Comics are known to be essential

Today 01:39

More than one reader of this column will probably be surprised to know that there are hundreds of Argentine comics published every year, disseminated in many ways, and accessible through websites, at festivals or in bookstores. We have an uninterrupted history of ninth art production in this country, and it is a very rich, strong and diverse tradition. A sea of ​​pulp, covers and copies. In that sea there are ups and downs, and the waves create mirages, creating illusions that condense into statements. Statements (or, at best, questions) that assume absence. Asking about the role of female authors in comics is like asking about “the role of women in rock music”: it is an indicator of disappearances and appears when there is no accessible information. When talking about the authors of comic strips and comic strip humor, two or three names are usually mentioned, when there are more than a hundred. Almost a hundred years are covered by our digital archive of comics and comic strip authors “Nosotras Contamos” and collects, publishes and restores the names of cartoonists, screenwriters and authors of this language in Argentina, from the beginning of the twentieth century until today.

This living archive was born in this sea of ​​vignettes, with the impetus of Mariela Acevedo; Researcher, editor, screenwriter and feminist activist. In 2018, she approached us to be part of an artistic research project. She didn’t know it, but those first exchanges were about to change our lives and our ways of seeing ourselves as cartoonists. Today this project is Feminism Illustrated and its digital archive. Genealogy, the autoethnography that allows us to recognize ourselves as authors and gives us a space to see. The selected fragmentation periods do not refer to decades, but rather to the different forms of creativity, production, circulation and consumption that have been and continue to exist in comics in our country. Within its multiple trajectories, we propose thematic axes, through which we can amplify intergenerational conversations between works by the same authors. There is no longer just one among many, but we are also many. In 2025, thanks to the Orillas Nuevas/Nouveaux Rivages/programme, we were able to translate our sample and catalog into a website. A digital archive of authors accessible to anyone who wants to immerse themselves and deepen their knowledge in the history of Argentine comics. There are more than a hundred authors uploaded to our site and more than a hundred more to be uploaded. Our collection is collaborative, it is constantly growing, and so our beloved Mariela’s legacy expands with it.

It is a path of discovery, for those who navigate it and for those of us who build it. Finding them is not always easy, it’s a bit like searching for treasures on the seashore. Sometimes they signed under vague pseudonyms, sometimes with just their first and last name. When looking at the signatures on some vignettes, the letter “G” is read. In front of “Destre”, one might assume “Gonzalo” or “Gilberto”, never “Gisela”. But Gisela, among other things, illustrated and signed pages from Ticonderoga, written by H. G. Oosterheld. We feel the unseen works, the little recorded collaborations and the absent signatures. There is also an enormous and difficult-to-calculate power of new emerging authors in the new media in circulation. It represents a genealogy with gaps and missing parts that we cannot find (yet). That’s why we tell this story: it’s unfinished and incomplete, but it’s choral and it seeks to show that what’s missing we can somehow reconstruct it, imagine it, write it down, make it present. There are many of us, who were once invisible, today are undeniable, always present. You can find us at feminismo-grafico.com. Hopefully, with the future of this project, the next time someone reads some comics, they’ll imagine different names behind each signed initial.

* She is an author, researcher, and cartoonist ** She is an author, researcher, and cartoonist.