Because every thinking humyn knows that there should be precisely 7.5 men on the list– no more, no less. Fair’s fair!

You know, I think there’s kind of an in-your-heart assumption that a female writer is a “female writer” and not really a writer. In cartoons and comics, female cartoonists are kind of segregated. There are anthologies of female cartoonists; there are histories written about female cartoonists. There are no histories written about men cartoonists.

Joanna Russ, on racism and sexism, circa 1983.

SRS

Cartoonist Fiona Katauskas on perception bias re humor
http://newmatilda.com/2008/11/14/woman-walks-bar

Cartoonist Gabby Schulz on bad artistic influences: Page 6 of 22
http://www.thelinknewspaper.ca/files/thelink/pdf/thelinkvol29iss30.pdf

Mediocre artists in comics
http://illustrationart.blogspot.com/2007/02/my-favorite-bad-artists.html

Cartoonist Ampersand on sexism among comic book geeks
http://www.amptoons.com/blog/archives/2006/12/04/sexism-among-comic-book-geeks-the-rape-pages-are-in/

An angry response to complaints about breast size in cartoons and video games
http://www.8bm.com/diatribes/volume01/048/977.htm

SRS

I’m more inspired and influenced by the work of Virginia Lee Burton and Marie Hall Ets than, say, Milton Caniff. Their work flows so effortlessly and has a spellbinding emotional core. Burton’s page designs are as revelatory as Will Eisner’s. Ets’ gentle stories and expressive drawings are positively enchanting. Male cartoonists of the same era seem crass and constipated by comparison.

Cartoonist Jennifer M. Babcock on industry sexism:

If I’m pimping my comic, it is fundamental for me that I downplay my femininity… otherwise, I won’t get taken seriously. Let’s take a look at the 2008 NYCC when I showed up on a Saturday wearing a summery white dress and peep toe heels (sans glasses). Every time I told a vendor that I was a cartoonist I was given a condescending and patronizing “Good for you!” On the other hand, when I returned the next day wearing my more masculine attire, the same vendors (who obviously didn’t remember me the day before) asked if I had a business card. [. . .]

By placing ourselves in this category of “women cartoonists” we are in fact implying that we are somehow inherently different from our male counterparts. Does Jessica Abel have a particular “feminine” creative mind that Craig Thompson can’t touch? [i][ii] That said, I am not necessarily saying that the” female voice” is always indistinguishable from the “male voice”- but I don’t see why there needs to be a separate category for “women cartoonists” as is often the case.

Wow. “I won’t draw any conclusions, I’ll just HEAVILY IMPLY something insulting, ad hominem and dismissive.”

If I was arguing that the list as it stands is accurate and defensible, I could understand this. But since all I’ve done is argue for the requirements of math — if you want to add someone in, you have to take someone out — it’s flabbergasting in its nastiness.

The fact that to add a woman to the list you have to remove a man is simply because _someone_ would have to be removed, and since everyone on the list is male, that would mean taking off someone male. There ain’t anyone else on the list to take off.

But the principle is exactly the same with Synsidar’s list. If you think there’s something wrong with his list, and you think someone should be added, then you’d need to say who, and you’d need to say who should be removed, if you want to keep it to the same numbers. That would be true regardless of whether the people you want to add have testes, and the people you want to remove have ovaries. Or vice versa. Or some mixture thereof.

I don’t see that as identity politics, because no identity is required for the principle to be articulated.

There might be identity politics involved if I were arguing about which identity deserved to be on the list, but I haven’t said anything of the sort. I have nothing vested in the Masters list, least of all my genitalia. Rework it all you like, says I — but if you want a 15 person list, you’ll still wind up taking names off for every name you want to put on, regardless of plumbing.

That’s not “identity politics.” That’s barely even “set theory.”

I think it’s “counting.”

kdb

Oh, and –

Who said it was the White Male’s “rightful” pedestal but you?

But there’s fifteen guys on those pedestals. Rightful, wrongful, neutralful, that’s the list people are reacting to. You can certainly say that those are wrongful choices, and could well be right. But the math of it doesn’t care — you _still_ have to take out one person for every person you want to add in.

