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| Diane Noomin | |
Diane Noomin, "who was a pioneer of feminist underground comics in the 1970s and whose comic book Twisted Sisters, a collaboration with her fellow artist Aline Kominsky-Crumb, has been a touchstone for generations of female cartoonists," died September 1, the New York Times reported. She was 75. Noomin's best-known creation "was DiDi Glitz--a curvy, big-haired, leopard-print-loving, fishnet-stocking-and-miniskirt-wearing and hard-drinking single mother. DiDi, whose world was filled with bad sex, sleazy men, cocktails and extravagant decorating, was a sendup of a certain kind of suburban stock character, but she was rendered with both affection and compassion."
"Diane treated her comics as a kind of exorcism," said her husband, cartoonist Bill Griffith (creator of Zippy the Pinhead). "There were things inside her that had to get out. DiDi was an amalgam of all the parents, all the housewives in Canarsie when she was growing up, the person she was afraid she might become, so in order to deal with that she took control.... It became very complex. Not only did she exorcise this character, she also inhabited her. That's why DiDi is such a powerful character. Diane wasn't interested in making fun of her; she wanted to deeply explore who she was."
In the early 1970s, Noomin had been making sculptures and drawings when she arrived in San Francisco. She and Kominsky-Crumb (then Aline Kominsky) met at a party, and when Kominsky-Crumb saw Noomin's sketchbook, she invited her to a meeting of female artists who were putting together the first issue of Wimmen's Comix. The group was a feminist collective trying to make their own comics in the deeply male underground genre, whose stars included Robert Crumb, Art Spiegelman and Griffith. Wimmen's Comix "would go on to be the longest-running female underground comic, publishing 17 issues from 1972 to 1992," the Times noted.
"It was revolutionary, expressive, personal and feminist, and open to a range of experience beyond what you would see in the New Yorker," said comics historian Brian Doherty. "It was a product of its times, and run like a feminist consciousness-raising project, and there were lots of sisterly meetings, which drove Diane and Aline crazy." Noomin and Kominsky-Crumb were also dating the enemy--their already famous future husbands Griffith and Crumb, respectively.
Twisted Sisters Comics, a 36-page publication released in 1976 and featuring Noomin's DiDi and Kominsky-Crumb's alter ego, "the Bunch," was their retort to what Noomin called the rigid feminism of Wimmen's Comix (though in later decades she would contribute more of her work to that publication and even edit it), the Times noted.
Noomin also edited and contributed to many cartoon collections, including Lemme Outa Here: Growing Up Inside the American Dream (1978). She revived the name Twisted Sisters in 1991 for an anthology of female cartoonists, Twisted Sisters: A Collection of Bad Girl Art.
Although the personal was always political for Noomin, the Times wrote that she "wasn't moved to make overtly political work until the run-up to the 2016 presidential election and the #MeToo movement. For Drawing Power: Women's Stories of Sexual Violence, Harassment, and Survival, she invited more than 60 artists of different races, nationalities, sexuality and ages to contribute. Published in 2019, the book was dedicated to Anita Hill."