A Few Thoughts on ‘Typical Girls: The Rhetoric of Women in Comic Strips’ by Susan E. Kirtley

by: Houman Sadri , December 13, 2021

In Typical Girls, Professor Susan E. Kirtley—director of comics studies at Portland State University, and Eisner-winning author of Lynda Barry: Girlhood through the Looking Glass—sets out to track the ways in which ‘comics created by woman … rendered and reflected the history of feminism in the United States,’ arguing that despite the fact that these strips tend to be both ‘small in size and often considered ephemeral and disposable’ comics do serve to reflect the societies into which they are created. (3) This is a compelling thought: if we accept the Gramscian idea that a constantly-changing dominant ideology is underpinned by the popular culture that serves it, then it must stand to reason that comic strips created by women would not simply react to challenges to patriarchal norms, but also do some of the heavy lifting in shaping and contextualising these challenges, with their ‘imagined reality … bear[ing] consequences for the real’. (3) In investigating this, Kirtley chooses to focus on Cathy (1976-2010), For Better or For Worse (1979-2008), Ernie Pook’s Comeek (1979-2008), Dykes to Watch Out For (1983-2008), Where I’m Coming From (1989-2005) and Stone Soup (1995-2020), all relatively long-running strips that have focused on different feminist experiences, periods and understandings, the better, as Kirtley explains, to look into ‘how they offer an evolving vision of gender’. (31)

While Kirtley makes it clear that she hopes this volume represents the start of a deeper and more detailed conversation, her dissection of these texts is detailed and forensic, using close readings of the texts and detailed looks at their creators to build a picture of the ways in which these strips both reflected and spoke back to society. 

The strips are, for the most part, tackled chronologically, the better to underline changes in focus and understanding, as well as the shift between different waves of the feminist movement. Cathy Guisewite’s Cathy, the first strip Kirtley examines, is, to an extent, the most liminal of the featured texts. As Kirtley points out, the strip has always engendered mixed feelings in its readers—while some see in its protagonist a kindred spirit living a life to which many female readers can easily relate, others perceive superficiality and gender stereotypes. Kirtley identifies this as the strip’s central struggle, with the protagonist constantly in search of some kind of equilibrium between ‘women’s lib’ and traditional gender roles—these two poles are represented within the strip by Cathy’s mother Anne and her best friend Andrea. Kirtley smartly identifies Cathy as a protean feminist text, one which changed and matured with the times, while never quite managing to be ahead of them. A 1980 storyline in which Cathy is sexually assaulted by her boss never quite sticks the landing, and the offending character experiences no real approbation for his actions (other than office gossip). This is seen here to be offset by Andrea’s unabashed campaigning for the progressive Democrat Michael Dukakis in the 1988 presidential elections after being laid off for taking unauthorised maternity leave. This liminality, or even ambivalence, is underlined by Guisewite’s own weary comments about lack of change when Cathy drew to a close, though Kirtley interprets this as the strip ‘walk[ing] a tightrope between false binaries’. (72)

Lynn Johnston’s For Better or For Worse is interesting in that the characters are seen to age in something akin to real time, culminating with the wedding of a character who was a toddler when the strip began. Johnston grew up with an abusive mother, so For Better or For Worse can be read as an attempt to address/redress this, or even as a means of catharsis. As Kirtley points out, while the strip functions as a mix of soap opera tropes and social commentary, its initial focus tended to be issues pertaining to motherhood, and as such her chapter about it explores representations of this within the comic frame. For Better or For Worse often focused on important social issues and dealt over the years with the shift in gender roles and the expectations of its female characters, with the challenges of motherhood examined frankly, ‘moving beyond simple stereotypes of maternal perfection and binaries to present a messier, more authentic reality’. (105) In a way, these chapters present Cathy and For Better or For Worse as, if not companion pieces, then at least pioneering texts that complement and speak to each other.

In stark contrast to Guisewite and Johnston, Lynda Barry’s interests and aesthetic have always tended to be more rooted in a punk sensibility, and it is in this chapter that Kirtley’s study begins to move toward comics that are slightly more representative of contemporary feminist viewpoints.  The work presented in Barry’s collection Girls and Boys is text-heavy, aesthetically jarring, and features male and female characters who are equally unappealing. Barry herself has always been somewhat ambivalent about being labelled a feminist artist—though Kirtley is adamant that the label is an accurate one—but she does represent a punk counterpoint to the more conventional and traditional Cathy and For Better or For Worse. Her work also experiments with the form, adopting a punk DIY aesthetic ‘directly addressing the reader and inviting them to participate in dismantling common comics tropes … establish[ing] a connection and a community of participants immersed in punk principles’. (120) The strips’ refusal to address politics, feminist or otherwise, is in itself a political act, one engaged with the creation of authentic community and solidarity, and with ‘disrupted received wisdoms’. (135)