So if you say, “One of them there pedestals is rightfully Lynda Barry’s!” you might well be right. But you still have to pick which one.

Ain’t a matter of rightful and wrongful, but of math. To add one to fifteen and still wind up with fifteen, you have to subtract one as well.

kdb

I think it would be unreasonable to say that, yes.

For one thing, it’s not my list. For another, the list being challenged doesn’t have only Caucasian males on it. For a third, I’ve never once suggested that such a list should be all-male, merely that if you’re looking at that list and you think there should be women on it, an appropriate question to ask is, “Which women? And who would you take off?” Much as, if you thought there was anyone, male, female, alien, neuter, or whatever, that should be on the list, it would be reasonable to ask who they are, and who you’d remove.

Of course, your questions assume that the list is all Caucasian, which is isn’t, and that the only reason there were no women on it was because the people who put it together were unaware of the existence of anyone but white dudes, which is doubly mistaken, since they put a non-white dude on it, and because they discussed the fact that it was all-male and in the end decided they had the right list nonetheless.

To pick another list, the Fantagraphics Top 100 Comics of the Century List has work by a number of women on it, but if you trimmed it to 15 (the number on the Masters list) it would be all-male (but not all-white). If you were to look at their list and ask them why they didn’t know of the existence on anyone but white men, I think they’d assume you were an idiot, since all three of your questions would be mistaken there, too.

But I suppose there’s some balance in the fact that, in assuming white patriarchal blindness, you made as many blind assumptions as you were accusing others of.

Oddly, I still think that replacing some of the Masters list with women is not a bizarre concept or a requirement, but that if you’re gonna do it, naming the women you’d put on and the people you’d take off is not a bizarre requirement, if only to know what should be put in the frames.

kdb

14. Do you think there’s a bias against women cartoonists in the industry? How do explain the relative lack of female cartoonists?

That is a really tough question. Disney actively refused to put women in their studios at one time… Dahlia Messick had to change her name to Dale to get Brenda Starr into syndication in the 50s… Hilda Terry fought (and won) an uphill battle to break the gender barrier in the National Cartoonist Society in the 50s. When I started cartooning in the late early 80s I was told there was limited room for comic strips done by women. If a newspaper had one or two, they didn’t need any more. Something that, I think, African American cartoonists feel they face today. As if we don’t write for everyone, as if only a part of the population would be interested in what we had to say.

So, that’s the HISTORY… does it affect women now?

In that there are few of us, and therefore less community and mentoring, it may feel like an unfriendly place for women. I enjoy my women friends, I’m sure that men feel the same, they like to hang together. At big gatherings of cartoonists, overwhelmingly male, it might seem hard to find a place for yourself as a woman. Add to that that the majority of syndicate salespeople and editors are male… you can feel like a stranger in a strange land. […]

With that, they left. That Ted might have a cartoonist WIFE was just too much of a stretch, I guess. He must be gay. News to us!

Art suggested Lynda Barry for Gary Panter and you quickly agreed that might be a possibility. There was a young guy who hasn’t written about comics in six years and only ever published about five times that made a snotty joke, but Art — and I don’t know Art, nor am I in his circle — seemed to me quite interested and engaged. You introduced your Mom to him, so you couldn’t have thought him particularly rude. The only time he even became curt is when it was suggested that Dale Messick might be in the show, which he just sort of thought was ridiculous. This isn’t a sign of disinterest.

So again, as usual, I have no idea what you’re talking about.

And shame on you for lofting another broadside you feel you don’t have to back up against some unnamed group of “major comics scholars.” Most of the major comics scholars I know — Jerry Robinson, Bill Blackbeard, those guys — have been among the first to write about or otherwise promote great female cartoonists. They deserve better.

I don’t see this as having sides, but if I don’t have to be on the side of the people who can read minds and think it’s awesome to imply super-nasty stuff about people, I guess I’m okay with it.

