Welcome back to Don’t Be a Dick, The Ladydrawers Comics Collective’s in-depth look at comics and gender diversity, presented in partnership with Bitch Media.
This is the second in a series of six Don’t Be a Dick comics about the comics industry, all written by Janelle Asselin, edited by Anne Elizabeth Moore, and drawn by six great artists. Today’s strip will take a look at the history of comics (spoiler alert—it wasn’t always a male-dominated industry!)—and if you missed our first installment, do check it out here!
About the creators:
The Ladydrawers Comics Collective (AKA “The Ladydrawers”) is an unofficially affiliated group of women, men, transgender, and non-binary 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. We’re doing another series at Truthout called “Our Fashion Year,” finishing up our documentary Comics Undressed, and travelling the world talking about gender and race diversity in comics. You can send us samples of your work or look over the Don’t Be a Dick artist’s roster here.
Sarah Vaughn has moved around so much in her life that it’s shortest just to say she’s from America. Her love for vintage romance comics began in Fort Wayne, IN when she spent more time at her local comic shop reading than working, and her entire collection is due to searching for the one issue that slipped through her fingers. The former artist for the webcomic Sparkshooter, Sarah is the co-creator and co-writer of the Image series Alex + Ada.
From little houses on the prairies of Nebraska and Iowa to the posh Chicago suburbs to the mean (gentrified) streets of Brooklyn to sunny Glendale, California, Janelle Asselin has carried her nerdity everywhere with her. Janelle has been a video gamer for at least 26 years, a comics fan for 20 years, and an editor of comic-type things for seven years. She’s worked at comic shops, comics news sites, and comics publishers like Fangoria Comics, DC Comics, and Disney. She’s written a book about selling comics to women and has a weekly column at ComicsAlliance.com featuring female creators on the rise.
Born in Winner, South Dakota, cultural critic Anne Elizabeth Moore founded the Best American Comics series for Houghton Mifflin and edited The Comics Journal before fostering the insanity that is The Ladydrawers. She’s also a prolific writer of word-books including Unmarketable (The New Press), Cambodian Grrrl, and New Girl Law (Cantankerous Titles). Her work has appeared in The Baffler, Jacobin, Al Jazeera, and Salon, and she is the comics editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books.
