Commentary: Alexandra Bowman of Georgetown's "The Hilltop Show" Responds to Callout and Critics

by Alexandra Bowman

Ms. Bowman is a 19-year-old student, political cartoonist, and humorist at Georgetown University. We interviewed her last December. When I met her in person last weekend, she told me about a minor university controversy about a pulp paperback book collection in a GU dorm library that had started to go national due to Brietbart picking it up. I offered her space at ComicsDC for her response. For the record, I'm in my mid-50s and grew up with many of the books pictured in the Georgetown Review story around the house, I have read some of them, and I personally do not find them generally offensive myself. However, I do believe that she and her colleagues have a right to make their opinions known without being trolled. And at least one of the books, The Cunning Linguist, is genuinely hardcore pornography. - Mike Rhode

Launched in fall 2019, The Hilltop Show is Georgetown University's political comedy show. Our team aims to make current campus, national, and international events accessible and entertaining to those who might not typically engage with the news - including not only students but the broader Georgetown community and beyond. In line with this mission, we publish journalistic pieces as well as comedic sketches and interviews with political practitioners and comedians. 

I founded the show last April. I write sketches and "informational monologues" (the thing John Oliver does), conduct and coordinate journalistic investigations, organize film shoots, edit videos in Adobe Premiere, and conduct outreach and PR for the Show. I create our graphics, drawing many by hand with traditional and digital media, like our Season 2 poster:

The Hilltop Show meets in a study space in a dorm that would be more accurately described as a glorified broom closet. Until a few weeks ago, the space included a bookshelf, on which were hundreds of books have been there since 2003 when the dorm opened and an alum donated them. During a weekly team meeting, we noticed one book that caught our eye, entitled Cherokee, which depicted a young Native American girl on the cover illustrated not only in an objectifying way but also with blood on her clothes. Upon further inspection, we realized that at least one of the books was hardcore pornography, but many others of them included derogatory racial elements and glamorized rape, including that of underage girls. We asked the university and multiple organizations if they were aware of the books and if they had any background knowledge of their origins, and within hours of one of our emails being sent, every book disappeared from the dorm library. 

The Hilltop Show partners with an independent student media publication on campus, The Georgetown Review, and we worked with them to publish a journalistic report based on The Hilltop Show's research and the events that had transpired. The Show also filmed and published a sketch (a Goodfella's parody) on the same day the books were removed. 

Shortly thereafter, the university newspaper, The Hoya, published an article that included a statement from me, with some remarks indicated as representative of the team's views and some as my own. As I noted to them, "While some were simply raucous crime noir murder mysteries representative of the literary and cultural time in which they were written, other books included extremely problematic and damaging elements, including the glamorization of rape, including that of underage girls. Completely naked women of all races were frequently featured on these books' covers. Further, many books fetishized young nonwhite women." 

The books were typical of the time in which they were written, but our main question was whether the university knew that they were present considering that the books' racist and pornographic content, regardless of when the books where written, could be harmful to those who read them. Several young children under the age of ten live in the buildings where these books were kept, not far out of their reach.

I'd point to how Disney has approached the issue of many of their older films containing culturally outdated and racist elements. On the new streaming service Disney+, films with these elements have warnings in their descriptions.  For example, on the 1967 film "The Jungle Book," the following lines are included in the description of the film: "This program is presented as originally created. It may contain outdated cultural depictions."  I believe that even a small plaque on the walls of the McCarthy and Reynolds library with a similar sentiment would have been enough. When we reached out to the university, we didn't want the books to ultimately be removed. We wanted them to be contextualized in a similar way to how Disney has handled such content typical of mid-20th century media.

Conservative higher education news site The College Fix published a laughably biased article, which was not based in fact nor particularly concerned with providing much context for the situation whatsoever. Breitbart apparently then noticed this article and then wrote one of their own based on the College Fix's report. 

Breitbart reported the story in a way that suits the narratives popular with their reader base. Their report paints the story thus: liberal snowflake college students complained when something offended them, and the university folded and banned the books those students whined about. The image accompanying the article, a photo of books engulfed in flame, has prompted thousands of commenters to compare what we did - which was to raise questions to the university regarding the presence of dime novels that glamorize rape and pedophilia - to Nazi book burnings. 

