Since earliest times, Art has observed The Woman with fascination. I still remember reading books on prehistory that showed photos of small, engraved figurines of pregnant women or the amazing bust of Nefertiti in the section on Egyptian art. Art history is laden with paintings of naked women, beautiful women, mysterious women or everyday women who seduce every onlooker from their museum niche. The Venus of Velazquez's mirror, Goya's Maja Nude, the three graces of Rubens, Titian's Danae or Manet's Olympia are just some examples. I would also suggest more modern entries, such as Jeff Koons's series with porn star Cicciolina.

Too, popular literature is filled with young princesses, young orphan girls, cruel stepmothers, witches and perverse women of all kinds. In fairy tales, good has an innocent face and a childish figure, bad is dressed as an older woman. Many religions distrust us women and view us as sinners. From the beginning of the world we induce sin, we give birth with pain and we bleed. In the more extremist manifestations of some religions, we are obliged to cover our bodies up, to lock ourselves up in the home, to become invisible. There are cultures that question our intellectual capacity, don't allow us to learn to read, and there are even those who advocate for the mutilation of the clitoris as a necessary step for our integration into society. Other cultures, such as that found in much of the U.S., create laws protective of women, yet are nevertheless incapable of controlling the high index of domestic violence, rapes and murders perpetrated against women in these countries. We who live on this planet with men receive much less money than they do for the same work. Men treat us poorly: they abandon us, they revile us, they mutilate us, they rape us and they even kill us when we hold positions in their lives as girlfriends or wives. Nevertheless, art has, for centuries, been fascinated by our face, our body, the ways we look from our silence. Perhaps I am mistaken in using the plural and pretending that I am speaking from a space composed of all women. Nevertheless, I want to remind the reader that this article is not written by a man observing women but a woman doing so. Some of these women that I am observing are true, some are fictitious, but all of them enter into my essay.

My childhood was filled with comics. I learned to read at the age of 4 with Little Lulu. I was inspired by Lulu's ability to confront boys and find ways to join a club in which being a woman was counted against you from the start -- a club that reflected in its "women aren't allowed" sign the future limitations the majority of women would confront when they grew up. When I was 10 or 11, my heroes were two female characters created by men: Aleta, Prince Valiant's lady and Diana Palmer, the Phantom's eternal girlfriend. I was never convinced by superheroines with supernatural powers. For me, Aleta, the Queen of the Misty Isles, possessed all the characteristics that a 10-year-old girl could hope for. She was beautiful and intelligent; a queen who married a prince. In my readings, I assumed the roles that Aleta had as a romantic lover and model mother as something natural and proper for women. On the other hand, Diana Palmer, the Phantom's girlfriend, seemed to be another female character with great possibilities. To be the girlfriend of a mysterious and legendary man who lived in the heart of the jungle seemed to me to be the romantic extreme. These women were connected in my mind to the concept of eternal love, loyalty and family. And the women of my time period, no matter how liberal our education, were under a great deal of social and cultural pressure. We dreamed in secret of the possibility of finding our own Prince Charming, which in my case was Prince Valiant or, in his absence, the Phantom. However, the modern image of women posited in comics lacks many of the moral qualities of previous heroines. Perhaps it was adolescence that changed my perspective or maybe a couple of romantic disillusionments. What is certain is that P'Gell and the femme fatales of the Spirit world were my fictional mentors in the difficult stage of life that marked the transition from teen-age innocence to young skepticism.

I only had a real consciousness that there was a world of comics made for women in the mid-1990s when I came to the U.S. from Spain. I immediately took interest in the various titles. I bought Twisted Sisters, vol. 2 and Dyke Strippers (both from 1995), I perused historiographies on women's comics by Trina Robbins and I bought various issues of magazines like Action Girl, Girl Talk, Wimmen's Comix and Real Girl; magazines that I found hidden away in the various comic stores I frequented. I was drawn to the narrative constructions of childhood and adolescence of Phoebe Gloeckner and Debbie Drechsler, Carol Lay's one-minute stories, the intimate self-representation of Julie Doucet, Jessica Abel's everyday realism and the transgressive lesbianism of Diane DiMassa, to mention a few examples. When I was 20, I had graduated from the P'Gell School for Girls but at 30, I went in search of comic pieces dealing with women's sentiments as drawn by women. I was looking for familiar images; metaphors for my own existence.

