History
Wimmen's Comix debuted a few years after the publication of the 1970 one-shot (also published by Last Gasp) It Ain't Me Babe Comics, the first American comic book entirely produced by women, and put together by Trina Robbins, the most prolific and influential of the women cartoonists in the underground scene. (It Ain't Me Babe was a feminist newspaper in Berkeley, California.) Many of the creators from the It Ain't Me Babe comic went on to contribute to Wimmen's Comix.
Originally, the group behind Wimmen's Comix was not an official collective, but rather a few women artists who came together with a common interest to create at least one comic that women could get paid to be in, in a male-dominated comix culture. The first issue was edited by musician and artist Patricia Moodian. Later issues (17 total in 20 years) were edited by a different editor, or different editors who shared the job.
In 1975, regular contributors Aline Kominsky-Crumb and Diane Noomin had a falling out with Robbins and other members of the collective, leaving to start their own title, Twisted Sisters. (Kominsky-Crumb has later claimed that a large part of her break with the Wimmen's Comix group was over feminist issues, and specifically over her relationship with Robert Crumb, whom Robbins particularly disliked.) Many Wimmen's Comix' contributors, including Aline Kominsky-Crumb, Penny Van Horn, Carol Tyler, M.K. Brown, Diane Noomin, Phoebe Gloeckner, Carol Lay, Caryn Leschen, Leslie Sternbergh, Dori Seda, Mary Fleener, and Krystine Kryttre, subsequently appeared in Twisted Sisters: A Collection of Bad Girl Art (Viking Penguin) and Twisted Sisters: Drawing the Line (Kitchen Sink Press), both edited by Noomin.
In 1992, for issue #17, the title of the comic was changed to Wimmin's Comix following a discussion over the gender politics of words containing "man" or "men" (see womyn). This, and other political conflicts within the by then what might be termed as a collective, along with financial difficulties and the increasing availability of other venues for independent female cartoonists, led to the end of the series after that issue.
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