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Comic book artists to watch out for

The New York Times Magazine ran a cover story on serious comics last summer (July 11, 2004) that made cartooning look like Mafia business. In a full-page photo, godfather Art Spiegelman sat a table, surrounded by lieutenants Joe Sacco, Seth, Chester Brown, and Adrian Tomine. It was clear: Just as mafiosi are dark-haired guys who mumble, cartoonists are men who wear glasses.

But it's not necessarily so. For one thing, some of the most trenchant cartoonists wielding brush and pen today are women. The article mentioned Iranian graphic memoirist Marjane Satrapi (Persepolis), but nary a word about Phoebe Gloeckner, Alison Bechdel, Jennifer Camper, or a host of other diversely talented women artists. If you're a careful reader of Utne, you've seen their work in our pages, just as you've read elsewhere about Chris Ware and Dan Clowes, two others profiled in the Times article. Now we'd like to recognize some artists whose names and work should be widely known.

Welcome to the world of LAUREN WEINSTEIN. Imagine strap-on home dentistry technology, picture Jesus Christ as pro wrestler, and consider the possible origins of equine sexual fetishes. The winner of a 2002 Xeric Foundation Grant (providing financial aid to budding comics artists), Brooklyn-based Weinstein depicts such wonderfully weird places and situations in her Inside Vineyland (distributed by Alternative Comics, www.indyworld.com/altcomics). The book features a longer story about a robot who goes for a walk and befriends a teenage boy, as well as drawings of bipolar dogs and a seer who really can tell the future ("One day you will die"). Weinstein calls herself a "schoolmarm by day, rocker by night" -- she teaches at Parsons School of Design and sings in the band Flaming Fire, a collective devoted to making music that comments on the human quest for philosophical and religious meaning. For more of Weinstein's work: www.vineyland.com and www.serializer.net.

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