Brietbart's article has been shared over 38,500 times as of February 20th. Over 11,000 comments have been left. 

The Hilltop Show has released a statement via a tweet commenting on the Breitbart article: 

"First, we didn't want the books removed altogether. We wanted them contextualized. Censorship? Nope. Second, if you're a fan of keeping books around that glamorize rape and pedophilia, we have Some Concerns. Something tells us you didn't read @thegureview's actual report."

I'd like to conclude by saying that we are more entertained by our Breitbart callout by anything else. After all, Breitbart has now called the Hilltop Show a "crack research team." Rest assured that "Crack Research Team Member" T-shirts are currently being designed. Cheers.

More information about The Hilltop Show can be found on our website, hilltopshow.com where you can also sign up for our newsletter. Our YouTube channel is linked here. We post updates, political cartoons, memes, and more on our social media pages: we are @hilltopshow on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. As our slogan states, we will continue to #capitalizeonthechaos. 

Annie Lunsford, Arlington illustrator, has passed away

Joe Sutliff is reporting on Facebook that Annie Lunsford passed away on Sunday, February 9, 2020. Annie was a professional illustrator for many years, and collaborated with her sister Linda, who survives her. The two exhibited at many local shows including Artomatic. In recent years, Annie's work including science fiction and cats. Her website is https://www.annielunsford.com/SetFrames.html

Linda and Annie Lunsford at Washington-Lee High School, December 2015.

Her contribution to the Team Cul de Sac book for Richard Thompson.

Annie Lunsford Hang in There Nemo Illustration Original Art (2012). Annie Lunsford, illustrator (page 79): "I met Richard years ago, before he was world-famous; just amazing and brilliant! He's got the winning combination -- wit, and he can draw! Richard's the best, and I hope all the money raised can really help." This wonderful ink and watercolor on paper homage to Winsor McCay's Little Nemo strip.

Jeffrey Thompson illustrations in a new fantasy novel

I was reading The City of Lost Fortunes by Bryan Camp, a fantasy novel about magicians and luck gods in New Orleans this week, and thinking something looked familiar about the interior illustrations.

It turns out that they're done by Jeffrey Thompson, of Baltimore. For many years, Jeff was the Wednesday staff at Big Planet Comics Bethesda and I've followed his illustration career for years. It was a good feeling to see these illustrations in a brand new book. I didn't photograph them all, but the Tarot Card concept is integral to the plot.

I enjoyed the book quite a bit, and I've seen it compared online to American Gods which seems reasonable. I'd recommend it.

Andrew Looney of Looney Labs interviewed at Awesome Con

by Mike Rhode

Andy Looney, a co-founder of local games maker Looney Labs (along with his wife Kristen), was roaming the board games floor in a white lab coat as soon as the Con opened, handing people a special promo card from his company’s new game in exchange for a fist bump. When I mentioned that we had talked about an interview at a previous Awesome Con, he immediately offered to sit down and talk. Looney Labs sells games that he has designed, with Fluxx being its best known game. Fluxx is a card game with two basic rules – draw a card and play a card – and then a host of other cards modify those rules. The game has many versions including licensed ones of animation shows such as Batman Adventures and Cartoon Network properties.

Mike Rhode: How long have you been in business?

Andy Looney: Twenty years. We started in the late 90s. I invented Fluxx on July 24^th, 1996. We started a company to sell it a little after I invented it. We’ve been based in College Park, MD the whole time.

MR: When you decide to expand the Fluxx game into all the variants?

AL: After a few years. We ran with the basic game for a while, and oddly enough the very first themed version was Stoner Fluxx. That was the very first one that suggested itself. It’s very common thing to say, “Hey, what if you took this game and made it a drinking game?” or in this case, a marijuana toking game.Since I’m not much of a drinker, this is the one we made. But also, we were really starting to get active with the legalization movement in those days, and when we first conceived it we thought of it as a fundraising thing. We were calling it NORML Fluxx.

We even pitched it to them. I remember an awkward meeting in their offices downtown where they essentially said, “What? No, we don’t want to do that. Sorry.” So we just made a generic Stoner Fluxx. That was the first one we printed, but things really took off with the themed versions with Zombie Fluxx in 2008.

