Before queer comics went mainstream, there was A-Girl.
In 1993, animator and cartoonist Elizabeth Watasin began self-publishing a hand-xeroxed zine called Adventures of A-Girl! out of Burbank, California. It cost one dollar. It was traded through underground newsletter listings, mailed in envelopes, and passed hand to hand among people who needed it. In a pre-internet era when the word “asexual” barely existed in public discourse, when “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” was national policy, and when the AIDS epidemic was devastating queer communities, A-Girl arrived as a beacon of irreverence, warmth, and defiant self-expression.
A-Girl is androgynous, cross-dressing, and proudly asexual — a short-haired young woman in a black suit and tie who stumbles into comic confrontations with a world that can’t quite categorize her and really wishes she’d stop. She gets punched. She runs away a lot. She says exactly what she thinks. She falls into philosophical conversations with strangers at ramen shops at 2 AM. She buys a Japanese schoolboy’s uniform by flinging money at a very angry old lady and sprinting. She is, in other words, a hero for the ages.
This collection brings together nearly the entire run of the series for the first time, including:
- The original Adventures of A-Girl! issues, from A-Girl’s first gag strips challenging social norms to her full-length Tokyo adventures — navigating tour groups, matchmaking strangers, an obsessive quest for shojo manga in the Jimbocho book district, and a final sunset at Tokyo Tower
- Further Adventures of A-Girl!, including A-Girl’s eccentric found-family household: landlady Miz Anita, vaudeville drag queens, born-again bisexual Lily, and exotic dancer Clea — all singing, arguing, and stumbling toward something like grace
- Strips published in celebrated indie titles Strangers in Paradise and Action Girl Comics, showcasing a tighter, print-ready style alongside the raw spontaneity of the zine work
- A selection of mini-cartoons, spot illustrations, and covers that appeared outside of the main A-Girl titles
Watasin drew all of the zine comics directly in ink — no pencils — over rough marker sketches on a light table, preserving an immediacy and warmth that leaps off the page. The result is cartooning that feels simultaneously rough and perfectly alive: expressive, funny, emotionally direct, and visually inventive.
Adventures of A-Girl! sits at the intersection of queer history, underground comics history, and personal mythology. It belongs on the shelf alongside Dykes to Watch Out For, Love and Rockets, and Fun Home — works that documented lives that weren’t being documented anywhere else, drawn by people who had no choice but to make the thing they needed to exist.
A-Girl never finished her adventures. She never had to. The point was always the looking — at Tokyo’s sparkling horizon, at the edge of what’s possible, at a world that keeps insisting you’re impossible and keeps being wrong.
A-Girl is back. She’s still wearing the suit.
- Paperback
- 172 pages, black-and-white
- ISBN-10 : 1949996964
- ISBN-13 : 978-1-949996-96-8
- Dimensions : 7.44″ x 9.69″
