Women Comics Authors in France and Belgium Before the 1970s: Making Them Invisible

The very masculine history of the comics world is often held to account for the small proportion of women among comics authors nowadays. However, when examining the Franco-Belgian illustrated magazines of the 1950s and 1960s, I discovered that 7% of authors were women, some of whom had started to wo...

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Dettagli Bibliografici
Pubblicato in:URI:https://journals.openedition.org/rrca,
Autore principale: Kohn, Jessica
Natura: Article ou chapitre numérique
Lingua:Anglais
Pubblicazione: Revue de recherche en civilisation américaine 2017
Soggetti:
Accesso online:Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM
Descrizione
Riassunto:The very masculine history of the comics world is often held to account for the small proportion of women among comics authors nowadays. However, when examining the Franco-Belgian illustrated magazines of the 1950s and 1960s, I discovered that 7% of authors were women, some of whom had started to work in the field in the 1930s. Hence, the history of comics has thus far ignored an entire population of authors who, though they were a minority, were nonetheless active. In this article, I attempt to retrieve the names and the careers of these post-war women comics authors, in order to understand the process of invisibilization they underwent, which consisted mainly in restricting them to children’s illustrations. This context made it difficult to promote the emergence of a women's network and reference system in the world of Franco-Belgian comics.