Sugar, Spice, and the Not So Nice – Comics Picturing Girlhood, a conference, and an edited volume

I work as a postdoctoral researcher studying comics, childhood and European culture at Ghent University on the ERC project COMICS. I recall a conversation-- during one of our team lunches in 2020,--with Dona Pursall (co-editor of the book) about the lack of in-depth studies of the ways in which girls were represented in comics, about girl readership, and about stereotypes in the comics industry and production. After this conversation, the idea of a conference and edited volume on girls and comics slowly grew. In April 2021, we organised the symposium with the much-valued help of Mel Gibson, Julia Round, and Joe Sutliff Sanders, three scholars who have been crucial to our academic Bildung.

In search of an appropriate image for the poster, I ended up commissioning an image from Valentine Gallardo, a French comics artist living in Belgium. Valentine’s work was introduced to me by my colleague Benoît Crucifix. Pendant que le loup n’y est pas, one of her first comics, drawn together with Mathilde Van Gheluwe, immerses the reader in 1990s Belgium, and explores the friendship, fears and fantasies of two young girls against the background of the Dutroux case. Benoît and I had the privilege of interviewing the artists, Valentine Gallardo and Mathilde Van Gheluwe, and you can watch it here.

The resulting image shows a girl of colour ‘trapped’ in Het Pand, a historical building in the middle of medieval Ghent where we were originally planning to situate the symposium. We wanted to literally put girlhood in the centre of scholarly conversation. But the girl, her posture and size query many of our prejudices about ‘girls’. Even though she is dressed in pink and surrounded by more or less stereotypical toys supposedly pandering to her wishes, her actions 'upset’ our (gendered) expectations. Moreover, the fact that she is literally larger than the ancient constructions that surround her and is facing away from the spectator instead of searching for recognition and offering a pleasurable smile to the viewer, suggests that girlhood outgrows, escapes and evolves beyond what adult scholars can claim to understand about it.

The eventual international symposium, Sugar, Spice and the Not So Nice, held at the end of April 2021, was moved online as Belgium was still experiencing COVID-related lockdowns. Nevertheless, many speakers brought papers that were clearly dear to them and many attended the complete two-day event (download program here). There were lively discussions and genuine interest in papers, and many exchanges were posted on our Padlet.

After the conference we started to look for an editor, which we found in the Leuven University Press’s series on European comics and graphic novels. Thanks to the ERC project on which both Dona and I are working, and KULeuven the resulting edited volume could be published open access and is free to download from here. The inclusivity that open access publishing allows for is extremely valuable to extend scholarship on comics to those who cannot benefit from expensive subscriptions within academia.

2021 was a year in which more edited, girlhood-related studies of comics surfaced. The Spanish Asociación Cultural Tebeosfera (ACyT) published a third volume in their collection on Comics History, titled Tebeos. Historietas Para Chicas [Comics, Strips for Girls]. In the prologue to the volume, Ana Merino stresses the need for comics history to recuperate and analyse Franquist- and democratic-era comics for girls, their graphic and narrative matter, and the social dynamics and expectations they created [1]. She also signals that there is more work to be done on women in the comics industry, in the footsteps of scholars such as Elisa McCausland and, I would like to add, Jessica Kohn, Julia Round, Mel Gibson, Joan Ormrod, Marie-Ève Thérenty, Giulio C. Cuccolini and many more. But most importantly, Merino’s prologue hints at the sense of shame that girls' comics generate(d) among their readers (whether of the intended gender or age category or not). Even if “[c]omic books for girls were the driving force behind the imagination of millions of women in the last century, and of quite a few men who read them in secret, as amused by their intrigues and characters as their female readers […] female readers seem not yet to have dared to publicly acknowledge their fascination. As if to say, "I loved comics for girls" implied a belittling because of the implicit prejudices associated with the idea of comics as infantile or because of the agendas of feminine construction within each proposal.[2]” Sugar, Spice, and the Not So Nice underscores this as Mel Gibson’s autoethnographical work and Martha Newbigging’s self-investigation of queerness debunk these labels and address this shame and secrecy.

Instead of offering a chronological account of girl comics published in one cultural area or researching a specific genre (such as Michelle Ann Abate’s Funny Girls from 2019), Sugar, Spice, and the Not So Nice bundles together international case studies on an array of genres. The book programmatically reaches further than traditional scholarship to include a discussion with two gender scholars on the representation of girls in the Flemish familiestrip Jommeke, and three graphic essays on the subjects of disability, queerness, and graphic art during Nazism. Future international conferences and collaborations, I am sure, will add to the exciting subject of girlhood and comics.

NOTES

[1] Ana Merino in Barrero, Manuel, et al. Tebeos: historietas para chicas. Asociación Cultural Tebeosfera, 2021, p. 9.

[2] My translation of: “Los tebeos para chicas fueron el motor de la imaginación de millones de mujeres del siglo pasado, y de bastantes hombres que los leían a escondidads tan entretenidos por sus intrigas y personajes como su compañeras lectoras […] las lectoras parece que no se han atrevido todavía a reconocer públicamente su fascinación. Como si decir, "me encantaban los tebeos para chicas" implicara un desmerecimiento por los prejuicios implícitos que hay asociados a la idea de los cómics como espacio para la ingancia o las agendas de construcción femenina dentro de cada propuesta.” Ana Merino in Barrero, Manuel, op.cit., pp. 11-12.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Eva Van de Wiele defended her PhD “Building a Glocalised Serial for children” in September 2022 and is now working on a one-year postdoctoral project on the Alain Van Passen Collection of Ghent University (Oct 2022-Sep 2023). She researches the scripting of child readers in special DIY and game sections of French-language children’s comics magazines from the 1930s to the 1960s. She is an editorial member of Comicalités, co-teaches comics history at LUCA School of Arts Brussels, is a member of iCOnMICs and of GruppoSnIF, an early-career-research group on Italian comics and publishes on comics on pulpdeluxe.be and 9ekunst.nl.