With stories ranging from mainstream adventures to hilarious comic shorts to heart-wrenching autobiography, Sexy Chix features stories by and about women from the under-recognized contingent of female authors/cartoonists. Editor Diana Schutz talks about her new anthology, Sexy Chix!
1. Exactly who are these "sexy chix," and what are their contributions?
Alphabetically then: Madison Clell; Chynna Clugston; Amanda Conner; Colleen Coover; Leela Corman; Colleen Doran; Roberta Gregory; Meghan Kinder; Alexa Kitchen; Lee Marrs; Sarah Grace McCandless and Joelle Jones; Joyce Carol Oates and Laurenn McCubbin; Carla Speed McNeil; Trina Robbins and Anne Timmons; Gail Simone and Rebecca Woods; and Jill Thompson.
The stories range all the way from the horror of child sexual abuse to female frivolousness at the mall. At my request, Lee Marrs has brought her wonderful Pudge, Girl Blimp back to life for the first time since the character's underground comix series in the mid-'70s in a humorous tale set in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. On a more serious note, a couple stories deal with the concept of mortality and the weight of grief. Colleen Doran tells the story of one woman's unhealthy obsession with young Japanese men in "Yellow Fever," while Leela Corman provides a historical piece set in New York's Lower East Side tenements in the early 1900s. There are a few autobiographical stories, a cautionary parable, a prose piece illustrated by Amanda Conner about a pioneering internet pornographer, a detective story that takes place at a high school, a Grand Guignol-style comedy set at a faith healers'convention, and a gloriously surreal story about female transformation - among others.
As you can see, the stories are madly, marvelously diverse - just like women, in fact!
2. In addition to a number of names familiar to comics readers, the anthology also features accomplished novelists and talented newcomers. How did Joyce Carol Oates and Sarah Grace McCandless come to be involved, and what are their stories about?
Just as a kind of preface, I should say that in the last couple years I've been lucky to work with more than a few established prose writers who, for one reason or another, have an interest in writing comics. Most of these folks, like Chris Offutt and Glen David Gold, have come to me by way of Michael Chabon to contribute stories to The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist, which is based on Michael's Pulitzer-winning novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. What I've found is that I really, really enjoy working with novelists! First of all, they have some very serious chops when it comes to writing, and their influences are so much more wide-ranging - and generally far more literary - than most comics writers. So they tend to bring new, fresher ideas - and just plain old better writing - to their comics work. I think the comics medium is only just beginning, really, to tap into its literary potential, and it's very exciting to me, as an editor, to help foster comics projects with a more literary bent. Plus, while prose and comics have their similarities, the two mediums are nonetheless quite different - especially in the mechanics of writing for each. So it's also a fun challenge to guide prose writers in the particularities (and peculiarities!) of writing for comics.
Anyway, Joyce Carol Oates also came to me by way of Michael Chabon. She was curious about the comics medium and wondering, I guess, about the possibility of adapting some of her stories into comics. Michael recommended she contact me and we had a brief (but still ongoing) correspondence, one of the results of which was that she offered me a short story of my choice, from her Haunted collection, to use in Sexy Chix! How cool is that?! I mean, here's this fabulously talented, remarkably prolific, best-selling writer who's won countless awards for her work, and not only does she fall into my hands but then she quite literally gives me one of her stories for Chix. I was astounded.
The story I chose is "Don't You Trust Me?" - a parable set in an uncomfortably near future in which women are denied control over their own body and, consequently, over their own destiny. Miss Oates allowed me to adapt her prose story into a four-page comics script, and Laurenn McCubbin (of XXXLiveNudeGirls fame) jumped at the chance to draw it. I'm kind of in love with Laurenn's drawing, and I've been wanting to work with her for a while now, so this all came together perfectly.
Sarah Grace McCandless, while primarily known for her hilarious and often poignant novel Grosse Pointe Girl, is not so far out of the realm of comics as you might think. She was Dark Horse's marketing manager for five years or so and was a very familiar face at comics conventions during that time, as her job responsibilities included planning and overseeing Dark Horse's presence at all the cons. I had originally read Grosse Pointe Girl in a previous small-press incarnation and was impressed enough that, as Sarah Grace was leaving Dark Horse - about to move east and devote more time to her writing - I asked if she'd be interested in trying her hand at a comics script. She said yes - and then totally knocked it out of the park! In between my offering SG the gig and her sending me the script, the Simon & Schuster publication of her much-reworked Grosse Pointe Girl was released, and it pretty conclusively demonstrated that my faith in Sarah Grace's writing ability was not misplaced - and that was confirmed again not too long thereafter when I received her Chix story, "The Art of Letting Go," which is a quiet yet heartbreaking piece about splitting up with someone you love.
