Happy Women’s History Month! All through March, we’ll be celebrating women who changed free expression in comics. Check back here every weekday for biographical snippets on female creators who have pushed the boundaries of the format and/or seen their work challenged or banned.

San Francisco in the 1960s and ’70s was the place to be if you were a cartoonist looking to break away from the regulations imposed on the comics industry by the Comics Code and find a public space to freely express yourself. The underground comix movement was in full force and a truly unique voice full of spit and spunk emerged from this band of creators in Aline Kominsky-Crumb.

Born Aline Goldsmith, Kominsky-Crumb was one of the expatriates of New York and mainstream comics who migrated to San Francisco to find a new arena for their works. Alongside Trina Robbins, Lee Marrs, and a handful of other women, Kominsky-Crumb would become a founder and contributor to the longest running all-women comix anthology, Wimmen’s Comix. Like most underground creators her gritty art and unabashedly honest narrative style complemented her equally honest approach to life. Kominsky-Crumb utilized the comics form to test social boundaries, push buttons, and get in readers’ faces. It is her free and unrestrained voice and style that made her not only one of the most prominent creators in the underground, but also one of the most influential creators for the future alternative and independent comics scenes.

When she wasn’t contributing to Wimmen’s Comix, a publication by women for women, she was contributing to other underground anthologies including Robert Crumb’s Weirdo which reached a whole other kind of reader. When she wasn’t doing work for other people’s books she was making her own. Together with Diane Noomin she created Twisted Sisters, which took the underground in a whole new direction for women creators and women readers. Unlike Wimmen’s Comix whose central theme was the empowerment of women, Twisted Sisters showed women as they were with all of their mortal flaws and desires. In a University of Florida conference in 2003 Noomin recalled, “Basically, we felt that our type of humor was self-deprecating and ironic and that what they were pushing for in the name of feminism and political correctness was a sort of self-aggrandizing and idealistic view of women as a super-race. We preferred to have our flaws and show them.”

Featuring gritty art, gritty stories, and gritty women, Aline Kominsky-Crumb’s work in the underground truly was work for a whole other kind of woman. Not to be held back by any kind of boundary—gender, ethnic, social, and so on—Kominsky-Crumb has not only worked with many of the industry’s greats, but has accumulated a portfolio that could be the poster child for freedom of expression. Her unabashed approach to comics, and ultimately freedom of speech as well, is what has made Kominsky-Crumb a leading and highly influential voice for a whole new generation of creator.

–Contributing Editor Caitlin McCabe