There was Zap and then there was Tits & Clits. It seems quite apt that the answer to the legendary Zap Comix would be a bit of a feminist rebuke but done so in the same salacious yet patriarchal freeing boldness. It was a bit lewd but with proper ownership and perspective, so to speak. In 1972, cartoonists Joyce Farmer and Lyn Chevli produced Tits & Clits as an anthology to showcase other women cartoonists, supporting the careers of Mary Fleener, Roberta Gregory, Krystine Kryttre, Lee Marrs, Carel Moiseiwitsch, Trina Robbins, Dori Seda, to name a few.
As a pure publishing moment in history, Tits & Clits was the first all-women published comic, but as a reflection of the era and the times, was a tribute to the 1960s being a shapeshifting decade for women’s rights, freedoms, sexuality, and political power. But it wasn’t always embraced as such a pivotal publication of progress. Ever controversial for its depictions of masturbation, menstruation, birth control, sex, and abortion, in 1973, a year after its first publication, conservative legal authorities in Orange County deemed the anthology too pornographic, threatening arrest of the two editors on obscenity charges. This is why Fantagraphics' new anthology, along with Farmer, Chevli, Gregory, Marrs, Trina Robbins, and editor Samantha Meier, comes at such a vital time and underscores the volatile nature of American politics, then and today. Consisting of the seven-issue run of the Tits & Clits series, plus two classic solo comics from 1972 written and drawn by Farmer and Chevli, Meier’s introductory essay places the comic in its rightful place in both art and feminist history. —Juxtapoz staff
Fantagraphics, fantagraphics.com