Joelle Jones, who is new to comics, has illustrated the story. I met Joelle quite by chance at a local Portland convention about a year ago. She'd been showing her work to David Mack, who was a guest of the show, and he brought her over to me. Joelle is a young girl with whopping promise as an artist. Definitely someone to keep an eye on - also, she's the "mysterious" girl on our cover mock-up whom no one can identify and everyone is curious about!
3. With such a diverse range of creators and contributions, how did you devise this unconventional mix in the first place?
Selecting contributors to any anthology is far from an exact science! And I'm sorry to say that my workload has been so overwhelming in this past year that I haven't had the kind of time I would have preferred to spend on Chix. Consequently, by the time I actually got around to calling certain cartoonists, they just weren't available in the given time frame - like Jessica Abel and Becky Cloonan, for instance. And there were some for whom I simply could not get contact info in enough time, like Renée French. Two other women were adamant about not wanting to participate in an anthology restricted to female cartoonists, arguing that women's anthologies serve to underscore the minority status of women in comics by recognizing women primarily for their gender and not for their work. One of those women, incidentally, was Megan Kelso - who went on to edit her own women's anthology, Scheherezade, which featured a lot of new female cartoonists, so I'm glad ultimately that she changed her mind.
Anyway, I've been planning Chix for a few years now, and I started out with a basic wish list of contributors, and then went from there. Really, there are so many female cartoonists whose work I admire that the difficulty was in culling the list to fit the available number of pages - not to mention the available creative budget! But as I said, some of those decisions were made for me.
Also, I wanted Chix to cover a broader (no pun intended) spectrum of cartoonists than we've seen in previous women's anthologies, with a wide variety of stories and art styles, ranging from creators who work in the more commercial "mainstream" - like Amanda Conner and Gail Simone - to those on the far alternative edges - like Madison Clell and Leela Corman - and everyone in between. Trina, of course, was an early role model for me. When I was in my twenties and trying to get my foot in the door of the comics biz, Trina not only was an inspiration but was personally very kind and encouraging to me - and she and Anne Timmons are already doing wonderful comics for girls. Lee Marrs and Roberta Gregory are two women whose work I also encountered in my twenties, in the undergrounds, and I still think they rock, both as artists and as people. Jill Thompson is the first woman I ever hired to draw a comic - that was the Elementals spinoff miniseries Fathom, almost twenty years ago - so it was really important to me that she be a part of this anthology. Carla Speed McNeil writes and draws what is probably the most intelligent comic in today's market, Finder, so she was high on my original wish list, too. Some women fell into my lap by way of recommendations: Fantagraphics publicist Eric Reynolds turned me onto Colleen Coover's work, and both Bob Schreck and Matt Wagner sung Meghan Kinder's praises to me after awarding her several prizes at a national student animation festival. Chynna Clugston, Colleen Doran...I just love their work; it's really that simple! Ditto Rebecca Woods, whom I met for the first time only last February, despite the fact that she lives here in Portland and is an active member of the Mercury Studios artists'collective. I knew she'd done quite a bit of inking, but not too long after I met her I saw a two-page story she'd written and drawn, and I was blown away. I was also blown away by Alexa Kitchen's comics, which I first saw at the 2004 MoCCA fest. Alexa has clearly inherited her father's drawing genes, and though only eight years old, she's already filled binder upon binder with comics stories.
Please tell me I've at least mentioned everyone's name in response to these last two questions!
Seriously, more than any other type of book, the anthology tends to be a direct reflection of its editor's tastes, at least insofar as the contributors go. What's critical for me, both as an editor and as a reader, is that the cartoonist tell a good story; as to the kind of story being told, as well as the particular art style in which it's being told, well, my tastes are obviously all over the map!
4. Though there are exemplary exceptions to the rule, women are still vastly underrepresented in the comics field. You have a unique perspective as a female senior editor at a major publisher-what, from your point of view, are the biggest hurdles that female creators have to overcome in this industry?
I think the major stumbling block is that the readership for comics is largely male – and most guys just plain aren't interested in comics by or for women. Or, y'know, even if they are, they keep that on the downlow ‘cause it seems to interfere with their own male self-concept. Or something. Hell if I know! But look, the very first comics that were actively targeted at female readers were Simon and Kirby's romance comics - a genre they pioneered in 1947 with Young Romance #1. Those comics sold millions of copies and spawned countless imitations - and the stories, pre-Comics Code, are really very good (the S&K ones, anyway). But most guys wouldn't be caught dead reading those comics! Except for Frank Miller, for instance, who's smart enough to appreciate just how strong those stories are and who's secure enough in his own masculinity not to feel threatened by reading "comics for women." But the Frank Millers of the world are damn rare.
