Description

Tits & Clits: 1972-1987 edited by Joyce Farmer, Lyn Chevli, and Mary Fleener

Hardcover – Fantagraphics – Mar 2023 – 368 pages

Tits & Clits: 1972-1987 is a facsimile compilation of every issue of the groundbreaking underground comix, a feminist counterpoint — and riposte — to the male-dominated Zap Comix, featuring over two dozen pioneering female cartoonists, including Roberta Gregory, Krystine Kryttre, Lee Marrs, Carel Moiseiwitsch, Trina Robbins, Dori Seda, Leslie Sternbergh, Sharon Rudahl, and others.

Edited by Joyce Farmer and Lyn Chevli (with a final issue edited by cartoonist Mary Fleener), Tits & Clits featured Farmer and Chevli’s editorial independence from male-dominated social norms, as well as feminist peer pressure, with comics that satirized women’s experiences with so-called sexual liberation (an intimate politics which occasionally clashed with contemporaneous feminist attitudes about sex and sexuality) with stories about birth control, abortion, menstruation, masturbation, and more.

Also included is Pandora’s Box, another feminist comics anthology published between Tits & Clits #1 and 2, as well as Abortion Eve (1973), a solo comic by Joyce Farmer. An introductory essay by the book’s editor, Samantha Meier, provides context to Tits & Clits‘ place in the history of women’s cartooning.

Now, for the first time in half a century, a new generation of readers will be shocked, entertained, enlightened, and scandalized by the bold satirical cartoonists that comprised the band of sisters in Tits & Clits.