Meeting in the Archive: Commix and Collecting as Community

This paper examines the holdings of several archives that house women's and queer comix. It considers the logics of comix creation, distribution, and collection, and their relationship to the formation of communities. Situating its analysis in relation to the reparative turn in queer history and arguments about queer utopianism, the paper considers these comix, most of which were produced and purchased from the 1970s to the 1990s, against the often libertarian, and misogynist, and better-known, underground comix of that era by figures like Robert Crumb, Spain Rodriguez, and S. Clay Wilson. It asks what sorts of relationships we might discern between the contents of women's and queer comix and the communities they represented and contributed to, and how archives of those comix inflect our understanding of that shared and contested history.