Before the Babe and After: Counting Women Cartoonists in the Underground Comix

Abstract

This year we celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of a remarkable publication, It Ain’t Me Babe, proclaimed by its creators as “the first women’s liberation comic” and “the world’s first all-women’s comic book.” Bearing the date July 1970, this was the collaborative product of seven female artists already active in the alternative feminist media and counterculture newspapers of the San Francisco Bay Area. Several of them belonged to a group called the Feminist Liberation Basement Press, which produced a tabloid newspaper that bore the same title as the comic book. It Ain’t Me Babe resembled in format the other underground “comix” sold in head shops, record stores, and independent booksellers