Arnold Zwicky's Blog

My life continues to be mostly absorbed by the Respiratory Virus and what I’ve come to call the Sleep Monster, which has had me knocked out for five hours of today already. Bits of my waking time have been taken up by useful domestic things, like replacing my dead slipper / moccasins and assembling a pleasing Thanksgiving meal for myself (a bowl of very eccentric but satisfying posole — pork, white hominy, red, with idiosyncratic embellishments).

Otherwise, I’ve been consumed by fits of red-hot rage combined with body-wracking weeping sorrow over the shootings at Club Q in Colorado Springs; I hope to be able to post on that subject soon, but not now. In any case, before this news came to me, today’s Zippy strip came in, with a touching (and characteristically funny) memorial by cartoonist Bill Griffith to his cartoonist wife, Diane Noomin, who died back in September and then was memorialized in a service  by a bunch of unruly friends back on the 10th.

This is way too brief, but it’s the best I can do before my day runs out.

Just to note that these people are of my generation: Griffith is 4 years younger than me, Noomin was 7 years younger. For comparison: I’m essentially the same age as Nancy Pelosi, Anthony Fauci, Joan Baez, and Bob Dylan, and only 2 years older than Joe Biden.

From Wikipedia:

Diane Robin Noomin (née Rosenblatt, May 13, 1947 – September 1, 2022) was an American comics artist associated with the underground comics movement. She is best known for her character DiDi Glitz, who addresses transgressive social issues such as feminism, female masturbation, body image, and miscarriages.

… Noomin’s first, short-lived marriage, was to photographer Alan Newman; her pen name, “Noomin,” was derived from her original married name.

… A memorial service, hosted by the School of Visual Arts [in New York City, on E. 23rd St.], was held for Noomin on November 10, 2022; speakers included Bill Griffith, Art Spiegelman, Phoebe Gloeckner, Hillary Chute, Jennifer Camper, and others

And from the New York Times, “Diane Noomin, 75, Is Dead; Gave Underground Comics a Feminist Voice” by  Penelope Green, on-line on 9/11/22:

[subhead:] Her best-known creation was a sendup of a certain kind of female stock character. But Ms. Noomin rendered her with compassion, and used her to tell important stories.

[from the body of the story:] 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 best-known creation was DiDi Glitz — a curvy, big-haired, leopard-print-loving, fishnet-stocking-and-miniskirt-wearing and 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.

This entry was posted on November 20, 2022 at 6:18 pm and is filed under Cartoonists, Gender and sexuality, Linguistics in the comics, My life, Names, Professional names. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.