When Carol Tyler asked a colleague in 2005 why there were no female cartoonists featured in the “Masters of American Comics” exhibition in Los Angeles that year, she was told there were “no women of significance who had a large enough body of work” to justify their inclusion. (Looking at the list of men who did make the cut, there’s a nerdy debate to be had about that assertion. Lyonel Feininger’s comics career was brilliant but brief and obscure; couldn’t he be bumped to make room for Dale Messick? And as much as I love Gary Panter… more worthy than Lynda Barry?) The comment led Tyler to paint a portrait of herself in a frilly dress á la Queen Elizabeth I, with a crow quill pen for a scepter and an ink pot for a crown. Liz had said she was “married to England”; Tyler declares herself “married to comics.” This royal self-portrait greets visitors to the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum’s exhibition “Write It Down, Draw It Out: The Comics Art of Carol Tyler,” a retrospective of the cartoonist’s long, unique career—plus a preview of her upcoming book—that confirms Tyler as a brilliant and singular figure in the canon of graphic narrative.

        Tyler was wed to comics in more ways than one. Her late husband was underground cartoonist Justin Green, author of Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary (1972), usually cited as the earliest and most influential example of autobiography in American comics. (The story of their turbulent relationship is beautifully told in John Kinhart’s 2023 documentary Married To Comics.) Binky Brown follows Green’s teenage surrogate as he wrestles, in humiliating detail, with puberty and “impure” thoughts while saddled with the twin impediments of a 1950s Catholic upbringing and what would eventually be diagnosed as obsessive-compulsive disorder. The comic was something of an “hallelujah” moment for a number of cartoonists, the genesis of a slew of self-deprecating, warts-and-all confessional comics to follow by the likes of Aline Kominsky-Crumb, Art Spiegelman, and Robert Crumb. As a painting student at Syracuse in the early ’70s, Tyler’s art had already tended to be narrative, but the revelatory experience of reading Binky Brown pushed her definitively toward making comics.

        The exhibition comes with a zine-like “keepsake booklet” drawn by Tyler to guide the visitor through the phases of her oeuvre. The first stop is the giant plywood cutout head, another self-portrait, with a matching hand holding a pencil that reminds the viewer why it’s important to “Write It Down, Draw It Out”: “So you don’t forget!” jots the pencil. All around the gallery are coffee cans and cigar boxes full of ink bottles, pens, and other art supplies from Tyler’s home, along with journals, weathered furniture, and personal memorabilia that help immerse the visitor in the world of her graphic novels. Early works of art are tacked up on the wall, including a small handmade book inspired by a tattoo Tyler spotted on someone’s arm, entitled “The Wanda Comic”; it was the first time she used the word “comic” to describe her work.

        Next stop is “Bloomerland,” a section featuring original art from her 2005 book Late Bloomer—an apt title for a twenty-year retrospective that was nevertheless a revelation even to folks who were hip to alternative “comix.” It collects Tyler’s earliest published work—short pieces originally seen in anthologies such as Weirdo and Wimmen’s Comics in the ’80s and ’90s— along with new material. In “Bloomerland” as elsewhere in the show, Tyler’s work is largely concerned with family matters, from her childhood being raised by the “Greatest Generation” in northern Illinois, to the joys and struggles of bringing up the daughter she has with Green, to chronicling the lives of her aging parents. Tyler’s sharp but humane sense of humor, and an unflinching honesty that even the notoriously unrestrained Crumb called “shocking,” are on display here. In her first published piece in Weirdo, Uncovered Property (1987), a naive nine-year-old Carol, in full view of her family, flashes her non-existent breasts at a city inspector in a desperate attempt to persuade him to install a water main (her teenage sister told her this would “drive men wild”). But that’s just the punchline—the real fun of the story comes from Tyler’s observations of family dynamics, mostly sibling antagonism and parental exasperation. A one-page cartoon from 1988 called Anatomy of a New Mom depicts Tyler’s post-pregnancy body like an “Operation” game board, with a belly of “uncoagulated jello,” “mashed potatoes” for brains, and a hand basket of “relics”—“creativity, solitude, focus, spontaneity”—from “pre-baby days.” (Tyler dedicated Late Bloomer to “anyone who has deferred a dream” due to child-rearing, illness, or loss.)

        The old underground comics were usually black-and-white, but when color later became an option, it allowed Tyler to bring her painterly sensibilities to her comics. In the one-pager Once, We Ran (2004) Tyler delicately applies watercolors to her loose ink work to nostalgic effect, in a flashback to a summer day spent with her daughter, shopping at yard sales and running across hot asphalt in matching skirts. There are two pages here from Just A Bad Seed (1996), in which Tyler uses gouache to render an anecdote about calming her young child’s fear of the “evil” sunflowers bobbing outside her bedroom window. The six panels on each page are nested in frames of richly hued, slightly menacing flora, and a glowing night sky that recalls Van Gogh, who also contemplated sunflowers.