MR: For the earlier years, you produced games that you didn’t have to license?

AL: Yeah. That was always the watchword: “No licenses.” Then Monty Python approached us, through a company named Toy Vault, that made Monty Python things. They wanted to do Monty Python Fluxx and contacted us about doing it and I said, “Sounds great, except I want to design and sell it, and we’ll kick you back [a commission] for making it happen. It’s a great idea.” It was great. They were so easy to work with and it sold well. It continues to be one of our hottest sellers, even though the license is just this vintage, old license. People still love Monty Python and it still does real well.

And then we thought, “This licensing thing isn’t so bad. Let’s try it with something else.” One of the things I really wanted to do was a themed version of Chrononauts, a time-travel game I invented in 2000. We made an early American version in 2004 and after Monty Python, I thought a license I would like to do would be to apply Back to the Future to the Chrononauts mechanism. We had it out for a few years, but then we had to let the license go because we couldn’t meet Universal’s guarantees because we’re not that big a company and it didn’t do that well for us. That also was an experience… whereas [licensing] Monty Python was a dream, this was much more challenging. There was a giant corporation that had a lot more pushback on various things, and there was a lot of back and forth to make them satisfied. I walked away from that one saying, “Oh my god, let’s not do any more licenses.” So for years, we didn’t do licenses. We focused on things like Cthulhu and Wizard of Oz and Pirates, but finally we started to do licenses again. We got Batman and the Cartoon Network ones then, but we’ve now lost the Cartoon Network licenses.  It’s a shame because everybody loves Rick and Morty now. We’ve still got Batman, Dr. Who, and Firefly and all of these have been hugely popular for us. This year we’re going to make Star Trek and ST: The Next Generation games.

MR: About the art – it’s varied over the games, but you have a high-level of art for a small game company. How do you find your artists?

AL: A lot of our games were done by one guy, Derek Ring of Boston. He’s our go-to artist. He’s done more art for Fluxx than any other artist. When we did Zombie Fluxx, we started working with a packaging and marketing design company. We wanted our packaging to look better so we hired a local company called Tim Kenney Marketing and he helped us update our branding and packaging. He was the one who connected us to Derek Ring. Afterwards, we wanted to keep working with Derek for our other games because he’d been such a great illustrator. He’s great.

Sometimes we use a friend of a friend, such as on Stoner Fluxx, and some art is done in-house. The art for Get the MacGuffin, our brand new game, is a long-time friend named Alex Bradley.

MR: MacGuffin is a totally new game and not based on anything you’ve done before?

AL: A totally new game. I’m real excited about it. There’s a thing called the MacGuffin that everyone is trying to get, because it’s a win-the-game card. If you have it, you’re likely to win, but the object of the game is to have the last card. If you’re out of cards, you’re out of the game. It’s an elimination game, but it’s always fast. You only have five cards or less depending on how many players are in the game. You have to make them last as long as you can. The MacGuffin is great because you can infinitely discard it and pick it up again instead of throwing away so it lasts forever. People try to steal it from you, or try to destroy it, but ultimately what matters is that you have the last card.

MR: Do you want to keep expanding the Fluxx line?

AL: I have so many other Fluxxes in my design library that I could make a Fluxx out of just about anything at this point. We’re doing more educational ones. I have a space one, not to be confused the science fiction Star Fluxx, that will be the solar system and space missions. I expect it next year or the year after. 

MR: The educational games are successful?

AL: Yes, we’re bringing out Anatomy Fluxx this year because Math and Chemistry proved so popular. We made those because we had a little convention of our fans a couple of years ago, and I put out every different version of Fluxx prototypes I had. At the time, I had as many unpublished prototypes as we had print games. I put them all on the table and said, “Try these out all weekend and vote for the ones you want to have published,” and Math and Chemistry were the vote leaders, so I thought “I guess we need to make these,” and they’ve proven popular enough that Anatomy was next. 