A polemic ensues whenever women's anthologies or monographic issues of magazines are published, the question is invariably raised: Are women-only anthologies relevant anymore? Curiously enough, anthologies of superheroes, erotic stories or romantic poets are rarely questioned about chosen themes (although the criteria used to select the individual pieces included is often questioned). Nevertheless, there are those who feel discomfort on seeing the label "Womens' " on the cover of an anthology. Personally, I think it is a problem of ignorance that leads to this rejection. In the world of comics, the true integration of women has been a relatively recent phenomenon, thanks in part to the effort of pioneers such as Mary Fleener, Diane Noomin, Aline Kominsky, Roberta Gregory, Trina Robbins and Phoebe Gloeckner, who over the course of several decades have tried to include and create dialogue over their differences in the predominantly masculine universe of comics. What implication has the efforts of these female pioneers to integrate women into the field of comics really had? Can the resultant feminine representative space in comics be called "feminism?" I would like to vindicate feminism as something both necessary and healthy within society and as a corollary, within the world of comics.

To understand in broad strokes why feminism has arisen in Western culture, one must turn to the years of the French Revolution, at the end of the 18th century, and to the years following it in the beginning of 19th-century Europe. The thinking that animated all such revolutionary discourse was the claim for individual political rights. Ideas such as liberty, equality and fraternity were on the lips of all. However, before the French Revolution, there existed an important production of essays (going back to the 15th century) whose content could be defined as feminist. They form a line of thinking called "The Women's Complaint" and led to books and essays that tried to establish women's interests and agendae. They contend that the subordination of women was due to social and cultural reasons and not (as contemporaries believed) to women's natural biological inferiority. It was in the years of the French Revolution that women's voices began to be heard with greater force, even though the role of women had already been decisive in popular mobilizations and social conflicts preceding industrialization. Women continued to defend their collective interests at all costs and to organize protests against increased food prices. But in the revolutionary years, more complaints of a feminist nature joined the chorus of complaints, such as the struggle for political rights by middle- (and lower-) class women. Bit by bit, there appeared various collective declarations that claim the rights of women to engage in politics. Olympe de Gouges, for example, published the Declaration of the Rights of the Woman and Lady Citizen in 1791 (a text adapted from Rousseau's Social Contract and the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man). In this declaration, there is a petition for women's emancipation at birth and it is herein demanded that women have the same rights as men. This tract also criticized the Revolution for not having recognized the political rights of women, and therefore the French Revolution's "universalism" was such in name only. All the feminist efforts of that epoch were repressed by the Jacobins; Olimpe de Gouges was guillotined in 1793. Even worse, by the start of the 19th century, the Napoleonic Code erased all the advances that French women had made to that point and created harsh laws that clearly established the place of women as the home. Nevertheless, women did not cede, and in all of the revolutions that took place in France throughout the 19th century (1830, 1848 and 1871), women would try to attain their political rights, improve their working conditions and gain access to education. Activist women also appeared in the Paris Commune of 1871, making an attempt to reconcile feminist and workers' interests. Normally in the U.S., British feminism is better known than the French, and one sees the name of Mary Wollstonecraft, who wrote the Vindication of Women's Rights in 1792. Her work was a denunciation of the situation of women who were condemned to being "home-bound angels" and restricted to the place of the family. Wollstonecraft demanded, among many other things, women's independence and access to education.

Why have I mentioned these women in an article on women and comics? I think that understanding the agenda of social and political claims of the last centuries will lead to helping people respect the word feminism and feminists (female and male) who in turn attempt to grant a new meaning to the word "woman." The U.S. is a country of amazing diversity, but remains embroiled (as do many other countries) in social problems of enormous magnitude: great social inequality, racism, discrimination and lack of environmental commitment, for example. The comic is a space for cultural expression that absorbs these societal dramas and re-writes and re-interprets them, as do both literature and movies. The well-known world of superheroes, for example, describes superheroes fighting supervillains in cities full of metaphors that evoke the real drama of many American cities. Even the science-fiction comic, where there may no longer be cities and scenes are set on distant planets inhabited by unimaginable entities, we can recognize the basic codes of good and evil that shape our culture, and see the critical or condescending tone of authors depending on their ideological position.

For example, in the introduction to the first volume of Twisted Sisters, creator and anthologist Diane Noomin explains how the name of her anthology came from an underground comic she created with Aline Kominsky in 1976, which was a type of response (one she defines as "politically incorrect") to a struggle that was ongoing in San Francisco, the headquarters of a collective group called Wimmen's Comix (who put out an anthology of the same name). This reference to the sociopolitical milieu of the 1970s was quite appropriate. From its first volume, published in 1972, Wimmen's Comix offered their readers a feminist and quite radical agenda.

