WOMEN IN COMIC BOOKS-READING AND WRITING COMIC BOOKS TO HELP HEAL Those Who Suffered Trauma.

http://www.comicbookresources.com/?page=article&id=53182

Princeless

I Kill Giants

"Death: The High Cost of Living" by Neil Gaiman and Chris Bachalo

Anyas Ghost

Bat woman

"Captain Marvel" by Kelly Sue DeConnick

FEMINISM IN COMIC BOOKS

DO THEY HELP WOMEN WHO HAVE BEEN THROUGH TRAUMA?

Please post your comments below.

http://www.comicbookresources.com/?page=article&id=53182

"For me, a feminist comic is one in which female characters aren't just a plot device providing male characters with an opportunity to react. They aren't a thing to be rescued, fucked, killed and discarded. Feminist comics show women as people, not tits and ass whose stories are only interesting if they're sexy. Their physical representation should be reflective of their character in a way that makes sense. The way they dress, how their bodies are portrayed -- these things aren't just to entice, but to inform. I have nothing against demonstrations of sexuality, and don't feel a 'good feminist comic' means the boobs are covered, but when a female character is sexualized, it should be relevant to who she is. She should have a story, a purpose and a narrative that portrays her as more than a victim or an object of desire"

We read  on pages 198-199 in the book,Where The Girls Are?by Susan Douglas,a section about women in comic books in the 1940's and 1970's and how they portrayed women "as a key repository of antifeminsm"

Please see the image of MS.Chute(below)as she discusses  graphic narratives — "they’re not just comic books anymore"

December 6, 2007

By Ken Gewertz, Harvard News Office

"The title of Hillary Chute’s Nov. 29 lecture,'Out of the Gutter: Contemporary Graphic Novels by Women' has a double meaning. It refers to the elevation of graphic narratives — comics — from the lowest, most disreputable level of artistic expression to a form worthy of New York Times best-sellerdom, literary prizes, and academic attention.

It also refers to something seemingly far more mundane — the empty space separating the framed drawings in a graphic narrative, literally the “gutter.”

For Chute, whose talk was delivered as the Radcliffe Institute’s Schlesinger Lecture, the relationship between gutter and frame represents “a counterpoint between presence and absence,” delineating the “boundaries of what can be said and what can be shown” in a graphic narrative.

Currently a junior fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows, Chute last year earned a Ph.D. in English from Rutgers University with a dissertation titled “Contemporary Graphic Narratives: History, Aesthetics, Ethics.” Her interest in comics began when she read Art Spiegelman’s “Maus: A Survivor’s Tale” in a graduate class on contemporary fiction.

“Totally blown away” by Spiegelman’s graphic narrative, as she described her response in an interview in a Rutgers alumni publication, Chute has since written extensively about Spiegelman’s work. Her criticism caught the attention of the artist himself, and they are now collaborating on a book about Spiegelman’s work called “MetaMaus.”

In her talk, Chute focused on two recent graphic narratives by women, more memoirs than novels: “Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood” (2003) by Marjane Satrapi and “Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic” (2006) by Alison Bechdel. Like the 1992 Pulitzer Prize-winning “Maus,” which relates Spiegelman’s father’s experiences as a concentration camp victim in Nazi Germany, these more recent narratives employ words and pictures to describe traumatic events.

In “Persepolis,” Satrapi describes her childhood in Iran during the Islamic revolution and the early years of the Ayatollah Khomeini’s dictatorship. In “Fun Home,” Bechdel, the creator of a lesbian-based comic strip called “Dykes to Watch Out For,” tells of her relationship with her father, a repressed, obsessive-compulsive, closeted gay man, whose suicide when Bechdel was 19 continues to be a traumatic and haunting event in her life."http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2007/12/chute-on-graphic-narratives-%E2%80%94-they%E2%80%99re-not-just-comic-books-anymore/

http://www.google.com/url?sa=i&rct=j&q=Maus,+A+comic+book&source=images&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CAUQjhw&url=http%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FMaus&ei=TC8xVc6uEsHXsAX_nYDwCg&bvm=bv.91071109,d.cGU&psig=AFQjCNFfMnCdjH9-UkKIycIcL-5yWMNkKw&ust=1429373129005767

I also read Maus and created a series of black and white drawings informed by this comic book (see below).

I created this piece after reading MAUS

MAUS 1,2015,mixed/paper,5"x7"