MR: I guess you can keep on going with educational games too…

AL: I’ve thought about dinosaurs. I definitely think a dinosaur Fluxx is one I’d do at some point, but I’m having a hard time deciding how to pair the cards off. It seems on one hand perfect – put a T Rex on a card, and ‘boom’ but on the other hand, how I match them up for the goals is the hard part.

MR: I’ve noticed a certain fondness for puns in your goals…

AL: I’m typically not a punster, but sometimes you can’t resist. I try to have humor in various forms throughout my games. I’m all about the comedy. With a name like Looney, you either develop a sense of humor growing up and embrace it, or you become embittered and can’t wait to change your name when you turn 18 or get married. For me, I embrace it and love comedy, so puns are one of the forms of humor I try to infuse in the games and goals are one of the best places I have for that comedy. I always say the goals are where the jokes are. Sometimes the hardest part is trimming out the goals, because I have so many great ideas, but I can’t have too many in the game. Sometime a deck has goal bloat anyway because there’s just too many jokes and I want to put them all in. 

Star Fluxx has goal bloat because I had just invented the goal mill, and the goal mill is such a useful card. Anytime a great new card comes along, I’ll start putting it into all versions I design after that, but I don’t usually like to retro-change the cards. Now the game cards have a new design without boilerplate and with a wraparound border, but older Fluxx games like Star, Monty Python, Zombie … they still have the old design and probably never will be updated. There is a heritage there that I like to be able to see – how the patterns and designs have changed and evolved.

MR: How many people work in Looney Labs?

AL: Around 8. It’s only 7 at the moment due to a recent departure. We’re small compared to a lot of game companies.

We’ve got a couple more games coming out. Mary Engelbreit, a noted illustrator, is someone we’re making three products with – one that I can’t talk about, a version of Loonacy, and Fairy Tale Fluxx that she’ll be doing all the illustrations for. We’re taking art out of her story books for Fluxx, and doing new art if necessary. 

MR: How did you end up working with her?

AL: We just reached out. Our new business person noted that Mary Engelbreit is very popular in markets we’re trying to reach such as more mainstream markets. We’re looking at ways of getting our products into markets where we aren’t usually seen like gift stores and greeting cards shops that already sell a lot of her products will hopefully pick these up based on her name. And that gets the foot in the door for selling Fluxx to a whole new group of people. I’m pretty excited about Space Fluxx which has black cards and NASA pictures.

MR: Speaking of new markets, for a while Target had an exclusive type of Fluxx…?

AL: We made a special edition of Fluxx for Target that was a little bit different, and was a little cheaper. When we working with Cartoon Network, we did a mashup for Target, and standalone Adventure Time and Regular Show versions for the hobby market. We also made Monster Fluxx that way. It was exclusive to Target for a while, but for us it’s been about trying to have a version of our product that is a little bit cheaper, a little bit different from the hobby store version, that we can sell in grocery stores, drug stores and places that have a little games area.

MR: Is that working for you?

AL: Yeah. It’s our secondary line. Monster Fluxx gives a sense of Zombie or Cthulhu, but in a lighter weight version with no Creepers. It’s the easy version of the game.

MR: Finally, will we see any more Chrononauts games?

AL: Everyone’s always asking about that. It’s hard. Timeline design is so challenging. It’s not like anything’s been happening in the news of note. [laughs] I’m always looking at the news, thinking, “Is this an event [that could change a timeline]?” Also there’s other areas of history that I think about, like a New World Chrononauts from pre-discovery America, or a future timeline imagining a bunch of big events… these are really challenging jobs. I’d like to update the basic game beyond The Gore Years expansion, but that’ll probably take a few years. I’m actively trying to work on a new game these days though.

Touring the LoC's Drawn to Purpose exhibit with curator Martha Kennedy

Anita Kunz

by Mike Rhode

Last November, the Library of Congress opened a new show in the historic Jefferson building on women cartoonists and illustrators, curated by Martha Kennedy of the Prints & Photographs Division. Martha has a long-standing interest in the subject, and works in the division that collects original art (in spite of its name). She’s previously curated a show and book of Ann Telnaes’ work, but this is the first exhibit to look at the wide world of women artists. The online description of the show reads: 

Features the rich collections of the Library of Congress and brings to light remarkable but little-known contributions made by North American women to the art forms of illustration and cartooning. Spanning the late 1800s to the present, the exhibition highlights the gradual broadening in both the private and public spheres of women’s roles and interests, and demonstrates that women once constrained by social conditions and convention, have gained immense new opportunities for self-expression and discovery. 

