Typical Girls: The Rhetoric of Womanhood in Comic Strips by Susan E. Kirtley (review)

Bookended by reminiscences of personal engagements with the comics pages in the newspaper, which show the personal significance that this genre has for the author, Susan Kirtley offers astute readings based within a rhetorical approach and tailored to each newspaper comic strip series that she discusses. The strips were all created by women, ran in daily or weekly newspapers, and were all syndicated for some time between 1976 and 2020, though they have all ceased publication by now.

The seven chapters treat the strips, which were each pioneering in their own way, in some depth and breadth, considering how their creators came to make comics, discussing their developments over their run in the newspapers (sometimes decades), and illuminating how they fit into their respective eras. All together, the chapters work "to offer a novel assessment of the historical moment during which the Women's Rights movement became a national conversation, … demonstrating the ways in which the most prominent and widely read comic strips created by women of the time bolster stereotypes of gender and domesticity even as they challenge them, presenting complicated women struggling to reconceive of success and fulfilment amidst competing visions of female identity, femininity, and domesticity" (4–5). The chapters are ordered roughly chronologically by the original start date of the series and so also provide an overview of the changing landscape in newspaper comics publishing.

The first chapter is about Cathy Guisewhite's strip Cathy, and Kirtley describes the delicate balancing act performed by Guisewhite as a female cartoonist creating a strip about a woman dealing with her everyday life of work and relationships. As reactions to the retirement of the strip showed, readers were polarized in their responses, many of them relating to the main character Cathy Andrews, but others feeling Guisewhite did not do enough with the strip to further feminism and became repetitive over the years. Kirtley argues that repetitive elements may have been a rhetorical strategy of the strip, creating an impact over time precisely through that repetition. More strikingly, Kirtley demonstrates that some of the series' most critical strips, showing a case of sexual harassment against Cathy by her boss, have all but disappeared from the record because they have not been included in the collected editions of the comic strip. Readers will only discover this significant storyline by looking up the strips as they were originally published in the papers in an archive, as Kirtley did herself.

For Better or For Worse by Lynn Johnston is the topic of the second chapter. Here Kirtley discusses how the strip used a gently humorous approach to reach audiences. She relates this to the rhetorical device of the comic frame, by which comical structure is used to relate to audiences. In the case of For Better or For Worse, this allowed the strip to "argue for another understanding of the maternal experience, in addition to positing notions of identification through consubstantiality, to dismantle dominant narratives of idealized motherhood" (74). While the strip is rooted in the domestic sphere, or maybe rather because it was, it was able to show how women might not have felt fulfilled by homemaking and mothering alone, showing domesticity as a trap of sorts, but without villainizing anyone in the process, neither Elly, who does not initially struggle particularly hard to escape that domesticity, nor her husband John, who benefits from her work at home. The ambivalence towards motherhood in the strip is a particularly meaningful insight Kirtley teases out in her discussion.

Kirtley frames Lynda Barry's Girls and Boys, from the early period of Ernie Pook's Comeek, within the era of punk, discussing the punk aesthetics of the strip as well as its punk ethos of inviting community engagement. She also contextualizes Barry's work within the rise of the alternative weeklies, the perfect timing of which allows Barry to construct a sense of community with her audience through her creation...