Another stumbling block is that the superhero genre is still dominant in comics - and superheroes, traditionally, just don't seem to be the preferred choice of female readers. I've been on more "women in comics" panels than I can count, and when we're inevitably asked what comics we read growing up, I'm always the anomaly - because I was a Mort Weisinger baby and read all his 1960s Superman-family titles. But my female colleagues, if they read comics at all as young girls, read Archies or funny animals - humor comics generally. When the vast majority of available comics jobs are in the superhero genre, it helps if you have an affinity for that - and, in the past, most women haven't.
Also, many women draw in a style that one might call "girly" – a style I happen to love, by the way. Earlier today I was looking at some stunningly gorgeous pages by Nell Brinkley from the mid-to-late 1920s, reprinted in a recent issue of The Comics Journal, and her art is detailed and curvilinear and flowy and flowery and, well, pretty. I adore that, but I'm not sure a lot of guys do. In fact, one fellow wrote me a fairly earnest letter not too long ago, after Sexy Chix had been solicited in Diamond Previews, complaining that the book's cover logo (which, by the way, was designed by a woman, Dark Horse art director Lia Ribacchi) was "written in curvy pretty font," "with a 'Snow White' bluebird," and "in pink" - as if those were all negatives! Not to me they're not.
But you're right that things are changing. For example, to my knowledge, Sexy Chix is the first anthology of female cartoonists that includes women who work primarily for mainstream comics publishers: Gail Simone, Jill Thompson, Colleen Doran, Rebecca Woods. Past anthologies I've seen have been restricted to cartoonists working in some "ghettoized" area of comics: underground comix or small-press comics of one sort or another. Not that I haven't loved those and bought them religiously - just that Sexy is another barometer of how things are changing for women working in this industry.
5. The title seems to be an ironic jab at the stereotypically buxom characters found in American comics. Do you think it's possible for such "bad girl" images to be honest or empowering?
Actually, the title doesn't poke fun at all. Could somebody please tell me when exactly it was that "sexy" became a bad thing?
As to your question, I guess it really depends on what you mean by "bad girl image." If that image is the impossibly proportioned woman in tights who's really nothing more than a two-dimensional and essentially male superhero with tits, then no, I don't see any way to reconcile that with "an honest female point of view."
By the same token, Devin Grayson's former run on Catwoman as well as Gail Simone's ongoing work on Birds of Prey are, I think, two good examples of books that do encompass an honest female perspective and feature hot babes as the leading characters. And the difference is that while the characters are indeed sexy - in the traditional sense of being good-looking, having great figures, and wearing tight outfits - they're written in a way that really explores their nature as women. In other words, the fact that they're women doesn't begin and end with their bra size; they're complicated, interesting human beings with some very real, and some very well written, female concerns.
And just to swing to the complete opposite end of the spectrum, probably my all-time favorite women's comics anthology is the first Twisted Sisters, edited by Diane Noomin, who created the fabulous Didi Glitz of underground comix fame. Noomin subtitled the book "A Collection of Bad Girl Art," and there's no question that many of the female characters therein are very bad girls! But they look nothing like the stereotypical spandex hottie. My old friend Dori Seda, who tragically died way too young, was one of the contributors to Twisted Sisters, and Dori was a perfect bad girl - with the clothes to prove it! Her comics stories were mostly autobio, and she depicted herself and her life unsparingly, foibles and all. Mary Fleener, Julie Doucet, Carel Moiseiwitsch, Aline Kominsky-Crumb...these are all excellent bad girls! And the characters they portray in their comics are the real "bad girls," written from an almost uncomfortably honest female point of view. Maybe even a little too uncomfortable for many men! We gals are amazing and strange creatures and sometimes so complex that it can be downright scary!
Anyway, yes...to your question. But we don't see that combination of bad girl and honest female too often in comics.
6. What is your opinion on the influx of shoujo manga-which traditionally caters to female readers-to the U.S. market?
I'm all for anything that brings more women into comics. I'm a little worried that the manga bubble in general is going to burst at some point, but if even some of those new female readers stick around, that benefits everyone. Admittedly, I don't read too many Japanese comics - although I adore Osamu Tezuka's work - but what's tremendously encouraging to me about shoujo manga is that the stories are primarily about human drama, human relationships. That is subject matter that's sadly lacking from traditional Western comics - Love and Rockets being the rare (and brilliant) exception - and American publishers could stand to learn some lessons from the recent success of shoujo in the U.S. The female market here for comics is huge and has been largely untapped - up until recently, that is. Women tend to prefer stories involving real human emotional drama, and that's what shoujo provide. Perhaps if we published comics that were more female-friendly, like shoujo, we'd have more women reading them. In the end, that's really the entire raison d'être behind Sexy Chix.