Martha was kind enough to give me a tour of the exhibit one day recently. The exhibit is in the Swann Gallery of the Jefferson Building, and will have two rotations of artwork, and an accompanying book.

Martha Kennedy: The show reflects a new approach to exhibit design here at the Library, in that you don’t see item by item labels. We have additional information on each piece on sheets at the entrance. The kind of design being used gives greater visual emphasis to the artworks themselves, and groups highly-varied kinds of illustrations and cartoons in ways that makes sense. The exhibit introduction defines six types of illustration and cartooning that are being highlighted. The exhibit is clearly intended to celebrate the contributions that women have made to both of these art forms, roughly from the late 19^th century into the 21^st century. We’re doing this by showing some of the very best examples of these art forms held in the Library’s collections.

We have in the Themes and Genres introduction examples of the six different kinds of illustration and cartooning that we’re featuring in the exhibition. The types are Golden Age illustration, early comics, new voices in comics, editorial illustration, magazine covers and cartoons, and political cartoons. This grouping overall also shows the two main threads running through the exhibition: 1.) how imagery of women and gender roles and relations changes over time; and 2.) how the subject matter broadens and quickens especially near the end of the 20^th century and into the 21^st century. These threads you’ll see in the groupings to various degrees.

For the Golden Age of illustration, we have Alice Barber Stevens showing the new woman, a social phenomenon of the end of the 19^th century, as two aspiring artists. For early comics, a page of Little Lulu by Marge originally published in the Saturday Evening Post. Anita Kunz is our example of an editorial illustrator’s work; she carries on the theme of how the images of women change. This dates from 2001 and was commissioned by Working Women Magazine and shows the quandary of everyday women still today, seventeen years later. The cell phones are a little out of date, but a lot of women still feel fragmented in their lives. Barbara Brandon Croft is our example of new voices in comics greatly broadening the subject matter of women’s concerns with her strip “Where I’m Coming From” that ran in the ‘90s. For magazine cartoons and covers, Roberta MacDonald did a wonderful New Yorker magazine cartoon from the wartime 1940s depicting role reversal during World War II. Finally, we have a beautiful example of Ann Telnaes’ editorial cartooning created just after 9/11. It’s just a sparkling example of her cartooning and really succinct text and commentary. 

Mike Rhode: How did you decide to do an exhibit on women cartoonists and illustrators?

Martha Kennedy: I’ve been working on this project for quite a while. When I first started, I remember being really impressed by the quality of work by women in different parts of the collection in Prints & Photographs. And also amazed and saddened by the fact that a lot of these women aren’t known. They’ve been overlooked in the histories of both art forms. I could see that there was collection development work and acquisitions to be done in both of those areas, and I have worked to build up those areas.

Mike Rhode: So the Telnaes art came in during your time, as you did an exhibit of her work. I remember when you brought Anita Kunz in to speak.

Martha Kennedy: Yes, and the some of the others were in the stacks, like Roberta MacDonald who deserves to be better known. But out of this exhibit, I acquired art by Gillespie, Barry, Price, Bechdel, Jetter, Chast, Wilkinson, Sherman, Benson, Mergen (over 600 drawings), and from rotation 2, Donnelly, Beck, and Tamaki.

Mike Rhode: How did you decide who to include in the show and the book? Was it women represented in the collection of the Library?

Martha Kennedy: Yes, it’s entirely collection-based. What we have in the collections is what inspired me to do a project of this kind and scope. I worked on it for years. This has been a special focus for me, even though previous curators had built up wonderful holdings of some of these artists. I have worked hard to add to and strengthen the holdings of work by women.

