It has been just over decade since comics historian Trina Robbins published Pretty in Ink (2013), where she identifies a series of women who actively made and published comics since the birth of this medium in the 1890s in the United States. However, it remains a dominant view in comics studies that comics were a male-dominated field until the 1970s. Ian Gordon acknowledges in retrospect that if artists as prolific and influential as Rose O’Neill are omitted from comics histories, then selection criteria must be reassessed (2022). In turn, as women’s oeuvres are recuperated and historicized, the question emerges regarding the universal validity of current comics theories and formalisms (produced since the 1990s by McCloud, Groensteen, and Baetens among others), given that they were formulated under the assumption that comics a) were mainly developed by men and b) did not exist in women-oriented editorial spaces prior to the feminist comix underground of the ‘70s. Hillary Chute, Elisabeth El Refaie, and Tamryn Bennet have analyzed in depth women’s nonfiction comics post-1970s, and Qiana Whitted has produced impactful scholarship on fiction comics by black women artists around the 1950s. But women’s contributions to comic art in decades prior are just being documented, and the extent of their innovation remains superficially understood. In three fifteen-minute presentations by a faculty, a postdoctoral scholar, and a doctoral candidate, this panel explores the possibility that the careful analysis of formal and thematic traits in comics made by women in the early history of comics --before the standardization of the sequential strip and/or before the feminist underground-- may transform what we understand as “comics” at a foundational level.

In “The Rise and Fall...”, Camila Gutiérrez coins the cascading layout as a particular arrangement of text and image that women artists developed and used frequently between the 1890s and the 1930s. Studying the works of Rose O’Neill, Ethel Hays and Nell Brinkley, she will illustrate how the cascading layout, by not using sequential panels and using verse rather than prose, gave the appearance of a feminine and ornamental illustration. This helped artists to circulate feminist discourse in the most prestigious sections of women’s magazines like Good Housekeeping, but also in public stages that did not easily sanction feminist material, such as the covers or front pages of widely read press like The American Weekly and The Cleveland Press. A product of women’s print culture, the cascading comic was structurally influenced by the fashion section, but in the page order it usually came before it.

In “Playing with Paper” Morgan Pedraza will focus on another case of influence between women’s print culture and comics, discussing how American women’s magazines shaped the paper-doll sets found in newspaper comic strips and comic books. These share a long history that begins with the 19th-century European toy theater and extends into the 20th-century American popular press. Across this wide expanse of time and space, play practices surrounding paper-based characters are surprisingly cohesive and form a historical framework for understanding how comics interpret and create meaning through play. Central to this framework is the “model figure,” a term she borrows from paper-doll culture to describe the print reproduction of a character designed to engage readers’ imaginations through play. Moving from magazines like Godey’s Lady’s Book and The Delineator and into strips ranging from Jane Arden and Brenda Starr, Reporter to Dick Tracy, Pedraza will explore how comics introduced new, often fantastic, possibilities for the paper-doll model figure, and yet social and cultural conceptions of the domestic continued to shape readers’ imaginations and play practices.

In “Superwomen fighting for/against Justice...”, Elisabetta Di Minico focuses on powerful and pioneering Golden Age superheroines and villainesses, especially the ones created by women artists such as crimefighter Marla Drake/Miss Fury, who first appeared in a syndicated strip by June Tarpé Mills in 1941, or Commandette, created by Nina Albright for Star-Studded Comics #1 in 1945. As Mike Madrid underlines in The Supergirls (2009), female superheroines of the Golden Age were mostly “ineffectual”, clumsy, and inexpert figures “inducted into the world of crime fighting by the men in their lives”. By contrast, Di Minico will discuss with what nuances women artists handled the tropes that shaped “bad” and “good” women in comics towards the 1940s, by covering 1) the creation, the representation, and the impact of female figures in Golden Age comics, 2) the relationship between gendered tropes and historical events, and 3) the use of sexuality and motherhood in the shaping of superheroines and villainesses.