Resist!

“We felt more like midwives to this project than editors,” say New Yorker art director Francoise Mouly and her daughter, the graphic novelist Nadja Spiegelman, of their experience guest editing Resist! 58,000 copies of the newspaper will be distributed on Saturday to coincide with the 370 worldwide women’s marches planned for the day after Trump’s inauguration. Inside the 40-page tabloid are political comics and graphics by mostly female artists, a selection of images chosen by Francoise and Nadine from over 1,000 submissions.

The paper aims to be a distillation of a powerful collective female voice; it’s an assertion of diversity, creativity and unity.

“At first, we got many more submissions from men that from women,” say the mother-daughter team when describing their selection process. “As we began to post images from online women on our site, that ratio reversed itself drastically.” From then on, more and more submissions from women started to pour in, and also far more interesting ones. “When women speak alone, they are under pressure to speak for all women. But when women speak together as a group, they can finally begin to speak form themselves,” say Francoise and Nadja.

“When condensing what we’d received into the 120 or so images that appear in the paper, we wanted to preserve the diversity of that collective voice we were hearing,” they continue. “Not simply in terms of identity, but also in terms of the vast range of styles and approaches we had received.”

The result – featuring work by well-known cartoonists such as Alison Bechdel and Lynda Barry as well as many others (some as young as 13) – will be distributed for free by volunteers (you’ll spot them carrying bright red totes) in Washington DC this Saturday. There will also be distributors in New York, Texas, California, Des Moines, Portland, and Chicago.

“The act of a free giveaway newspaper forces a sense of interaction in a country that right now feels so disconnected and alienated,” say Francoise and Nadja. “People go into the streets, they pass it from one hand into another. And it’s permanent – it’s a permanent record of all the emotions we feel right now.”

You can also order the publication online at resistsubmissions.com.