The next grouping focuses on the Golden Age of Illustration which dates roughly from 1880 to 1930. A lot of women ended up working in children’s books or fashion illustrating. Some exceptional ones branched out and illustrated works of literature in books or short stories in magazines aimed at adult readers. For example, Mary Hallock Foote is an interesting figure. She did most of her work in the west. Her husband was a mining engineer, and when they got married in the 1870s, she went west with him. She already had established a career and had good contacts; she knew the editor of Scribner’s and Century Magazine and continued illustrating, and then writing. She’s someone who should be better known. She took wood-engraving blocks with her that she worked on. Jessie Gillespie should be better known too. She did fashion illustration early on, and we show a 1914 satirical fashion illustration of women wearing pants.

Mike Rhode: 100 years later, her drawing would still work as a standalone illustration, if slightly redrawn.

Martha Kennedy: She’s also recognized as an incredible silhouette artist. We have some of those too, which are fairly newly acquired.

Mike Rhode: Even though the work is 100 years old, she wasn’t in the collection before?

Martha Kennedy: No, and we have a stunning piece of advertising art by her that will be in the second rotation. There will be two rotations of this show; the second one will go up in May. We will end up having about 40 artists represented overall with 70 works which is just a fraction of what we have.

Mike Rhode: Will it be a complete rotation?

Martha Kennedy: It will be. Some artists from the first version will also be in the second – people like Lynda Barry, Allison Bechdel and Lynn Johnston.

 

Our next grouping is Early Comics. Women found it hard to enter the comic strip field in the late 19^th century and tended to be channeled into a narrow range of subjects if they were successful and featured babies, cute children and animals in their strips. Rose O’Neill’s comic strip The Kewpies is just an incredible example, I think. She just raised the bar for that kind of comic strip. Our example is a 1935 Sunday page, from when she revived the strip which originally ran 1917-1918 and then 1934-1935.

Mike Rhode: She’s working very large and is using two pages of paper to make one page of artwork.

Martha Kennedy: It’s incredible to see her at the height of her powers and her drawing technique is so accomplished and amazing. This piece is an amusing story about the Kewpies trying to convince people that ghosts really exist, but what’s really striking is the incredibly detailed notes to her colorist Miss Hess along the margins. She goes through frame by frame.

Mike Rhode: It looks like it would have been faster for her to do a color guide and color parts of it herself.

Martha Kennedy: Yes, you’re right. Why she did it this way is unknown.

Other famous characters are Grace Drayton’s Campbell Soup Kids. She’s best known for this creation, although she created successful strips, several of which featured cute kids who looked like the Campbell Kids. The Kids were created in 1904 and appeared in the Lady’s Home Journal.

Virginia Huget’s flapper strip, Molly the Manicure Girl is one of the few comics featuring a flapper who is also ostensibly a working girl. It’s very light-hearted. Her work is really rare. In the book that’s going to come out in March, there are bullet point biographies for all these cartoonists and illustrators and more. There are about 123.

Mike Rhode: Is it a catalog of the show in addition to a book about women cartoonists?

Martha Kennedy: It’s not a catalog of the show, but there are six chapters that correspond to the sections of the exhibit.

Mollie the Manicure Girl by Huget

Mike Rhode: Also in this section is a 1965 Brenda Starr by Dale Messick, with Brenda sobbing over the missing Basil St. John… it really was a romance comic by that point. 

Martha Kennedy: For me, this era ends on a triumphant note, with Dale Messick winning syndication for Brenda Starr in 1940 which is a big deal because it was one of the first adventure strips with a female heroine. Starr would go off in search of news stories as a reporter. It was less of a romance strip in the early days.

I also want to note three years prior to that, Jackie Ormes, one of the few  African-American cartoonists, published her first strip called Torchy Brown – From Dixie to Harlem in 1937 in the Pittsburgh Courier. Her strip featured a young heroine in an adventurous life as she moved north in search of a career. It ran initially only two years, but she revived the strip later on. We have no original work by her unfortunately, and this is a tearsheet on exhibit. We’ve tried to get some, but it is very rare. She did two other comic features, and engages with broader issues such as environment, race… and paper dolls. Paper dolls frequently appear in women’s strips including Trina Robbins, Grace Drayton…

The next group is New Narratives, New Voices which includes recent comics. We have an example of a beautiful silk-screened example of a mini-comic by Lille Carre collected from the Small Press Expo (SPX). 

Mike Rhode: SPX is probably bringing in a lot of works by women cartoonists given that the show is probably approaching parity with equal numbers of men and women exhibiting.

