What a fucking cunt Virginia Woolf was eh? Talk about massageny. Guess what you interwar whore, women CAN paint. In fact, the four greatest cartoonists in the world right now are broads (we’re not including Ware, Bagge, Clowes, David B, Sacco, et al because they’re already well-established and including them is like saying Stephen King is a hot new writer). Laura Park, Vanessa Davis, Geneviève Elverum, and Gabrielle Bell can draw hands as well as Robert Crumb but they add a loose, girliness to their illustrations that male cartoonists can only wet dream of.

LAURA PARK
The number one rule of all cartoons is: 50% black 50% white. Crumb does this by cross hatching the living shit out of his figures but he is the master and making all those little lines consistent is damn near impossible. Laura Park does the same thing with these scratchy lines that look like she pounded out each illustration in five minutes. She also draws herself fat which is cool.

GENEVIÈVE ELVERUM (PREVIOUSLY GENEVIÈVE CASTRÉE PREVIOUSLY FIDEL CASTRÉE)
This girl is a total enigma who, like most French Canadians, is content to stay in Quebec, make little songs on a guitar and never speak to the rest of the world ever again. Her paintings sell before she can finish them and she occasionally does stuff for Montreal’s Drawn & Quarterly but if you want to see her work up close and personal, you’re basically going to have to strap on some snowshoes and head North.

Update: She lives nowhere near Quebec and is now in Washington state. That kind of blows the whole “small town frog” angle. When I met her she had a real anti-superstar kind of vibe but that was fucking 10 years ago. Ooops.

VANESSA DAVIS
Not the most prolific poopster in town, Vanessa hasn’t done much since Lesley Arfin’s book (above) and Spaniel Rage. Her auto-bio sketches are some of the few comics on earth that can totally abandon the boxes without losing the flow of the story. When we heard Ani DiFranco say she doesn’t like right angles because they are not her rules we thought she was being a dumb dyke but Davis’ drawerings make us think Ani may have had a point after all.

GABRIELLE BELL
The proportions in Lucky are so perfectly accurate you kind of start to wonder if she traced a lot of her figures. She didn’t. She just took so many life-drawing classes she could basically draw a thalidomide baby playing the piano with a cigarette in his lobster claw and it would look perfect. She can also tell the shit out of a story, which is rare.

Update: The picture that used to be here was by Jonathan Bennett. Double OOPS!

HONORABLE MENTIONS: We really wanted to include Julie Wentz in this because Fart Party is funny as hell and at five feet tall you want to include her in everything but sorry, you can’t achieve 50/50 by painting a chest of drawers black and giving stickmen dark hair. Lucy Kinsley obeys all the rules of cartooning and even adds some of her own but she doesn’t quite make it into the top four. Not sure why. Maybe it’s her gross lettering and the huge borders on her word balloons.

Milano Chow is also out-of-hand perfect but, like Hope Gangloff she’s more just an illustrator and if you can’t make your drawerings tell a story, you can’t be in the top four in the world. That’s the rules.

Related posts:

1. DEAR DREW: DO ALL WOMEN WAX NOW?
2. STRAIGHT TO THE LANDFILL: THE PET DOORBELL
3. OPEN MIC: MEETING WOMEN IN SOUTHERN ASIA