For example, the Patricia Moodian cover made numerous social and political references; in the upper left margin (where the traditional comic imprint is usually found) one sees a closed fist with the words "workers-united-cartoon." This allusion to leftist thinking, that invoked the concepts of International Communism and the proletarian struggle, denoted the connections made between graphic feminism and the sociopolitical problems of the period. A small caption alludes to the themes to be covered in this comic: "Inside This Issue: Sex, Revelation, Psychotic Adventure and more...." On the cover, an attractive woman wearing lots of make-up, drawn in the style of traditional romantic comic strips, is kissing a man. At a distance, another (somewhat untraditionally drawn) woman is thinking, "Except for being fat, ugly, pimple-faced, bad-tempered and selfish, you'd think he'd see I'm a much better choice!" This scene has many possible interpretations. On one hand, there is the tension between the classical canon of drawing women and new ways of representing them. On the other, there is a reaction to the psychological and aesthetic submission of women, or even simply a parody of reality.

Aline Kominsky tells in this issue the story of "Goldie, A Neurotic Woman." The title plays with the clichˇd notion associating women with certain types of mental disorders, such as neurosis or hysteria. The comic is narrated in the first-person by Goldie, a character who relates the different stages of her life, difficulties with puberty, sex and relations with men. The comic concludes when the protagonist explains that she realizes that she doesn't have to spend her life "trying to please other people," and that she can live her life as she sees fit. The next story, by Lora Fountain, is called "A Teenage Abortion." Also told through first-person narrative, this story deals with the difficult perspective of a teenage woman who becomes pregnant, is abandoned by her boyfriend and who undergoes an abortion. There is also a strip by Trina Robbins who discusses the story of Sandy, a character who realizes she is a lesbian. In the last frame, Trina draws herself drawing the strip and speaking to her readers, introducing herself as the artist and telling them that what they just read was a "true-life comic," in which she took some poetic license in narrating the story of her friend Sally.

In the last few decades, new historical, discursive, analytical, artistic, creative and theoretical approaches have been filling the spaces left by the past. In some universities, for example, one can study courses based on themes of race, ethnicity, cultural representation and gender and sexuality.

Departments of Black Studies, Women's Studies and Cultural Studies have been opened and in libraries new shelf space is slowly opened for traditional literature to share room with comics. Those "voiceless" individuals (minorities, women), spaces, themes (e.g. comics as cultural representation), and objects (e.g. comics books) have now begun to "have a voice." History is being rewritten from its margins, so that now one can write a thesis on slaves who worked on Southern plantations in an attempt reconstruct the slave's space and experience or on women in the 19th century from the repressive space of the house; one can even write a thesis about comics. The feminine comics genre as created by women has formed a new space in the history of comics, just as the voices of Olympe de Gouges and Mary Wollstonecraft were crucial in articulating a feminine socio-political desire in a world of men at the end of the 18th century, when almost no man could even imagine a woman as being equal to himself. Women's comics have proclaimed for themselves an active and conscious space of self-representation since the middle of the 1970s, offering previously unknown themes for readers who were used to seeing women as comic-strip characters, but not as creative graphical and narrative voices.

When I claim a space for women's comics, I don't intend at all to demean the value of men's comics. What I am aiming for is the natural and unprejudiced recognition that will widen the thematical canon of comics and allow those written by women to enter more thoroughly, more easily, in greater quantities and to wider recognition and acceptance. The first feminists who demanded political recognition and the right to educate women did not want to deny these rights to men, but rather they sought to open the field for women and their rights to education, break the mute and marginal barriers of the home, and allow women to enter the public space while simultaneously increasing the potentials of this public space for all. Perhaps what I am writing seems obvious, but machismo and discrimination is the order of the day throughout the world, and the comics milieu is not inviolate. Some readers might not want to appreciate the narrative and aesthetic possibilities of comics written and drawn by women, or might only see superficial aspects that connect it with the underground, and therefore grant them some leeway.

