Twisted Sisters: A Collection of Bad Girl Art

Whole Earth, Spring, 1998

Twisted Sisters: A Collection of Bad Girl Art

Diane Noomin, editor. Kitchen Sink Press.

Sad, but not surprising, the comics were largely a boys' club, until the current generation came along. Up until recently, with the exception of Dale Messnick's Brenda Starr, all of the leading women characters in comics were fictions of the male imagination. Even a power figure such as Wonder Woman, too hastily adopted by the founders of Ms. magazine, what with all of her whips and bracelets and chains, turned out to be only one teasing and submissive "yes" away from an outright bondage figure.

Children of the underground culture of the sixties, and its extensions into the seventies and eighties, artists Diane Noomin and Aline Kominsky, the original Twisted Sisters, as well as Lee Mars, Melinda Gebbie, and Trina Robbins, have changed the role of women in comics for good. With homage to these particular founding "ma-mahmahs," it is important to mention as well the biting, politically dark comics of Sue Coe and Carel Moiseiwitsch; the storytelling powers of Carol Tyler, Phoebe Gloeckner, and Carol Swain; and the general splash and sass of a few real style-drivers: Mary Fleener, Krystine Kryttre, and Julie Doucet. This is very exciting work. Remember these names. This is probably what comics will increasingly come to look like, and say, in the future.