The Flapper Queens by Trina Robbins review – a luscious curation
Of all the cartoonists whose work appears in Trina Robbins’s brilliant new book, The Flapper Queens: Women Cartoonists of the Jazz Age, my favourite is Fay King. Like her dazzling contemporaries, King used her strips to review movies and plays, as well as to chart the latest fashions. But she’s at her best – and her most modern – when her material is autobiographical. “The ukulele has not made me as popular as I expected,” she writes, in a cartoon depicting herself, all 45-degree angles and shingled hair, learning new instruments. “Women now read newspapers,” she observes tartly, in one of several strips in which her feminism is explicit. And then there’s her intriguingly hectic private life. In 1913, King caused a stir when, having married boxer Battling Nelson, she filed for divorce only a month later, claiming that he had kidnapped her and forced her to get hitched.
These six American women represent a revolution, not only in hairstyles and hemlines, but in a woman’s autonomy
But in truth, every page of this luscious collection is delightful. Quietly curated by Robbins, an Eisner award-winning comics historian – she’d rather showcase her subjects’ work than spout social history – it begins with the most famous flapper cartoonist of them all, Nell Brinkley, who in 1925 began working on the first of her beautifully illustrated serials starring several somewhat daffy females: The Adventures of Prudence Prim; The Fortunes of Flossie; Dimples’ Day Dreams (in which the heroine fantasises, among other things, about running for president). Brinkley was wildly influential, “the most copied artist in the world”, according to some.
She was not alone. At the Boston Post, Edith Stevens was drawing a daily strip, Us Girls, devoted largely to fashion (“For winter, stockings with larger open mesh than ever,” she writes, gently poking fun at the latest torture device for the modish female), while Ethel Hays, whose career began at the Cleveland Press, turned her attention to all manner of modern problems, from the best way to cover one’s bathing suit (“the water is so concealing”) to the trouble with marriage (“Brides beware!” she warns her readers. “Don’t expect a Chesterfield. Be content with a human being.”).
I’m mad about this book. If it isn’t cartoon bliss, I don’t know what is – though sadly there’ll be no chortling on the bus: it’s too big to slip into your bag. Robbins isn’t certain where the word flapper originated. It could refer to the movements involved in dancing the charleston, though her preferred theory arises from the fashion in the 1920s for leaving your galoshes unfastened, which meant that they flapped as you walked. But what Robbins understands is that these six American women (the others are Eleanor Schorer and Virginia Huget) represent a revolution, not only in hairstyles and hemlines, but in a woman’s autonomy. They were working girls. The sharp elbows and pointy knees they gave their heroines not only made them look good in short, sleeveless dresses; they spoke, too, of a certain energy: a restless desire to be something more than just a fashion plate, a wife, a mother.
The Flapper Queens edited by Trina Robbins is published by Fantagraphics (£30.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15
