Making Lesbians Visible: Recovering the Social History of the 1990s Lesbian Comics Boom

Abstract: In the early 1990s, young feminists and queer individuals embraced zines, a DIY self-publishing format with no editorial rules or restrictions, building epistolary networks which spread the word about the riot grrrl and queercore subcultures and formed them into internationally known movements. Paralleling but also independent of these movements, lesbian and bisexual women cartoonists also formed a tight-knit community through zines, expanding their publishing opportunities and facilitating an unprecedented but little-remembered boom in lesbian comics publishing. This article traces how zines were integral to the expansion of lesbian cartoonist voices and how it allowed them to openly dialogue about their sexuality. As scholars of queer comics have documented, grassroots newspapers and underground series like Wimmen's Comix and Gay Comix provided the foundation for lesbian cartoonists to develop as a community across the 1980s, but limitations of page space and editorial ideology meant that only a handful of lesbian cartoonists could really flourish and publish with any regularity. By contrast, zines offered cartoonists unprecedented freedom and space to publish what they wanted when they wanted. In looking closely at the newsletters, series, and individual comics that emerged through zine networks, we can trace how cartoonists used zines to proliferate and expand the conversation about lesbian sexual expression and lesbian subcultures. This article includes extended discussion of publications including Girljock, Hothead Paisan, Lana's World, Lesbian Cartoonists' Network, Liliane, OH …, and Strange-Looking Exile . While scholars have celebrated the likes of Alison Bechdel or Diane DiMassa for how they documented lesbian subculture in comics, the dozens of women creating comics in zines in this period offer up an even broader vision of lesbian sexuality and show how necessary the community was to their success.