Martha Kennedy: SPX is incredible. And so many women are winning top prizes at SPX and San Diego Comic-Con and other venues where awards are given. Peers are recognizing peers for their work.

We have Trina Robbins represented by an example of a cover for Wimmen’s Comix. She’s such an important figure in the whole history of comics and the chronicling of comics’ history. She did both writing and art in underground and mainstream comic books, and then became a ‘herstorian.”

Since the 1940s, one of the distinctions between the comics in this section and the earlier ones, is that the creators have turned to their own lives and are drawing on their own experiences and the experiences of people they know well.

Mike Rhode: On display here is original art by Allison Bechdel, Hilary Price, Lynn Johnston and Lynda Barry, in addition to the printed works we’ve already discussed. I’m wondering about the absence of Cathy Guisewite?

Martha Kennedy: She’s in the book. I wish we had more examples of her work. She’s certainly important in this era of women’s comics. 

I would like to point out the Lynda Barry piece as really interesting. It’s from one of the stories in 100 Demons, her breakout book from 2002. In this piece, she’s resurrecting and transforming her childhood memories of smell, when she noticed that every single house in her neighborhood had a different smell, including her own. She’s very funny as she describes the smells and ascribes significance to them.

Mike Rhode: Under the strip is a collage…

 Martha Kennedy: All her title pages in the book are double-page spreads and they’re amazing multi-media works with ink, water color, photographs, dried flowers… She refers to her approach as autobiofictionalography.

Mike Rhode: I don’t think that term is going to catch on with anyone else. She’s a great creator though.

Next to this section is a video screen with other examples?

Martha Kennedy: Yes, we’re seeing some later Little Lulu strips by Ward Kimball. Marge was very entrepreneurial. And there are other examples of Brenda Starr and art by Marie Severin. It has some art from every section of pieces I wished we could include, but weren’t able to.

Whitney Sherman

The next section is Editorial Illustrators as exemplified by Anita Kunz. Especially interesting is this pairing of Sue Coe and Frances Jetter. They’re both commenting on the 1991 Persian Gulf War, and have created very strong statements. Jetter’s may look like fine art, but it was published in Time Magazine and that’s the way she works. She chooses to work in linocut. She does more fine art now, and works mostly in sculpture, but she went through a period when she published a lot of illustrations. This very strong statement about the enemy war dead was published in Time, whereas Coe’s piece was commissioned by The Progressive, a strongly pacifist magazine, and is a universal indictment of war. It’s a powerful, haunting piece showing her drawing technique and the influence of German Expressionist Kathe Kollwitz. Whitney Sherman’s piece is an editorial illustration for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s annual report about the easy availability of drugs at schools and really hits hard on this. She’s in charge of the graduate illustration program at MICA. 

Bernarda Bryson Shahn is perhaps the godmother of editorial illustration, and her piece is from 1935. She drove her famous husband around the South and the Midwest as part of the WPA project, but was taking her own notes, looking at his photographs, thinking about the state of the country, and coming up with her own idea for a series. She called it The Vanishing American Frontier, and got some funding to work on it, but never finished it, because like other women, life interfered. She was supportive of his career, and had three children. It wasn’t until the 1990s that the work was published and exhibited, and we know from that catalog that she intended the series to be published as a book. It wasn’t intended as fine art, but meant for broader distribution in the tradition of editorial illustration. There will be another example of her work in the next rotation.

Bernarda Shahn

Mike Rhode: To me, this piece looks like she’s quoting Grant Wood’s American Gothic…

Martha Kennedy: She claimed she didn’t know about his painting at the time.

Anita Kunz

Mike Rhode The next section is Magazine Covers andCartoons. I see a Roz Chast cartoon, and another Anita Kunz – you snuck two in…

Helen Hokinson

Martha Kennedy: I did! She’s just so colorful and compelling. This was for Ms. Magazine showing how a cover highlights a feature in the magazine, in this case a Satanic cult victimizing children. This horizontal piece of art was used as a wraparound cover.

Helen Hokinson is next. She’s a magazine cartoonist for the New Yorker who died in the 1949.

