Lee Marrs (born September 5, 1945) is an American comic book writer, animator, and one of the first women underground comix creators. She is best known for her comic book series, The Further Fattening Adventures of Pudge, Girl Blimp, which lasted from 1973 to 1978.
Life and Career[]
Marrs graduated from American University in Washington DC in 1967. Her best friend in college, Barbara Blaisdell's father was comic book artist Tex Blaisdell, who invited her to spend her summers in New York assisting him on comic strip background work for such strips as Prince Valiant and Little Orphan Annie. She started using her middle name, Lee, due to the sexism she faced when searching for freelance gigs. After reviewing her mailed-in art samples, publishers would be shocked when she showed up for a meeting, having assumed she was male. She eventually landed a job at the CBS affiliate in Washington, where she worked on an Emmy Award–winning piece about the 1968 riots in D.C. [1]
Marrs was a frequent contributor to underground comics and one of the “founding mommies” of the Wimmen's Comix collective. She provided stories for Wet Satin, Manhunt, El Perfecto, and Gates of Heaven. Her parodies often substituted lesbians in place of heterosexual figures, as in feature strips in the long-running Gay Comix. In 1971 she co-founded the Alternative Features Service, which distributed news, features and comics to underground newspapers.[2]
As one of Mike Friedrich’s Star*Reach regulars, she expanded her writing and art style to include serious fantasy fiction in Stark’s Quest, a study of ESP, politics, and social engineering. From this body of work, "Waters of Requital" is especially powerful. She created short futuristic graphic tales for Heavy Metal magazine, Epic Illustrated and Imagine magazine.
Marrs had a mainstream comics career at the same time, one of the few comic book creators to do so. She was introduced to the DC Comics editor Joe Orlando by Blaisdell. After a start with DC’s Plop!, Weird Mystery Tales, and House of Secrets, she created "Crazy Lady", a series about growing up female, for Marvel Comics’ Crazy magazine. Most of her mainstream comics work was as a writer, in Wonder Woman Annual 1989, Viking Glory: the Viking Prince, and Zatanna: Come Together. She also wrote Dark Horse Comics’ series Indiana Jones and the Arms of Gold and Indiana Jones and the Iron Phoenix, stories drawn by Leo Duranona. For Blackthorne Publishing, she created Pre-Teen Dirty-Gene Kung Fu Kangaroos, a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles parody.
She has drawn news art and cartoons for newspapers from the Washington Post to the Berkeley Barb; for magazines from the Saturday Review to Crawdaddy. Her work has been reprinted in nine countries, including eight book collections in three countries. Lee received the Inkpot Award in 1982 and served as an Eisner Award judge in 2002.
Animation[]
Marrs has had another career, that of an animation director. An Emmy Award-winning art director, she has run Lee Marrs Artwork, a digital design and animation company for many years. She worked in 2D digital animation in the early 1980s, Her clients have included Disney/ABC, Apple Computer, IBM, Time Warner Inc., Children's Television Workshop, Nickelodeon, Electronic Arts, and MTV. She is currently Multimedia Co-chair and head of the Animation Strand for Berkeley City College.
In 2005, she earned her MA in Multimedia from California State University.[3]
She has been partnered with Star*Reach collaborator Mike Friedrich since 1978.[4]
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Sources[]
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