The artform has allowed many female illustrators to confront how they see their bodies and how their bodies are seen by the men around them

In Commute: An Illustrated Memoir of Female Shame, Erin Williams draws herself dozens of times. The rough, reality-based illustrations of her body move through the memoir’s pages both as a person enduring the banal, and as a sexualized figure, recovering from trauma. Spanning a single day with extended departures into reflection and digression, the memoir chronicles both the journey of a daily commute, and a larger one from blackout sexual encounters to sobriety and motherhood. That means a fair amount of difficult, sometimes shame-filled, material: “All the mornings I woke up and couldn’t remember whether I’d had sex the night before, I’d finger myself to see if I was sore,” writes Williams beneath a drawing of her with a hand beneath her scrunched-up shorts.

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Throughout, she considers how her body is used both privately and publicly, a question which is particularly interesting in a form where the artist is representing herself again and again. She builds an equation where desirability equals visibility, and wrestles with whether, if there are only two options on offer, she’d prefer to be objectified or ignored.

Until 1989, “the Comics Code” forbade depictions of “illicit sex relations” in mainstream comics (meaning a graphic novel or comic book sold by a publisher with distribution), and out of this restriction, comics grew into a space of underground liberation. Artists began working without any worry over commercial viability, because there was none. This was the spirit from which Aline Kominsky-Crumb began drawing bodies extravagant in their ugliness, Phoebe Gloeckner released comics filled with hyperrealistic drawings of teenage sexual violence, and Alison Bechdel started her long-running serial comic Dykes to Watch Out For.

The sensation of shame extends far beyond sexual behavior and bodies, but from our earliest stories – Eve eats the apple and grasps for anything nearby to cover herself with – shame, especially women’s shame, is so often associated with physicality or desire. A body is the space no one can escape, and so it’s the place from which we project ourselves onto the world, and receive its scrutiny. “The visual register itself is often seen as ‘excessive’,” writes Hillary Chute in Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics, referring to the way that memoirs of women are sometimes eyed with suspicion.

Female shame is often interlocked with trauma, sex and exposure. As Williams writes in Commute, “shame is an instrument of oppression”, and across comics, female artists are confronting their mottled self-images through the act of drawing their bodies, traumas and desires.

“Shame has been such a big part of women’s work and comics in general,” says Chute. “[Because] comics is a form about intimacy. It’s about making visible a person’s interior.”

Illustration offers the opportunity not only to depict the reality of a physical body, but also presents an opportunity to represent how one sees oneself. “[Comics] are being drawn and written from an embodied perspective,” says Chute. Through the use of caricature and sometimes grotesquely-exaggerated forms, visual arguments about women’s bodies can operate quite differently than they do in live-action television, film or even prose novels. TV is constrained, at least to some extent, by the limitations of real bodies, particularly those that are visually appealing. In prose, it may be arduous and distracting to describe the way an arm jiggles and dimples form across the stomach each time our protagonist leans forward or bends over, but in comics, we’re reminded of the body every time it’s drawn – which is often every panel or page.

Gina Wynbrandt’s Will Someone Please Have Sex With Me, for example, chronicles a young woman’s loneliness and unfulfilled sexual desires in cringe-worthy detail and neon linework. Her facial expressions are consistently exaggerated — her tongue lolling out of her mouth, her body splayed out in bulbous exaggeration.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest An image from Kristen Radtke’s Terrible Men. Photograph: Pantheon

An extreme example of physical caricature can be found in Allie Brosh’s popular Hyperbole and a Half, both a book and webcomic. Brosh’s subject is often her anxiety and depression, and the body she draws to represent herself isn’t a body at all, at least in any realistically representational sense: it’s a noodle-shaped blob with sticks for arms and legs, with a yellow cone to represent her ponytail atop a frog-like face. “This character sort of evolved and doesn’t look like me, but in a way it’s an impression of me,” Brosh said in a 2013 interview on NPR. “It’s this absurd, crude little thing, and that’s really what I am inside, and it’s a more accurate way to represent myself.”

