Diane Noomin, who was a pioneer of feminist underground comics in the 1970s, and whose comic book Twisted Sisters, a collaboration with her fellow artist Aline Kominsky-Crumb, has been a touchstone for generations of female cartoonists, died on Sept. 1 at her home in Hadlyme, Conn. She was 75.
The cause was uterine cancer, said her husband, Bill Griffith, the cartoonist whose best-known creation is Zippy the Pinhead.
Ms. Noomin’s own best-known creation was DiDi Glitz — a curvy, big-haired, leopard-print-loving, fishnet-stocking-and-miniskirt-wearing, hard-drinking single mother. DiDi, whose world was filled with bad sex, sleazy men, cocktails and extravagant decorating, was a sendup of a certain kind of suburban stock character, but she was rendered with both affection and compassion.
Ms. Noomin was not planning on a career as a cartoonist when she arrived in San Francisco from New York in the early 1970s. She had been making sculptures and drawings and had just ended a brief and unhappy marriage. She and Ms. Kominsky-Crumb (then Aline Kominsky) met at a party, and when Ms. Noomin showed her her sketchbook — she was already experimenting with the comic form — Ms. Kominksy-Crumb dragged her to a meeting of female artists who were putting together the first issue of Wimmen’s Comix.
The group was a feminist collective trying to do something radical: make their own comics in the deeply male underground genre, whose stars included Robert Crumb, Mr. Griffith and Art Spiegelman. The collective, Ms. Noomin wrote later, was just at the stage of deciding how to spell “wimmen,” and, she said, “the idea of combining word and pictures in comic book form blew my mind (remember it was 1972).”
Wimmen’s Comix would go on to be the longest-running female underground comic, publishing 17 issues from 1972 to 1992.
“It was revolutionary, expressive, personal and feminist, and open to a range of experience beyond what you would see in The New Yorker,” said Brian Doherty, author of “Dirty Pictures” a history of the underground comics world that was published this year. “It was a product of its times, and run like a feminist consciousness-raising project, and there were lots of sisterly meetings, which drove Diane and Aline crazy.”
It also seemed to irritate members of the collective that Ms. Noomin and Ms. Kominsky-Crumb were dating the enemy — the already famous Mr. Crumb and Mr. Griffith, whom they would later marry.
Twisted Sisters Comics, a 36-page gem published in 1976 and featuring Ms. Kominsky-Crumb’s alter ego, “the Bunch,” and Ms. Noomin’s DiDi, was their retort to what Ms. Noomin called the rigid feminism of Wimmen’s Comix (though in later decades she would contribute more of her work to that publication, and even edit it).
Twisted Sisters was gross, confessional and utterly alluring. The Bunch appears on the cover, sitting on the toilet and grimacing into a hand mirror, polka-dot panties around her ankles. DiDi is on the back cover, which Ms. Noomin decorated with a pie chart called “Didi’s Priority Pie.” (Bubble baths and lavish interior design schemes made up the largest slices; sex and career were mere slivers.)
“Wimmin’s Comix Collective took the path that many women’s or political collectives do over the years and became a hotbed of bickering and power plays,” Ms. Noomin told a conference in 2003. “Aline and I found ourselves on one side of a power play.”
They decided to do their own comic, she said, because “basically we felt that our type of humor was self-deprecating and ironic, and that what they were pushing for in the name of feminism and political correctness was a sort of self-aggrandizing and idealistic view of women as a super-race. We preferred to have our flaws and show them.”
Ms. Noomin and Ms. Kominsky-Crumb made “an artistic project out of demystifying womanhood,” said Hillary Chute, a professor at Northeastern University and the author of “Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics” (2010).
“Their work influenced a generation of feminist creators across different media,” Professor Chute, who is a contributor to The New York Times Book Review, said in a phone interview. “It’s this whole ‘leaning into abjection’ thing we see in ‘Girls’ and ‘Fleabag’” — the television shows created by Lena Dunham and Phoebe Waller-Bridges. “What they did was new not only for comics — what it means to be embodied as a woman — but also in terms of feminist cultural productions in general.”