Two things about the MoAC list stand out; Newspaper entertainment strips are overrepresented and autobiographical works, which women cartoonists are noted for, are underrepresented. Using that, and negative reactions to Crumb’s work, to modify the list:

Lynda Barry
Alison Bechdel
Milton Caniff
Will Eisner
George Herriman
Jack Kirby
Harvey Kurtzman
Winsor McCay
Jackie Ormes
Gary Panter
Sharon Rudahl
Charles M. Schulz
E.C. Segar
Art Spiegelman
Chris Ware

SRS

The Drayton thing IS sad, but the disinterest of major comics scholars in early female cartoonists due to their perceived inferiority — you’ll recall the conversation you, me and Art Spiegleman had outside Mocca a few years ago, Tom — is not likely to change that. I’m hoping the amazing Nell Brinkley book from Fanta will help bring some of these artists out of the “Trina Robbins-verse” and get more people (PEOPLE) interested in this field. There are many undiscovered artists or all shapes and sizes awaiting internet fame.

SRS

The reason your statement in quotes above would be rightly laughed at by many people of all genders is that you have no idea what the hell the Masters people considered or didn’t, and you’re jumping to a conclusion that suits your view of how such arguments developed without any evidence that the nasty thing you’re asserting is true. For all you know, they spent 385 days considering female cartoonists and male cartoonists of color, and then one day considering white dudes. Not likely, granted, but you don’t know.

I think if you look at this kind of nasty, implication-laden broadside and compare it to posts up thread where things are argued in more specific terms, you begin to see why I think one is better than the other.

You know what’s sadder than this entire thread? This:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Drayton

No, Kurt, it’s not unreasonable to say, “What is wrong with you, that your list of the 10 Greatest Actors Of All Time/Greatest Cartoonists Of All Time/Greatest Sentient Whatevers Of All Time has only Caucausian males on it? Why are you incapable of even considering from the get-go that there are other people out there beside white dudes? How come you can’t even SEE us until we are pointed out to you?”

Starting from your Aristotelian default of Male=Human, Female=Defective Male is the only way that your question - that is to say, your attitude that some White Male must be knocked off his rightful pedestal to allow for diversity - makes any sense. ‘Tis pity that even after so many decades, this attitude is not only still to be found, but still so common, and not only in fandom.

SRS

But, but I’ve been told that leaving women off a particular list was a devastating patriarchal blow, marginalizing female artists and burying their work. And yet, somehow, it didn’t happen. Am I going insane?

SRS

The Humor: International Journal of Humor Research has a 2007 article titled “The interaction of cartoonist’s gender and formal features of cartoons.” That should be informative reading.

SRS

Many of them were very good. The Cartoon Art Museum has a Nell Brinkley show up right now, and visitors to the museum keep mentioning how impressive it is. The common refrain is, “I can’t believe I’ve never heard of her before!” Same happened when the Museum did its Mary Blair show last year.

I don’t think Nell Brinkley was on the level of, say, Frank King, but she was damn good. One of the great things about comics is that there are a lot of unique, offbeat artists who might not qualify as capital-M Masters but produce amazing work.

I would urge people who think comic art is mostly white and male to pay attention to the Cartoon Art Museum. The museum’s current shows, for example, are “The Art of Stan Sakai,” “Watchmen” with art by Dave Gibbons, “The Brinkley Girls,” and a Small Press Spotlight on Rina Ayuyang. That’s one white guy in the bunch, and he’s not even American.

Pointing to a specific pioneer is difficult, because there have been female cartoonists as long as there have been cartoons. It’s just that they weren’t very good, as most scholars agree.

Carlin himself knows that these kinds of questions would be raised:

The curators of “Masters of American Comics” have provided plenty of grist for querulous feminists. “These are 15 artists who used comics to express themselves,” says curator Carlin, who explains that selections were based on the criteria of craft and formal innovation. Of the marquee catalogue essayists who give personal glosses on the artists, the only women are New Yorker art editor Françoise Mouly (who also happens to be Spiegelman’s wife), who provides an informative take on Crumb, and art historian Karal Ann Marling, who writes on Frank King (“Gasoline Alley”). “These artists are mostly white, middle-class, male,” acknowledges Carlin, who readily admits that women artists got cut as the list narrowed from 40 to 15 artists. “But I felt a canon needed to be there, in order to be challenged.” (Notably, Herriman is African American; however, Stanley Crouch notes in his catalogue essay that “most of us were introduced to George Herriman’s ethnicity” only when Ishmael Reed dedicated his 1972 novel Mumbo Jumbo to him.)