        Tyler’s comics are often as formally inventive as they are beautifully crafted. The “Bloomerland” section closes out with a philosophically minded collection of illustrations entitled My American Labels (2004), a rumination on midwestern American values in the form of nine produce can labels. The original drawings hang on the wall above a shelf lined with cans, each mocked up with a label, forming a sort of narrative pantry.

        The next territory on the map, marked by a whirlwind of comics art swirling up from a wooden crate a la Pandora’s box, is called Trauma and Trouble. Where her family in Uncovered Property was broadly sketched for humorous effect, here Tyler draws more nuanced and revealing portraits of her mother and father—not an easy thing, given the dark stories and difficult emotions both parents had long repressed. Here are pages from Tyler’s most ambitious and accomplished book to date, 2015’s Soldier’s Heart, her attempt to better understand her father, an easily angered, PTSD-afflicted veteran of World War II. On one page, Tyler paints a portrait of her dad puttering in his neatly organized, fully appointed workshop: it’s got “every power tool, every hand tool there is… The guy can do Anything!” Tyler tells us in the captions. Yet in the center of the page, Tyler’s father, looking a bit small inside the high-ceilinged space, stands at his workbench cursing out a few errant nails (“Will you cocksuckers quit rolling around!”). Tyler’s admiration for this man is as clear as his need to maintain control over his corner of the world. In another formally creative and emotionally moving page, her dad drives his station wagon down a winding rural road, while around him the words “Not all scars R visible” are woven almost imperceptibly into the landscape.

        Here too are pages from 1994’s The Hannah Story (originally published in the anthology Drawn & Quarterly and later incorporated into Soldier’s Heart). It’s a heartrending account, related by Tyler’s mother, of the death in 1947 of Tyler’s two-year-old sister Ann. The child survived being scalded by a pot of boiling water, only to die due to hospital neglect. The reactions of family members to the loss were unhelpful at best, leaving Hannah Tyler to struggle with her guilt and grief alone. Carol Tyler again uses color sparingly here, for instance to punctuate the sepia-tone memories with spots of red—for the hot stove, the burns on the child, flowers brought to the hospital, and her mother’s broken heart.

        To complicate matters, while Tyler was working with her father on the book, her husband began an affair with another woman and took off to California, leaving Tyler to tend to their now-teenage daughter. When he returns, the shamefaced Green can’t forgive himself. Tyler gives the original autobio cartoonist some advice for healing: “Binky,” she says, “just do your artwork. Process everything, find your truths and become a better person.” In other words: write it down; draw it out. Some might find her a bit too accommodating and forgiving at times, of Green and of her father, but for Tyler, art is the way through life’s most difficult circumstances, and art both requires and engenders understanding.

        The final stop on the exhibition map is… another map, a sort of concept sketch for her upcoming book The Ephemerata: Shaping the Exquisite Nature of Grief. It’s a map of a place Tyler calls “Griefville,” through which she wanders Dante-like in pages from the book, displayed here. She encounters symbols of death and grieving—mourners dragging logs representing their loved ones, beings called the Mitigators who comfort those in pain, and a giant bonnet like one worn by her great-grandmother, a healer, in which Tyler can shelter. While Tyler’s symbolism is highly personal, she assures us “this is a place for everyone who has suffered a loss… It’s here for us all.” Justin Green died in 2022, a few years after Tyler created the Griefville map. Tyler’s portrait of Green hangs nearby. Beside it, she offers one last self-portrait, in which the sad and tired-looking cartoonist holds a clay pot above which hovers like an “impossible trident”—an optical illusion, the importance of which will likely be revealed when The Ephemerata is released.

        There’s more here than can easily be digested in one visit (don’t miss Tyler’s account of seeing the Beatles in 1965 and be sure to visit the giant walk-in kettle in the center of the room where you can draw out your own thoughts). It’s a joy just to immerse yourself in Tyler’s world through her art and the wonderful design of the exhibition, curated by her daughter Julia. Still, as always with comics exhibitions, it’s important to note that even the most beautiful original comics pages are just relics of the comics-making process—the final artworks are the books themselves. Write It Down, Draw It Out is a funky, compassionate, invigorating experience that should drive visitors directly to bookshops and libraries to read Tyler’s graphic works in full.

        On Friday, September 19 at 2pm, Carol Tyler will give a guided gallery tour of Write It Down, Draw It Out: The Comics Art of Carol Tyler as part of Cartoon Crossroads Columbus. For information, visit cartoons.osu.edu.

Sean Bieri, a cartoonist and graphic designer, has written on art for the Detroit Metro Times, Wayne State University, and the Erb Family Foundation among other outlets. He received both his BFA and a BA in Art History—28 years apart—from Wayne State. He is a founding member of Hatch, an arts collective based in the Detroit enclave of Hamtramck, where he lives. He is currently assisting Hatch in the renovation of the “Hamtramck Disneyland” folk art site.