Reviews for From Girls to Grrrlz: A History of Women's Comics from Teens to Zines

The average rating for From Girls to Grrrlz: A History of Women's Comics from Teens to Zines based on 2 reviews is 2 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-01-27 00:00:00 Zach Harris A decent overview, but outdated (it's now 17 years after the pub date). Robbins doesn't discuss issues of race at all, and makes a lot of generalized statements about women's issues. It's cursory, and not nearly critical enough. A skimable history of "comics for girls" (she doesn't discuss girls in superhero comics at all, and basically claims that girls don't read those...) This book should probably be updated/republished as a revised edition with some contemporary knowledge and more attention to issues of intersectionality. Or maybe someone else needs to publish a new history of women and comics.

Review # 2 was written on 2009-07-10 00:00:00 Laurie Cobler I wanted to like this a lot more than I do. Essentially, it's written for a lay audience, so it doesn't contain anywhere near as much info as I want. It's a skimming history. For one thing, I want more and longer reprints of comics to go along with the commentary. Reprinted pages would be far more effective than her text synopses of comics; how can you fully discuss comics as an art without plenty of them? Robbins obviously knows that most of these comics are rare, since 1. duh, older comics Are rare and 2. she spends some time discussing how few women even know contemporary independent comics even exist; why isn't she presenting them far more obviously? Probably there were rights issues, plus financial negotiations concerning how many pages of color they could afford to print. So, realistically, this may have been a difficult task, but it's still a flaw. Then I want the commentary to be more in-depth, discussing political implications in more detail and making more connections to other groundbreaking feminist arts. The info Robbins presents is good, but there just isn't enough of it.