“It’s challenging to be part of an industry where it’s still a novelty that women are cartoonists… Everyone deserves to see themselves reflected in the media they consume.”—Nicole J. Georges
Kristen Radtke from Buzzfeed has interviewed female comic artists to talk about how they depict their bodies in this male-dominated field.
Many of these women talked about showing bodies as they are, depicting their bodily functions to normalize them to their audience. Another artist, Ellen Forney, also admitted that she draws her body in such a way that depicts how she feels as it helps tackle with bipolar disorder.
This showcase provides a lot of commentary on how women’s bodies are neglected in comics, and shows that there so many ways to depict them respectfully.
Check out some of our favorites below or head on over to Buzzfeed to read the entire article.
“[Comics have] been part of a very emotional process of accepting what my body has been through in pursuit of imagined perfection, and in survival and recovery from abuse.”—Katie Green
“I look forward to the time when honest depictions of women’s bodies are a normal thing to look at, instead of some kind of statement.”—Anya Ulinich
“We need women’s bodies in our stories, having sex and getting our periods and eating food and doing whatever bodies do, so that the things our bodies do are normalized and present—so that boys don’t grow up thinking women are gross or whores or pigs or any other horrible epithet.”—Lucy Knisley
“I wanted to depict my bipolar moods in a visceral way — for myself and for the reader — so I drew myself loopy, stark, realistic, cartoony, abstracted, in ink, pencil, polished, sketchy… Embodying and externalizing my feelings in the self-portraits, when I really nailed them, was truly cathartic.”—Ellen Forney
“When I draw nudity, for the most part, I’m trying to make it commonplace, nothing out of the ordinary.”—Erika Moen
[via Buzzfeed]