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Post by arecomicsevengood on Aug 7, 2022 4:12:07 GMT
Tom Herpich's recent article "Outbox" at TCJ called attention to Roberta Gregory's series Artistic Licentiousness being charming. I've read an issue now and liked it pretty well. I would say it holds up. She's better known for Naughty Bits, which was long-running at the time I got into alternative comics, but the vibe it promised didn't appeal to me (though I do like the covers now). Looking online I see she also did some graphic novels in the late eighties called "Winging It" which seems to be a metaphysical thing about someone who's committed suicide. She also had stuff in underground anthologies like Gay Comix and Wimmen's Comix. Anybody have opinions on this stuff?
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Post by dominocorp on Aug 7, 2022 5:11:20 GMT
I'm surprised I don't see her work out in the wild more, because I've always wanted to (at the very least) flip through it but I don't think I've ever seen a copy of her stuff around. Which probably means its very good, people aren't letting go of those copies. When I was getting into alternative comics I looked at the Fantagraphics print catalog a lot to try to figure things out and her work was very prominent in that, but maybe it was also fading away at that precise moment..
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Post by manoopuesta on Aug 7, 2022 16:56:09 GMT
I'm surprised I don't see her work out in the wild more, because I've always wanted to (at the very least) flip through it but I don't think I've ever seen a copy of her stuff around. Which probably means its very good, people aren't letting go of those copies. When I was getting into alternative comics I looked at the Fantagraphics print catalog a lot to try to figure things out and her work was very prominent in that, but maybe it was also fading away at that precise moment.. That's odd. I've bought some issues of Naughty Bits in a local store in Finland so I imagined it would be easier then to find her work in the US.
I found her comics first unappealing because her art style was not my thing at that moment but after reading over several issues I grew fond of the characters. She is pretty good at character development I think, also storytelling. I may have to look for those other series, I had no idea she had more things apart from Bitchy Bitch and short stories here and there in anthologies.
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Post by arecomicsevengood on Aug 8, 2022 3:05:12 GMT
Turns out she's got a website (from 2014) where you can order assorted stuff like old issues of Naughty Bits. mail.robertagregory.com/Robertagregory/Buy_Robertas_Books.html Not sure if the info's still good but fans of old websites will enjoy clicking around. She says she gave a copy of her comic Winging It to Moebius and he liked it!
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Post by whitecomics on Aug 9, 2022 0:32:39 GMT
Huh, I've also come across Naughty Bits issues in back issue bins pretty frequently. I've picked up a few mostly because I find her line very compelling, but I can't say I have a strong impression beyond that. I should dig out the issues again, not sure I read any of them front-to-back because I found the often dense text a bit off-putting. She strikes me as significantly underdiscussed relative to most of her 90s altcomics peers, especially given her output (40 issues alone is impressive!).
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Post by arecomicsevengood on Aug 13, 2022 5:09:57 GMT
Alright, got this early book Winging It, and while I haven't really dug into the reading experience yet I did want to talk about one aspect of it. Relevant to conversations about floppies happening in other threads is that, while one issue was printed as a comic book, Gregory then abandoned that idea to do a book that collects like six issues worth of material. (A second book of similar dimensions was planned but it took a while for that to come out.) The book has a letters column in the back, consisting of people who read the first issue, and cartoonist peers who read xeroxes of the first two issues and are giving feedback. Trina Robbins, Howard Cruse, and Don Simpson, who's like "putting a suggested for mature readers label on a comic reduces the sales." They are giving feedback and I guess some of that feedback led to changes between early versions and what's in the book. Interesting to read that stuff in a book format! Also kinda wild. It makes sense that the feedback you get from your peers that's potentially constructive is going to couched in terms of commercial considerations, but even that makes more sense in terms of thirty-four years ago, when there were more readers around. In this era, Gregory would've been in undergrounds before but this is her doing a sensitive metaphysical fantasy thing, sorta proto-Vertigo but in a moment where Elfquest is the going comparison.
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