Serial Critique: The Counterpublic of Wimmen's Comix

Despite the prevalence of the serial anthology format in underground comics, current scholarly approaches tend to focus on single authors or individual comics. In the case of Wimmen's Comix, a series written by and for women, the serial anthology format provided important opportunities for dialogue through and across difference. This article presents an analysis of these dialogic possibilities through the lens of what I call the "correspondence zone," which refers to the public dialogic spaces enabled by serial publication where readers build solidarity. My analysis of the correspondence zone in Wimmen's Comix demonstrates two seemingly paradoxical aspects of seriality: while the unification of stories within the same series suggests solidarity, the diversity of multiple stories published across multiple issues encourages discussion of difference. Though the broader feminist movement has been critiqued for its homogeneity, the case study of Roberta Gregory creating a comic that responds to a published comic by Trina Robbins demonstrates how the serial anthology provided a space for lesbian critique of feminism without undermining solidarity. By providing a framework for discussing the multiple types of public dialogue presented throughout comics, the correspondence zone methodology enhances our understanding of how readers, particularly marginalized readers, have deployed the cultural, political, and ethical potential of comics to form publics and counterpublics.