Explorations in nonfiction and autobio comics
It was 1970 and the scene on Haight-Ashbury was groovy--hippies and straights buzzed in and out of headshops with new wares. Trina Robbins flipped through her issue of Zap Comix, the underground comic book curated and published by R. Crumb. She was newly arrived from New York and as an artist and lover of comics, looked to enter the burgeoning underground comics scene. Sadly for her, and many other women creators, Zap and other underground comix at the time didn't publish female-authored pieces (sans Aline Kominsky-Crumb, Crumb’s wife). The women that did appear in those funny pages were often sexualized and stupid, false representations by the “closed boy’s club,” as Robbins put it, that was the underground at the time. Her response would be Wimmen’s Comix, which gave space to female authors and their authentic experiences. So much has changed since those days, with the plethora of female comic creators publishing today: Lucy Knisely, Mira Jacob, Kristen Radtke--and the list could go on.
This was our entrance into comics, and while our first love will always be women-created comics, we will also be exploring nonfiction stories told by all genders.
We have presented “Get Inked: Creative Nonfiction Comics as Cultural Critique” at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference and “Toward a Definition of Poetry Comics” and “Casting Narrative Aside: the Poetry Comics of Bianca Stone” at the Southwest Popular American Culture Association Conference.
More recently, we have co-authored several reviews of graphic narratives and contributed articles to the Women in Media reference handbook. Here are some links to our reviews:
“Brooding, Obsessing, and Drawing: The Diary Comics of Keiler Roberts,” Another Chicago Magazine.
“When Ideals Meet Reality: The Contradictions by Sophie Yanow,” The Rumpus.
We have also taught courses on autobiographix and poetry comics.
Nora has previously worked at comic publishers Devil’s Due Publishing and Drawn and Quarterly. Her poetry and nonfiction appear in Guernica, DIAGRAM, Bennington Review and elsewhere. Nora teaches at CSU and Aims Community College.
Amaris occupies her time with open space, white space, CMYK, flash nonfiction, long trails, f-stops, line breaks, and several Adobe programs running simultaneously. Her books of poems include A Poetic Inventory of the Sandia Mountains and Glitches in the FBI. Amaris teaches at the University of New Mexico.
Join us as we dive into a lot of comics!
What’s new?
Comic-Con @ Home is happening this week! Some panels we are particularly excited about are:
Telling True Tales
Jul 25, 2021 12:00 pm (GMT-07:00) Pacific Time (US & Canada)
Drawing Apart: New Coming-of-Age Comics
Jul 25, 2021 12:00 pm (GMT-07:00) Pacific Time (US & Canada)