Kirtley identifies Nicole Hollander’s Sylvia as a modern, mainstream example of Menippean satire, one that argues for ‘a more radical form of feminism’. (136) Her analysis of the strip focuses on Hollander’s use of rhetoric, and the way it uses satire to pinpoint misogyny and patriarchy while the eponymous character acerbically positions ‘a particular strand of feminism as the only truly logical position’. (137) Kirtley explains that Hollander’s political views are steeped not only in feminism, but also the drive of her trade-unionist father, who encouraged her not to rely on others to fight battles when she could take up arms herself. Sylvia is cynical, complex, and linguistically rich; but most of all it is subversive: a nationally syndicated newspaper strip that uses its reach to lambast patriarchy, sexism, and stereotypes daily to a huge audience, and employs Menippean techniques to argue for radical feminist ideas. 

Dykes to Watch Out For, as Kirtley notes, tends to exist in the gigantic shadow of Fun Home, both within the academy and the culture at large. As a result, far more scholarship deals with the latter work, a deeply personal meditation on family relationships, sexual identity and what constitutes a happy or secure home. Dykes to Watch Out For is no less personal, in a way, but has a wider focus, documenting as it does the experiences of lesbian women of Alison Bechdel’s generation. The strip was first published in 1983, and so coincides with the overlapping of second and third wave feminist ideas. Importantly, the comic foregrounds LGBTQ+ issues, and does so at a time where visibility for such issues was rare indeed. Found family is a key component, as are questions of sexual and gender identity. Kirtley highlights these as examples of Aristotelian epieikeia, with diversity and flexibility representing building blocks for a stronger community than one built on monolithic inflexibility.

Structurally, Typical Girls resembles a journey through the attitudes of the past five decades, from the tentative toe-dipping and near-ambivalence of Cathy—and the society into which that strip was first born— to more modern strips such as Where I’m Coming From and Stone Soup, the focus of the final two chapters. Where I’m Coming From was the first nationally syndicated comic strip created by a female African American, Barbara Brandon-Croft. In the author’s words, the strip represented ‘a running social commentary on what it’s like to be a black woman in America’ (192), situating the strip squarely within third-wave discourse. Kirtley highlights a weekly edition of the strip in which an African American woman is upbraided and called a traitor by an unseen voice on the telephone for equating feminism with the struggle for racial equality, identifying it as a ‘call to remember our boundedness and our diversity’. (192) Kirtley also notes that critics of Where I’m Coming From have called it a ‘Black Cathy’ —a label Brandon-Croft, who is dismissive of Guisewite’s strip, bristles at—because both strips were both about and created by women, and dealt with issues of the everyday, but concludes that the strip’s importance and success lie in the fact that it ‘challenged stereotypes … establishing a presence, a situatedness that argued for a community marked by diversity’. (210) 

Stone Soup is arguably the perfect comic for Kirtley to conclude with, focusing as it does on a professional, Caucasian single mother, whose significant other—later husband—is black. Indeed, it is through the latter character, Phil, that Kirtley approaches the strip, hitting upon him during a comparison of comics appearing in The Oregonian on December 5th, 1984, and those appearing on the same date in 2014. This comparison revealed that neither comics section featured any LGBTQ+ characters, and that the only non-Caucasian to appear on either date was Phil. Meanwhile, of all the female characters, only Val Stone, Stone Soup’s protagonist, is actually seen to be working, as opposed to socialising or being a homemaker. (213-214)  In a way, both these characters are quietly revolutionary: Stone Soup does not pretend to be out to reinvent the wheel, or to be overtly political, and the strip’s creator Jan Eliot was at first somewhat reticent about her own feminist credentials, but it is the matter-of-factness of the characters’ situations that is important. And of course, as the strip progressed, Eliot made increasingly strident feminist statements which ‘encouraged the reader to come to a larger conclusion … that feminism is the natural and sound state of the world and the family’. (233)

In all, Typical Girls is an excellent overview of and rumination upon an aspect of comics that is often overlooked, and as Kirtley stresses is a baton that ought to be taken up by other scholars of both feminism and comics studies. The texts she chooses to examine are both important and telling: important because of the ways in which they reflect and speak back to the culture of the times in which they were produced and telling because they are so few and far-between. Kirtley’s comparison of 1984 and 2014 is actually chilling, because it shows how little has changed—for all the strides made, and for all the longevity the strips she includes here have shown, the default setting, in comics as in our society, still seems overwhelmingly white, male, and heteronormative. Kirtley, though, remains positive, concluding that in figures such as those featured in these comics, she perceives ‘connection and community, a wider world of women and the possibilities represented therein’. (234)