One of Ms. Noomin’s most startling and moving pieces was a 1994 story called “Baby Talk: A Tale of 4 Miscarriages,” in which she wrote of her own miscarriages, of the ignominies and the cruelties she endured at the hands of medical professionals as she kept trying to conceive.
It takes a few panels for Ms. Noomin to enter the story. First she draws stand-ins for herself and Mr. Griffith named Glenda and Jimmy; then DiDi appears and drags her into the comic, saying: “It’s your story. … Are you gonna let some cartoon yuppies cry cartoon tears over your lost babies?”
DiDi first manifested herself, as Ms. Noomin put it, in the form of a Halloween costume she wore to a party in 1972. She used to joke that DiDi’s wig was locked in her closet and could be let out only under strict supervision.
“Diane treated her comics as a kind of exorcism,” Mr. Griffith said in a phone interview. “There were things inside her that had to get out. DiDi was an amalgam of all the parents, all the housewives in Canarsie when she was growing up, the person she was afraid she might become, so in order to deal with that she took control.
“It became very complex,” he continued. “Not only did she exorcise this character, she also inhabited her. That’s why DiDi is such a powerful character. Diane wasn’t interested in making fun of her; she wanted to deeply explore who she was.”
Diane Robin Rosenblatt was born on May 13, 1947, in the Canarsie neighborhood of Brooklyn. Her father, Sam Rosenblatt, had his own shop in Manhattan’s diamond district, polishing and repairing jewelry. Her mother, Nessa (Gershater) Rosenblatt, worked for the Board of Education and the Social Security Administration.
They were both members of the Communist Party, but they kept their activities secret from their two daughters, Diane and her sister, Ronnie, who did not learn the truth until they were young adults, Mr. Griffith said: “When Diane asked what they did, Sam said, ‘We did far worse than the Rosenbergs,’ but he never explained what that was.”
The family moved from Brooklyn to Hempstead, on Long Island, and back again when Diane was 13. In junior high school she was a stellar student, but, she wrote in a cartoon called “Coming of Age in Canarsie”: “I learned to pretend I didn’t study, to roll up my skirts, wear white lipstick, hang out in bowling alleys and shoplift.”
Diane attended the High School of Music & Art (now the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts), then Brooklyn College and Pratt Institute, where she studied sculpture and photography. After a brief marriage to Alan Newman, a photographer, she moved to San Francisco. When she began to draw cartoons, she signed them Diane Noomin, which became her pen name.
She and Mr. Griffith were fixed up by Mr. Spiegelman, who invited them to dinner, though he doesn’t remember his reason for doing so — and in any case the match didn’t “take” until they met again at a New Year’s Eve party a few months later (she thought he was standoffish, he thought she was too beautiful and out of his league).
They became a couple in 1973 but didn’t marry until 1980, when they eloped to Las Vegas with the thought of marrying in an Elvis chapel. But, Mr. Griffith recalled, “when we saw what it was like, we panicked and ran to City Hall.”
Ms. Noomin edited and contributed to many cartoon collections. For “Lemme Outa Here: Growing Up Inside the American Dream” (1978), she invited comic artists who had grown up in suburbia to share their stories, with, she said, “all the constraints, expectations and shag carpeting that usually entails.”
In addition to her husband, Ms. Noomin is survived by her sister, Veronica Smith.
Ms. Noomin revived the name “Twisted Sisters” in 1991 for an anthology of female cartoonists, including herself and Ms. Kominsky-Crumb. “Twisted Sisters: A Collection of Bad Girl Art” also featured the work of Carol Tyler, Mary Fleener and Phoebe Gloeckner, among others. “Lots of cartoonists push their work to the edge, but these women shove their cartoons right off the cliff and take you along for the ride,” wrote Matt Groening, the creator of “The Simpsons.” A second volume was published in 1994.
The personal was always political for Ms. Noomin, but she wasn’t moved to make overtly political work until the #MeToo movement and the run-up to the 2016 presidential election. For “Drawing Power: Women’s Stories of Sexual Violence, Harassment, and Survival,” Ms. Noomin invited more than 60 artists of different races, nationalities, sexuality and ages to contribute. Published in 2019, the book was dedicated to Anita Hill.