Mike Rhode: I think she’s their most famous woman cartoonist until Roz Chast arrived in the 1970s.

Martha Kennedy: They used other women cartoonists such as Barbara Shermund. Roberta MacDonald did 100 cartoons and then they accepted less and less. In her book, Liza Donnelly traces the history of women cartoonists in the magazine.

 Two magazine cover designs we exhibit show the change in gender relations. The 1920s Vanity Fair by Ann Harriet Fish shows dancers moving with great freedom, and she designed over thirty covers for them. She published in other magazines such as Cosmopolitan. 

Mike Rhode: I think part of the reason some of these people have ‘disappeared’ is that their magazines failed, whereas the New Yorker has continued publishing, and publishing cartoon collections, and raiding their back stock, while other publications are gone.

Martha Kennedy: The Golden Age of magazines is over.

Mike Rhode: The next section is Political Cartoons, and you’ve chosen some of the usual suspects such as Signe Wilkinson (one of the two Pulitzer Prize winners) and alternative cartoonist and Herblock prize-winner Jen Sorenson. Lisa Benson is less familiar, working in a smaller market.

Martha Kennedy: Benson started in a California paper and is one of the few conservative editorial cartoonists. She’s part of the Washington Post Writers Group’s Cartoonist Group, and you see her in the Post’s Saturday roundup once in a while, signing drawings as “Lisa.”

 

Ann Mergen was the editorial cartoonist for the Miami Daily News from 1933-1956. She turned from fashion illustration to editorial cartooning, and basically worked herself into a job. That paper did not have an editorial cartoonist. She should be better known. For over 20 years, she was their editorial cartoonist, and we have over 600 of her cartoons. The paper won a Pulitzer when she was on staff and her editor sent her a telegram saying, “Don’t let anyone tell you it wasn’t Mergen cartoons that won us the Pulitzer. “ She did cartoons about the environment and the Everglades; Southern Florida Historical Society has that work. Ohio State’s Billy Ireland Library did a solo show on her work, and I’d like to do more on her work. Some editorial cartoonists’ most powerful work is almost timeless, because some of the issues they address are ongoing.

Mike Rhode: Why aren’t there more print publications in the exhibit beyond the two or three? You could have included more cartoonists if you had used books or comics from other divisions.

Martha Kennedy: Space was limited. We did use some supporting material, and more is in the book. I would have liked to show more of how multi-faceted some of these women were, doing different kinds of illustrations, cartoons and book illustration and some doing book design as well. My book is intended to spotlight the great diversity and the range of inventiveness and innovation that these artists were capable of. So many of these women had to earn a living; they had talent and they wanted to use it and they moved in directions that offered them outlets.

Hilary Price

Mike Rhode: Who would you like to have included in the exhibition but couldn’t?

Martha Kennedy: Several who come to mind are cartoonists Martha Orr and Alice Harvey and illustrators Violet Oakley and Florence Scovel Shinn.

I have a whole section on caricatures in the book that I wasn’t able to include in the exhibit due to lack of space. Some are on the video screen in the exhibit. And we don’t have a lot of work by women animators. The book will be a co-publication between the Library of Congress and the University Press of Mississippi. There will about 230 illustrations and it comes out in March. We are planning some public programs too.

There are probably less than ten books on women cartoonists, so I’m hoping this exhibit will spur further research and more acquisitions, and generally more recognition of what women have contributed.

Jen Sorenson

Mike Rhode: Regarding future acquisitions – you only have limited money to buy items, but people can give you gifts and you’d be happy to talk to people about that right?

Martha Kennedy: Yes, definitely. Some types of illustration and comics that my colleagues and I would like to acquire for the Library include excellent examples of original comic book, graphic narrative, and children’s book illustration art. Acquiring excellent examples of original drawings by Kate Carew, other female cartoonists and illustrators commenting on the woman suffrage movement, Fay King, and editorial cartoons by Edwina Dumm would also be of strong interest.

Drawn to Purpose
November 18, 2017–October 20, 2018, 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.
Graphic Arts Galleries, Ground Floor, Thomas Jefferson Building
Washington, DC 
https://www.loc.gov/exhibitions/drawn-to-purpose/about-this-exhibition/