Why ‘Team Girl’ Might Be The Coolest Comic Ever Made

I heart comics hard and I’m all about women joining forces to kick ass and take names, which is why I was so surprised I hadn’t heard of Team Girl before. The world is ginormous, the internet has infinity other articles to read, but still I really should have heard of these twenty-plus women comic creators banding together to create comic anthologies before now. Whatever, the past is the past, I’ll find it somewhere in my heart to forgive myself, the point is that I know about Team Girl now.

Now on it’s tenth issue, the comic writers behind Team Girl use their pens to tackle myriad issues women bump up against. MJ Wallace wrestles with the age-old tradition of women dealing with self-acceptance and body image shenanigans.

Meanwhile Eilidh Nicholson explores what it is to be a trans writer struggling to write about something other than trans issues. Trina Roberts and Gill Hatcher take The Eisner Awards (the comic book industry’s equivalent of The Oscars) to task for giving almost all their awards out to men. And in Lucy Sweet’s biographical piece “What Will I Be Doing When I’m Forty,” the author explores, well, right, that title is pretty self-explanatory, it’s more than a little obvious what she’s exploring.

The latest issue, which just came out, explores how the original Team Girl came to be. It all started in 2009 when editor and DIY comic book creator Gill Hatcher noticed the lack of other female writers in her field. After searching far and wide for fellow women collaborators, she launched Team Girl #1 and the rest is history.

The Scottish-based anthology celebrates different genres and voices in comics, from the hyper-realistic to the fantastically absurd, the emotional and deeply personal to the side-splittingly hilarious. What all these comics have in common is that they were created by women comic writers and illustrators, a dazzlingly talented group of creatives who don’t always get the love they deserve in the mainstream comic world, an industry notorious for being mired in misogyny. It’s really inspiring to see Team Girl take the sexism of their profession in stride and rather than getting mad, getting even by banding together to create so much awesomeness.

(Image via Autostraddle)