Scheherazade: Comics About Love, Treachery, Mothers and Monsters

Using the story-telling queen as a narrative model, this unique collection of work from the most fascinating female graphic artists in the world includes contributions from twenty-three artists and presents material that will appeal to comic book fans, graphic novel readers, and devotees of the "third wave" of feminism. Original.

This is a collection of material from 23 of the most exciting and interesting female cartoonists working today. For years Kelso wanted to edit an anthology of female cartoonists, but didn't know what would tie it together. A few years ago, she noticed an explosion of younger female cartoonists who were truly ambitious and promising, and got this idea to work with them as a very active, hands-on editor, which is all too rare in comics. In "Queen Scheherazade of the 1001 Nights", Kelso found a role model: the archetypal (female) storyteller, cheating death by enthralling her royal captor with new installments of a vast, interconnected story. Like her stories, the tales in this book take on broad human concerns: love, life, death, money, food, treachery, mothers and monsters. (A framing story by Ariel Bordeaux will bookend the collection and thread between all the other stories, which range from five to 14 pages each.) But the fact that they are all women is secondary to their promise as important contributors to a new era in the medium of comics, one marked by their energy, their potential and their ferocity.