Women Artists Celebrated Independence Day by Roasting Trump

When Donald Trump was first elected president, more than 1,000 women and LGBTQ artists illustrated their shock and pain and horror for Resist!, a zine launched by New Yorker art director Françoise Mouly and her daughter, the writer Nadja Spiegelman. On inauguration weekend, they and volunteers across the country distributed nearly 60,000 copies of the zine, which was supposed to be a one-off. But the more issues they gave out, the more they “realized that what we had in our hands wasn’t the end point but the starting point,” Spiegelman said. She went on, “We need places for art as a form of political resistance. We, personally, need to be making something — some physical manifestation of everything we believe in — in order to stay sane. [So] as long as there’s enough demand for it, we’ll keep going.”

The second time around, Resist! has gone from a thin broadsheet to a fattened, bound issue. Mouly and Spiegelman chose its content from among 2,000 submissions, and on July 4, they orchestrated the distribution of another 30,000 copies of Resist! for free at more than 100 independent comics shops, coffee shops, and bookstores around the country and internationally.

Whereas the first issue’s overwhelming theme was despair and solidarity, Mouly and Spiegelman said the second shows fewer linked arms and more raised fists. “The anger that’s coursing through this issue surprised us at first,” they said. “[But] we embraced it — it’s time for women to be allowed to be angry, for women to get angry, for women to grab back.”