Tits & Clits: 1972-1987

Edited by Joyce Farmer, Lyn Chevli and Mary Fleener. Published by Fantagraphics. 

Hardcover, 368 pages, Colour and B&W, 2023 (originally published 1972-1987)

The groundbreaking, women-edited comics anthology that served as an antidote and rebuke to male-dominated underground comix is now collected in a single volume for the first time.

In 1972, underground cartoonists Joyce Farmer and Lyn Chevli produced Tits & Clits — 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.

A feminist answer to Zap, Tits & Clits quickly became an anthology showcase for other women cartoonists, featuring the work of Mary Fleener, Roberta Gregory, Krystine Kryttre, Lee Marrs, Carel Moiseiwitsch, Trina Robbins, Dori Seda, among others. Like other underground comix, Tits & Clits 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 Tits & Clits. In addition to reprinting the seven-issue run of the Tits & Clits 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 Tits & Clits’ place in the history of women’s cartooning by the book’s editor, Samantha Meier.