T*Ts & Cl*Ts 1972-1987 HC (MR)

The groundbreaking, women-edited comics anthology that served as an antidote and rebuke tomale-dominated underground comix is now collected in a single volume for the first time. In 1972, underground cartoonists Joyce Farmer and Lyn Chevli produced T*ts & Cl*ts - a funny, rowdy, raucous underground comix series about female sexuality that one reviewer described as "the ultimate in vaginal politics" - and became the first American women ever credited with writing, drawing, and publishing their own comic books.

T*ts & Cl*ts quickly became an anthology showcase for other women cartoonists, a feminist answer to Zap, and featured the work of Mary Fleener, Roberta Gregory, Krystine Kryttre, Lee Marrs, Carel Moiseiwitsch, Trina Robbins, Dori Seda, among others. Like other underground comix, T*ts & Cl*ts leaned into being lewd in order to satirize women's experiences with so-called sexual liberation. Featuring stories about birth control, abortion, menstruation, masturbation, and more, Tits & Clits featured intimate politics which occasionally clashed with contemporaneous feminist concepts about sex and sexuality. As Chevli put it: their work had something to offend everyone. (In 1973, conservative legal authorities in Orange County deemed their work pornographic and even threatened the two editors with arrest on obscenity charges.)

Now, for the first time in half a century, a new generation of readers will be shocked, entertained, enlightened, and scandalized by the bold satirical cartoonists that comprised the band of sisters in T*ts & Cl*ts. In addition to reprinting the seven-issue run of the T*ts & Cl*ts series, this collection also includes in their entirety two classic solo comics from 1972 written and drawn by Farmer and Chevli- Abortion Eve and Pandora's Box. Also included is an introductory essay providing context to T*ts & Cl*ts' place in the history of women's cartooning by the book's editor, Samantha Meier.