina says, you know, she's a writer but still your drawings are so good. You did all that inking, right? Sure. Could you teach me? Oh, Mary, you're so good, you're so talented, my God. Mary also has written a series and she was for a while a mystery writer and she's one of my favorite writers. I just wrote the book I wanted to read. I had to be on an airplane a lot and there were no women detectives at that point and there was no movies on the airplane so I read about all these men in very much like the comic book thing so I just wrote my own. And no lesbian detectives. Yeah, and so it was the first lesbian detective novel and it turned out quite well. So it was really, yeah, it's all the good things have happened to me. I think we were really lucky to be part of that time. Don't you? Don't you feel kinda sorry for the young people? It was a revolution. And they don't come that often, you know. The 20s was a revolution and the 60s was a revolution. Well now we're in a time that is extremely economically uncertain and completely unrepressed. We had the opposite. We had so much repression but now there's no repression. What does it all mean? There are forces that would like to bring us back to the 50s, you know, as I'm sure you know. But you know, hey, okay. What Trump has done, people ask me about Trump. You know what he has done? He has made more women stand up and say, I'm a feminist. So, you know, he's done good for you, Trump. Hope you're rotten hell. Katrina, you're also the one that wrote, you're also the one that really established the history of women in comic books. It would not be there. Those women would be lost to history if you hadn't done it. Yeah, and a discovery I made when I wrote my books was simply, if you're not written about, you're forgotten. And all these women, look, hey, Frida Kahlo, right? Until the 70s, no one had heard of Frida Kahlo. She was forgotten. Everybody knew Diego Rivera. Suddenly women are putting out, we're putting out in like, I think I first saw her work in 73. Women suddenly were putting out collections of women artists that we had known nothing about. And now she's everywhere. I just came back from Argentina. She's on buildings. It's wonderful. Oh, okay, questions. I'm wondering if anything happened. Yes, go. Can you just tell us that she was from the beginning? Yes, Lily's story. I have done a graphic novel about her and I have a new book that just came out that you would love. It collects the work of four women who drew comics during the 40s. Because what happened was during the 40s, as in every other industry, the guys went off to fight and the women took their jobs. So suddenly, there were more women drawing for comic books than ever before and Lily was one of them. She was a talented Jewish teenager in Vienna in 1938 when the Nazis marched in. She escaped to England in 1939 via Kindertransport. She had, of course, had to leave her parents behind. And shortly after that was when England declared war on Germany and she lost touch with her parents completely. Happy ending that her parents escaped to America and found her and sent for her. Isn't that, I couldn't do this story if it not had a happy ending. No, I couldn't. But there they are, they'd been very well off in Vienna but they, of course, left everything behind and they were living hand to mouth in a tenement with other refugees and Lily's mother, Lily at this point was 18. Lily's mother saw an ad in the paper saying comic book companies were looking for artists. Lily had never drawn a comic before. She went to the newsstand. She was a talented artist. Went to the newsstand, bought a couple of comics, studied them, did some sample panels, went to Fiction House, which of all the comic book companies during the war hired more women than any of the others even though the others were hiring women too. And she got the job and she, as you say, she did covers not just for Fiction House but for fight comics. She drew interior comics which were wonderful. The Adventures of Senorita Rio who was a secret, beautiful secret service agent in South America. These women were great. I do urge you to check out my book, Babes in Arms that just came out which is about these women. Steve, you had your hand raised. Yes, see the one called Fight Comics with that beautiful woman and a kind of a common Miranda outfit fighting with the guy? That's Senorita Rio and the cover is by Lily Renee. She's about 98 I think now. She never lost her wonderful Viennese accent. I always know when she's phoning me I pick up the phone and her voice is Trina. She sounds like one of the Gabor sisters. Is this the woman you visited in New York City? Yes, that's her. One night Trina disappeared and she said, I'm gonna go visit this woman. And you did, you went out and- I always visit her because each time I see her I'm afraid it might be the last time. Of course. Did she still draw? No, she has macular degeneration and she can't really see anymore which breaks my heart and breaks her heart. She's very sad really because all her friends are dead. That's what happens. Speaking of, I have to write another book because no one else has written it. Old, old. I am, I'm writing a comic book called Old You Should Be So Lucky. It features such things as the goddess incontinence of things I dropped today. Why am I in this room? Someone's gotta write this, right? Yes. Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you. Are there any more questions? Yes. I loved Honey West. I mean, she was the first Honey West was the first woman detective on television and she was played by Anne Francis who was perfect, perfect. And a couple of years back I did a bunch of Honey West comics. This one publishing company, what were they, Moonstone? Is that what they were called? They got the rights to do Honey West comics and I wrote a whole bunch of them and I enjoyed myself thoroughly doing it because Honey, it took place in 65 and 66 which was when the TV show was so all of my stories are retro. They all take place during that period. Last comments, Mary. Oh no. What's next? You know, it's limitless, it's limitless, isn't it? I'm just gonna listen to you. Let's face it, we're not going back. We're never going back so all we can do is go forward. Yep. And there's micro dosing LSD, right? I understand. Anyone doing that? How do you do it? Talk to me afterwards. Okay, if that's it. Alta has a book out there. I have three copies of this book if anyone wants to buy them and I think that's it, huh? Thank you, Diane. Thank you, Diane. Thank you.