Bitch: Winter 2010 Issue

The Winter 2010 issue of Bitch Magazine is out and about. It has an article I assisted Anne Elizabeth Moore and Esther Pearl Watson with called, "Gender and Comics Potluck: A graphic survey of where women and trans people are - and aren't - in the comics industry." 

It's something of a companion piece to Women's Comics Anthology, a zine I co-edited with Moore earlier this year. Both pieces are part of a larger project interrogating the gender inequality in comics that Moore has been exploring with her Lady Drawers class at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. 

You can find Bitch Magazine, like, anywhere. It's even in real life places like Barnes and Noble, but, really, you should just subscribe. 

Interview With Filmmaker Cassandra Troyan

          Coup de Foudre, Part I of The Ascent of the Behemoth Trilogy.

Cassandra Troyan, my erstwhile roommate, collaborator, and friend, is a filmmaker, performance artist, and poet who has just released a chapbook with her brother, Cody Troyan, called Big Bill and the Lonely Nation. At the Wexner Center earlier this year Ron Green, an Associate Professor of Film Studies at OSU, dedicated his lecture on the emergence of the film loop to Cassandra, as well as to other OSU alumni Stacie Sells, Randy Hunter, Karl Baumann, Matthew Swift, and Nicolette Swift for pursuing the realization of experimental film and video at a university that doesn't even bother to offer a program for film production. But don't fret, Cassie has since transcended such dire circumstances and now finds herself a MFA candidate at the University of Chicago.

I interviewed her almost a year ago about the three-part film she made with Stacie Sells entitled The Ascent of the Behemoth Trilogy. That interview, partially updated to reflect time + reality, is after "the jump."

Women's Comics Anthology

                      Front and back cover wraparound by Sara Drake.

Women's Comics Anthology, a zine I co-edited as part of the Ladydrawers project I am helping Anne Elizabeth Moore with, is now available to download for free on 'the Internet.'

Women's Comics Anthology is a gendered content analysis of a random sample of comics anthologies. Some of the statistics derived from our study are deeply troubling and call for soul-searching introspection of behalf of comics editors, publishers and artists. For instance, women comics makers only accounted for 16% of total contributors to the anthologies we reviewed. Indeed, more women appeared as naked characters in the anthologies than as clothed creators contributing to them.  These facty-facts, propped up by anecdotal accounts in extensive interviews collected under the Ladydrawers project, paint the comics industry as systematically inequitable and largely divided among gender lines.

Women's Comics Anthology is also a comics anthology, largely drawn by women. Each statistic collected was illustrated by a different artist. Contributors include Ramsey Beyer, Candace Corbin, Chelsea Dirck, Sara Drake, Emil Emanta, Karla Hewitt-Blackie, Ingrid Olson, Leslie Perrine, Alma Vescovi and most of Moore's Ladydrawers class at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Download Women's Comics Anthology at Pressing Concern Books: here.