Nevertheless, from my point of view, women's underground comics are quite different from men's, since their expressive coordinates were developed with respect to other problems, as will be outlined below. Even though they might share a black-and-white format and have a similar design, their preoccupations and the use of a testimonial and autobiographical formats show great differences. Take a moment and try to think of what things you have found in women's comics that you have not read in other comics. You will see that many show a dynamic narration tied to intimacy. It is not the underground men's comic that confesses passions and uses desire and consummation to construct an intercourse under the image of a mythical woman. Women's writing gives you a vision of their own reality and aesthetic perspective, key sexual and erotic moments, intellectual, existential and ideological yearnings. The anthologies of Diane Noomin, Twisted Sisters and Twisted Sisters vol. 2, are undisputable examples of the quality and influence of women's comics, and give us clues as to their geneology of names and themes. In these works made by women you can find a copious amount of first-personal and autobiographical material.

Many explicitly feminine topics are discussed, including menstruation, a female autobiographical concern over pregnancy, the desire to attain a perfect body in order to please men and childhood traumas entailing domestic and sexual abuses. Other noteworthy aspects include female masturbation and the confrontation of religious repression, points that coincide with men's underground topics of male masturbation and religious shame. A comic such as Phoebe Gloeckner's "Minnie's 3rd Love" (1994) describes vulnerable childhoods. It show the face of an America that humilliates and destroys the innocence of young girls. Set in the 1970s, it narrates the story of Minnie and Tabitha. Tabitha is a teen-ager who has been a junkie from the age of 12 onward, who has had to prostitute herself to survive. Tabitha's story is chilling; her own mother was a heroin addict who was so unprincipled as to make her daughter work in pornos as a child. For her part, Minnie is being manipulated by her mother's boyfriend, who wishes to have sex with her, and thus makes her feel insecure and miserable. Minnie endures through this adolescent hell and 18 years later finds Tabitha on a street corner. She is filthy, begging for change and signs of an advanced disease (probably AIDS) shows on her face. No reader with any sensitivity can read this comic and remain unaffected. This comic highlights a series of problems that are not confined to the fictional realms of comic book pages. What is the story of a teen-ager who must resort to prostitution? How many of these girls are doing so since they know no other lifestyle or are addicted to drugs? How can a youth who is sexually abused by her mother's boyfriend remake her life? The women writers of the 1970s opened a space for themes that show active femininity in all its dimensions, from their sexual experiences to their most intimate anguish. In their works one can see new codes that men and women learn to decipher.

Of course, all these topics could be discussed by men. The 1980s provide fantastic examples like the Hernandez Brothers' comics. Yet women's comics arise in the 1970s and are consolidated with an aesthetic and dialectic of their own. I refer to these general characteristics in the comic that exist due to the fact that their creators are women. It is similar to Picasso's fascination with African masks. Pablo Picasso and other contemporary artists learned from these cultural objects and incorporated elements from them into their own paintings. When one reads works like Doucet's, one is not following a story of women who live like those drawn by the Hernandez Brothers or Dan Clowes. One is inundated by torrents of sentiment, anguish and vulnerability that are narrated in a way that is not bound by year-long plotlines. The world that Julie Doucet creates, for example, seems to have no windows or doors. It is sealed away, and it is this hermeticism (so similar to the graphic expression of Frida Kahlo) that makes us uneasy upon viewing it. In the end, it matters not exactly which boyfriend Julie is dumping this time, what fascinates is her ability to remain solitary and indestructible on the inside.

Perhaps in the future, new women artists will decide not to cultivate a thematic comic space like the one I have just defined, and there will be men influenced by this type of women's comic (as in fact there are, above all in the field of independent autobiographical comics). Art and literature abound with aesthetic currents, some develop over history (such as Romanticism, which preceded literary Realism and Naturalism), others live side-by-side (as do abstract, figurative and photographic art). In comics, the women's movement exists and thrives alongside other styles such as underground, superhero, science-fiction and alternative comics. It is only natural that readers have anthologies and monographs where they can find the works of these women who have provided new perspectives, narratives and styles yet another chapter in the 20th-century comic. Where will this genre be in the next century? Will they tell stories similar to men's comics? Will drawing styles return to homogeneity?

Perhaps in this new century, the women's comic along the lines I have described here will slowly cease to exist. The inner world of women might have an opportunity to form a dialogue with a more just and respectful society, one I believe remains to be built. Perhaps the reality of these new women will be less painful and female artists of the future will feel no special need to express themselves using this personal space that they evoke to save themselves from the repressive world that surrounds them. But shouldn't it be the women, the creators, who decide this? Meanwhile, we readers should celebrate all that we have learned and enjoyed from their works.