Over the last twenty years, the growing diversity in content and artistic innovation in graphic novels, comic books, and web comics combined with the popularity of films based on comics material have made comic art newly attractive to curators, museums, and university galleries. More artists identified with comics are getting big budget retrospectives, collecting institutions are mounting rich historical shows, and exhibits capitalizing on the popularity of all types of comics are popping up around the world. The chapter maps out the history of influential shows of original comic art from newly rediscovered shows of the 1930s to contemporary blockbusters like High and Low: Modern Art, Popular Culture and Masters of American Comics, as well as the critical dialogue surrounding these shows, who some of the pioneers were, and how exhibition standards have developed over time.

Countering popular assumptions about comics being made for and by men, this chapter begins by offering a brief alternative comics history focusing on women artists, covering comics production from the mainstream to the underground. Taking cues from recent exhibitions on women artists and comics history by women authors and artists, the chapter provides insight into the different contexts and communities, covering political cartoonists and illustrators, mainstream and underground artists.

The second half of the chapter focuses on the graphic novel and examines works by Lynda Barry and a new generation of women comics artists, Ebony Flowers and Weng Pixin. It elaborates on the possibilities of reading the graphic novels in light of the rich history of women artists and comics storytelling, building bridges between individual and collective stories while pointing out the innovations unfolding through drawing, writing, and collage.