When Feminism Went to Market

The comics anthology has long served as a productive format by which creators with a feminist consciousness have made their individual efforts visible and elaborated their networks of other like-minded creators. The material conditions under which comics anthologies with a feminist consciousness are made and received reveal how comics are a unique medium whose reach extends beyond the spaces where we expect to find feminist discourse, such as the feminist bookstore, rally, or consciousness-raising meeting. Looking at how feminist comics anthologies address these material conditions, this chapter considers how Sarah Dyer’s Action Girl Comics anthology in the early 1990s is inflected by Dyer’s history as a grass-roots zine maker and situates itself within the larger comics industry. The chapter then turns to Dyer’s archive at the Sallie Bingham Center to elaborate how her all-girl comics anthology’s mission to saturate the comics marketplace with women’s work actually played out.