Trina Robbins, Mary Wings, Heather Plunkett, Isis Rodriguez, and moderator Maureen Burdock speak at California College of the Arts’ San Francisco campus on Wednesday, November 13, 2013 from 10am – 12pm!
This roundtable conversation will delve into San Francisco’s underground and wimmin’s comix herstory. Through the lens of visionaries Trina Robbins and Mary Wings, two of the founding mothers of this movement, and through discussion with Cartoon Art Museum bookseller Heather Plunkett and contemporary graphic novelist Maureen Burdock, we will explore how women cartoonists have established this genre of politically engaged sequential art, how the field and community have changed over the past four decades, and how we might imagine and help shape the future of women in comics.
Maureen Burdock is an award-winning artist and graphic novelist. Born in Germany’s Black Forest in 1970, during the Cold War Era, Burdock has consistently made art that reflects her passionate political consciousness and incorporates magical realist elements inspired by the fairy tales and fables she grew up with. She recently moved to San Francisco from New Mexico to pursue a Master of Fine Arts and a Master of Arts in Visual and Critical Studies at CCA. Burdock brought the UK-based Laydeez Do Comics Forum to San Francisco, where she and Heather Plunkett and the Cartoon Art Museum host cartoonists who present and discuss work with an emphasis on women creators, autobiographical comics, social issues-based comics, and the like.
Women in Comix Speakers
Writer and herstorian Trina Robbins has been writing and drawing comics since before she produced the first all-woman comic book, It Ain’t Me, Babe, in 1970. In 1972 she was one of the founding mothers of Wimmen’s Comix, the longest-running all-woman anthology comic book (1972 – 1992). In her collections and herstories she has brought back to public attention such previously forgotten women cartoonists as Nell Brinkley, Tarpe Mills, and Lily Renee. She also writes award-winning graphic novels for young readers and books about women: women who draw comics, women who kill, women from Ireland, women who happen to be goddesses. She lives in a 108-year-old house in San Francisco, California.
Mary Wings is an American writer, artist, and musician. In 1973, she made history by releasing Come Out Comix, the first lesbian underground comic book. She is best known for her series of detective novels featuring lesbian heroine Emma Victor. Divine Victim, Wings’ only Gothic novel, won the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Mystery in 1993. Wings, an open lesbian, resides in San Francisco.
Heather Plunkett studied art history and fine art at the University of Arkansas. She has been a lifelong comics and cartoon geek who learned to read with the Peanuts comic strips. Plunkett has worked as a bookseller for the past 15 years and is now the bookstore manager for the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco, where she hosts Laydeez Do Comics gatherings among other book signings and releases.
When Isis Rodriguez was a little girl, she copied Hannah-Barbara, Warner Bros., and Disney, making sure to get their proportions just right. She considers this practice to be her first lessons in art. She was born in Los Angeles California and received her Bachelors of Fine Arts in Painting in 1988 from the University of Kansas. In 1997, she had her first solo show at Galeria de la Raza, called “My Life as a Comic Stripper”, using the editorial comic strip format to comment on the rewards and consequences of Exotic Dancing. This show caught the attention of Bay Area Now II, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, where she was selected as “one of San Francisco’s promising artists”. In 2003, she won The Individual Arts Commission Grant of San Francisco to produce her animation short, “The ReAwakening,” and won “The Media Arts Awards” in San Jose California for best animation. Now a contemporary cartoonist, Isis travels frequently to Mexico to work on her newest project, called ”Niñají Comic,” a comic that celebrates Indigenous values for a modern world.”
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