From Sandra Bell-Lundy: My Cartooning Life –
Hot Flash Woman was a super hero I created for my comic character, Kim, who has a career as a writer. I had a grand time designing her costume with her fishnet stockings and over-the-knee spike boots. (the explanation for the clothing choices is explained in the comics below) While telling my (then teenaged) son about Hot Flash Woman and laughing at my own genius, he rolled his eyes and said, “MOM…women your age don’t read comics.”
Sandra Bell-Lundy remembers creating Hot Flash Woman and reactions to the character in Between Friends.
I was told as a girl that women did not watch Laurel and Hardy. When I was a young woman I was told that women could not animate. I became a professional animator and was the first female member of the New York Founding Tent of the Sons of the Desert. Now I am being told that women my age don’t like comics?
Sandra Bell-Lundy explained to me that the entire demographic of middle aged women has been ignored in the comics. Her strip speaks to this demographic.
I enjoy Between Friends. I also enjoy comics that do not ‘speak’ to any particular demographic, but are just funny. Many of them do not involve human characters in real life situations.
Generalizations such as this occur from polls taken personally by the generalizers whose sample is composed of all the women they know personally enough to have ever discussed the subject with them. This is why you get “women don’t like The Three Stooges,” because their mothers or sisters thought they were beneath contempt. It’s as valid a method as national polls, which is, not very valid at all. And I doubt that there’s ever been a recent poll about women over 50 reading comics of any scientific validity.
Geez. I thought a Hot Flash Woman super hero for women for 50 was funny. I still do. The series wasn’t a research project.
Women, like Black cartoonists on the newspaper comics page frequently get lumped in a one-size-fits all. If they got one, they figure they’re covered. Like we all speak with the same voice. That’s a different and more complex conversation.
The response I received from mature women was validating. And I got a good laugh from it.
That’s all, folks.
I am 78 and have read the funnies since I could read (before that my Dad and I read them together). I enjoy Between Friends, which of course was one of the strips the Akron Beacon Journal dropped when it went with the Gannett party line to bring back zombie strips drawn by men But that is another discussion. Thank goodness for online comics.
Men must have some weird need for things to be their own. Personally, I loved watching all the early comedians ( in the 50’s to 60’s). The Marx brothers, Laurel & Hardy, Abbott & Costello.. etc. Present times don’t have the humor. We knew the guys didn’t really get hurt… didn’t realize what it cost them to give us laughs.