Obviously the Masters show remains something of a flashpoint for may comics scholars, Tom and myself included. But based on all the comments here it is time to move on FOR EVERYONE. I’m much more interested in what actually touched this whole thing off … James Sturm’s interesting investigation of the influence of illustration work on comics prior to…oh say Neal Adams, when it all blew up.

Putting Lynda Barry in a show would’ve been like breaking the color bar in baseball? It’s a lousy analogy.

The analogy isn’t inappropriate, since the focus is on exclusion without justification. There are distinct differences in the ways male and female cartoonists approach their work; for just one analysis of the differences, see Trina Robbins’s piece:

Like all other art forms, The comic strip often reveals more about the creator than he or she intended to show. One thing it reveals is the way in which cartoonists see both themselves and people of the opposite sex.

When a list has a limited number of slots, the assessment of any artist’s artistic worth will be influenced by one’s appreciation for a particular style or styles. The bias is practically unavoidable. Having both male and female artists participate in the evaluation of artists is certainly preferable to men-only judgments. For an overtly angry reaction to the exclusion of women from the “Masters” exhibit, see this:

Jack Kirby (1917-94), who helped invent “Captain America” and “The Fantastic Four,” took an equally macho approach. A catalog essay describes his work as “deliberately primitive and bombastic, but in a way that perfectly embodied the fantasy life of young American boys in the middle of the 20th century.”

Harvey Kurtzman, founder of Mad magazine, spent his last years at Playboy, drawing the sexual exploits of the bosomy “Little Annie Fanny.” Even today, undercurrents of negativity toward women course through the depressive and quasi-autobiographical work of Chris Ware. When they appear at all, they are cold and/or sexually rapacious. Ware addresses his art to nerdy, solipsistic and vaguely pretentious men like himself.

Out of curiosity, who _was_ the first person to name a woman to an all-time comics greats list? If that’s tantamount to being Branch Rickey, then surely that person is worth remembering.

For my part, I’d think the person who first hired a woman to make professional comics would be more analogous to Rickey (and predates Rickey by quite some time, to boot), but if being named to a best-ever list is enough to be lauded as the equivalent of breaking the color bar in pro baseball…who did it? And who was Jackie Robinson?

kdb

That said, the whole concept of trying to rank artists who are all working at the highest levels of medium is pretty silly. Charles Schulz was simply not trying to do the same things with his art as Art Spiegelman. Or Carol Tyler. Or whoever. Such debates almost always end up favoring the artists who are judged to have had more historic impact on the form, and that group is going to consist mostly of white men.

Love Virginia Lee Burton, by the way. I named a character in my strip after her, and no one seems to have noticed the reference, which makes me sad.

This is risible on many levels. The Masters of Comics list was a list. Major League Baseball was an industry which systematically denied a class of people access to work. There’s a small difference between professional recognition and professional extinction.

There were approximately 500 players’ jobs in baseball when Jackie Robinson debuted, not 15. When someone mounts a museum show of the Top 500 Cartoonists and it’s still wall-to-wall penis, let us know.

Jackie Robinson filled a specific slot. He replaced Bruce Edwards as the first baseman on the Brooklyn Dodgers’ “Masters of Baseball” list, also known as their starting lineup.

Jackie Robinson won the Rookie of the Year Award in 1947, and was eventually elected to the Hall of Fame. His athletic credentials would have spoken for themselves (and did) without regard to his race. Incidentally, Robinson is NOT considered one of the best 15 players in major league history.

Putting Lynda Barry in a show would’ve been like breaking the color bar in baseball? It’s a lousy analogy.