Supergrrrl Adventure Comix #1

supergrrrlcomix@gmail.com

I used to wonder where comics artists came from and why one day you'd pick up an issue or a graphic novel and find this amazing artist that you'd never heard of before. Eventually I realized that these people had been drawing for years, putting stuff online, publishing it in zines, and going to cons. It was really just the fact that I lived somewhere pretty damn isolated that stopped me from realizing this.

What this means is that there are tons of work by creators you love that you'll probably never see (the awesome cover to this issue of Supergrrrl Aventure Comix is by Ross Campbell). It also means that when you read minicomics (or indeed webcomics) you can try to figure out who's going to rise up and become well known amongst comics fans.

Supergrrrl Adventure Comix (SAC) starts off with a comic by Rachel Edidin and (friend of 365 Zines) Jen Vaughn. The comic is about a hip and trendy city that has been gentrified into horrible yuppiness. It features journalists trying to prevent police brutality, references to Food Not Bombs, people fighting against a corrupt, corporatist society, and a robot. Based on this comic it's no wonder I've become friends with Vaughn, I mean the only other thing it needs is a dinosaur.

Vaughn's art is a little bit uneven here, and while I like quite a lot of the panels, there are some that I don't think work too well. Still, it is a couple of years old so it's unfair to judge her on art from the past. At the least I do want to know if part two of the story ever came out.

After that there's a pretty decent short story by Alex Wilson that seems like part of a much bigger world, a good piece on sexism in the comics industry (and how to fight it) by Mariah McCourt, an amusing poem by Kate Fitzsimmons ("Listen, please do not tell me / You were a priestess of Atlantis"), and a bunch of other stuff.

And that's the one major failing of Supergrrrl Adventure Comix: most of it isn't actually comics. I'm not insulting the poetry, prose, and non-fiction pieces included in here (some of them are quite good!), but I guess I expected the whole thing to be comics since the word (or a derivative at least) is in the title.