Prof. Nicholas Sammond shares the research he conducted during his Research and Study Leave.
Combining archival research with in-depth interviews with artists, publishers, and distributors, this short essay lays the groundwork for understanding the emergence of women’s underground comics in the 1970s as grounded in the application of feminist consciousness-raising praxis, with the support of a network of women-owned businesses and community organizations. This ‘alternative alternative history,’ frees the history of women’s comics from a genealogy rooted solely in a reaction to the misogyny of mainstream underground comix, to locate it in an emergent women’s movement, and as moving beyond the left-libertarianism that defined the underground comix industry.