Ceres Magazine Issue 4 - Fall 2016 | Page 19

Fight

DRAW

Ceres: Your name is Teresa Richards, but your artist name is Terre Richards.

Terre: It used to be Terry Richards, but I changed the spelling to Terre because I was getting fan mail addressed to Mr. Richards, and I wanted to be identified as a woman cartoonist, of course.

Ceres: How long have you been a cartoonist and what brought you to it?

Terre: It was in 1971, I had just landed in San Francisco where I used to live prior to traveling and living in Europe for a year. Now I was back in the U.S., and I decided I wanted to be an artist [Laughter]. I had a vision that I’d find a career in the arts!

At a party, I met the publisher for a comic book company named Last Gasp. His name was Ron Turner. I told him that I was new in town, and as an artist, I was looking for work, and asked him if he had anything. I was prepared to sweep floors since I was young, 23 at the time, but he said: “Well, actually, I do need someone,” and he hired me as the production manager for one of his underground comix publishing companies. That’s how I learned

everything about publishing a book or a comic. San Francisco was the epicenter of the

underground comix movement*, so I was meeting artists through the company and the parties. Then, I heard something about a project for a comic by women that Last Gasp was the publisher for. I was curious.

Thus, I met Lee Marrs, who had a comic called The Further Fattening Adventures of Pudge. I met Trina Robbins, who had already published the very first all-woman comic book, the one-shot It Ain't Me, Babe Comics, in 1970. Then, I was introduced to Patty Moodian, the founder editor of what was going to be Wimmen’s Comix, though we didn't even have a name for it, yet.

Ceres: What was the idea behind Wimmen’s Comix and what was your involvement with it?

Terre: The idea was to have an all-women's comic because, at the time, getting our work published was tough. The only avenues were alternative newspapers like the Berkeley Barb or the Village Voice, even though we all had done some work and

  

 

The

Photo by Lands of Void

to

Conversation with

Terre Richards

19 | Ceres Magazine | Fall 2016

Above: Two-volume slipcased set collects two decades of the groundbreaking underground/alternative anthology Wimmen’s Comix.

*Underground comix are small press or self-published comic books.