There isn’t something inherently radical about drawing oneself, but to render the female body at all risks opening an artist up to scrutiny. When my first book, a graphic memoir, came out, I was surprised by reviews that called attention to the way I looked. “The abundance of self-portraits makes her author photo on the back flap oddly unsettling,” wrote one review, “Because it both clearly resembles yet subtly contradicts the character in her artwork.” I’d drawn myself both as too real, and not real enough.

Soon I started questioning my own body every time I sat down to draw. Should I cut out that fat roll or should I accentuate it? Do I smooth out my hair? I often take reference photos of myself before I draw difficult poses. In one, my nipples showed through my tank top slightly. Should I draw them, then, I wondered? What will it mean if I have nipples? What will it mean if I don’t have nipples?

In 2017, writer and illustrator Mira Jacob was working on her own graphic memoir, Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations. “Hi, do you have a sec for naked drawing talk? I need to know if what I did looks chicken,” she texted one afternoon. She showed me a drawing she’d made of her naked, early-20s self. “Do you think I’m going to get slammed?” She asked. Jacob hadn’t drawn herself naked before – at least not for public consumption – and she had some anxiety about representing herself in her early-adulthood physical prime. The illustration was not meant to represent shame. It accompanied a section depicting a young woman engaged in enjoyable, consensual sexual relationships, yet the drawing itself opened up an insecurity off the page well beyond the narrative’s intention. Like other women, she’d spent her entire life being silently and not-so-silently judged for her appearance, but the drawing introduced an added nervousness about how the way in which she drew her body would cause a reader to criticize or dismiss her. The question of whether or not the drawing was “chicken”, or too timid, also illuminates another layer of the problem: There’s a way to draw a naked body that’s actually not graphic enough.

Jacob came up with a temporary solution: When she drew her naked body, she exaggerated her pubic hair. “Just add more bush,” we began saying to each other when a drawing needed “uglying up”. Jacob’s struggle to represent her body on the page seems largely in line with the daily questions Williams is asking in Commute – to hide one’s body is also to protect it from a form of scrutiny. “Haters may not be scared of much,” Jacob said to me, “but bush is probably a good place to start.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Trinidad Escobar - All These Years. image taken from Drawing Power: Women’s Stories of Sexual Violence, Harassment, and Survival. Photograph: Courtesy of Abrams ComicArts

Drawing a female body isn’t necessarily about confronting shame, but in many ways it can be about reminding oneself that it’s difficult to be in a body at all. In an early scene in Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do, the narrator is half-naked, in labor, on a hospital bed. As she consents to an epidural, the needle injected into her spine is supersized, exaggerated so it appears nearly as large as she is.

Critic Tahneer Oksman calls this quality a “pre-linguistic sense of the body.” Through the act of drawing comics, an artist is translating an internal feeling into an external, physical representation, which Oksman says mirrors the way shame is experienced. “You feel shame before you have a language for it … [Comics can communicate] the excess of the body and its discomfort without putting it into language.”

The new anthology Drawing Power: Women’s Stories of Sexual Violence, Harassment, and Survival offers the work of over sixty artists confronting this discomfort head on. “A lot of guys would look at my comics and then recoil,” legendary feminist artist Roberta Gregory writes in Adult Comics, referring to Naughty Bits, the comic book series she wrote through the nineties until its final issue in 2004. Gregory suggests quite clearly that this work was not made for the men who were repelled by it. Jennifer Camper’s Noncompliant offers a similar message. “I rarely make autobiographical comics,” she writes. Camper has made prolific, important work about sexual assault, but she’s stopped short of representing herself. “In my comics I get the final word,” she writes.

The toughest thing about shame, says Oksman, is that “it’s a form of self-isolation”, in which women are taught to keep these feelings private in order to avoid the additional shame that comes of sharing it. If shame is indeed an act of oppression, then drawing experiences from everyday humiliations to deep-seated sexual traumas can be considered an exercise in liberation.