More One-Sided Admiration

I've met my share of rock stars. Heck, even Green Day slept on my living room floor. But few things have left me ridiculously starstuck in the last twenty years than having underground comix legend Roberta Gregory comment sweetly on several of my Facebook updates. I'm a giggling teenybopper right now, and I wanna, I dunno, go hang a poster of her on my wall and kiss it every night or somethin'.

It was probably around the early or mid 90's when my friend S. first handed me a copy of Naughty Bits that she had received in the mail as part of a "freebie" gift bag from Fantagraphics, gushing over how funny it was. "I love how pointy her breasts get when she's angry!" S. explained as a selling-point, pitching the rough, cartoony artwork to me. But she didn't need to tell me twice. I could already relate to the comic's protagonist Midge McCracken's large and heavy sagging breast dilemma and the way that they interfered with her life, getting tied up in phone cords or winding up in her armpits when she sleeps. But as much as I hoped that the similarities ended there -- that at age forty I have not become the bitter, angry, PMS-riddled harridan that Midge portrays -- I do think that, probably like all of us, Midge voices her real feelings about dating, sex, politics, parents, co-workers, and life in general in a slightly more self-absorbed and unfair yet clearer insight on the way things really are in her own head a majority of the time. Midge's inner dialogue is most of the dialogue we see in the stories, her thought balloons getting more prickly and ragged the more she works herself up in a lather. She speaks with one corner of her smiling mouth while thinks from the snarling, fanged corner of the other side. Sound like anybody we know?

But what makes Midge more than just the "Bitchy Bitch" that Roberta nicknamed her that Roberta has also given Midge a life, of some sort, even if it's working a thunderously dull 9 to 5 desk job and a weekend of watching bad TV or going on the occasional disastrous date. But the repetition of this pattern enhances the rut that she lives -- the tedious job amongst an all-female work team with a twisted shrew of a boss counting every minute that Midge is late for work, a flakey New-Ager team leader always giving loopy feel-good advice, and a chipper fundamentalist Christian slipping Bible verses into Midge's desk when she's not looking. Who wouldn't be constantly filled with rage and aggravation after awhile? We are also privy to Midge's stressful childhood with her smothering mother and rageaholic father (now we know where she get it from)and her adolescence, coming of age in the turbulent 1960's where our Hippie Bitch takes drugs and loses her virginity to a stranger at a party, becoming pregnant in the process. The subsequent story about Midge's abortion in the pre-Roe vs. Wade 60's is to this day one of the most harrowing and amazing stories I have ever read, in comics as well as any piece of literature in my entire life.

Roberta Gregory has also had a long history with the comix medium and it practically runs through her blood. Her father Robert Gregory used to write for Donald Duck and many other Disney comics when Roberta was a child. In the early 70's Roberta became heavily involved in the feminist/gay/lesbian movements, getting her first series "Dynamite Damsels" in Wimmen's Comix and in the 80's published several other series called "Winging It", "Sheila And The Unicorn", and "Artistic Licentiousness" on into the 90's. But other than Naughty Bits, I have also adored Roberta's Butchy Butch series, shorter-lived but just as funny and even grippingly powerful as the best moments in Naughty Bits. "Butchy" is sort of the dyke version of Bitchy Bitch Midge, furious at the world for making her feel so out of place in it. Proudly "old school" in her man-hating dyke ways, even the younger generation of lesbians roll their eyes over her diatribes about The Way Things Used To Be, and how the kinderdykes of today Have It So Easy compared to her. But flashbacks to Butchy's teenage years coming to terms with her sexuality in the 1960's when homosexuality was still listed as a "disease" in medical books, you gotta admit she has a point. And you have to admire her bravery for walking down the street every day with her crewcut and combat boots and being exactly who she is without fear or shame. She's gone through a lot to get to where she is today, and I gotta say, as a straight woman to a fictional character, my filthy breeder heart goes out to her.

Roberta Gregory, thank you for coming into my life. Your nice little comments on a message board mean more to me than you'll ever know.