Ranked #5 in "Best of the Small Press 2012" by Jennifer Hayden (Underwire)

Glitz-2-Go finally collects nearly 40 years of comics stories by Diane Noomin, best-known for her work as cartoonist and editor of the women comics anthology Twisted Sisters.

Noomin’s career in underground comix began in 1972 and included appearances in Wimmen’s Comix, Young Lust, Short Order, Arcade, Real Girl, Lemme Outta Here, El Perfecto, True Glitz, Aftershock, Mind Riot, Titters, and Weirdo.

Glitz-2-Go stars Noomin’s signature character, DiDi Glitz, the frustrated middle-aged glamour-puss and anxiety-ridden suburban Sisyphus. All of her stories, beginning with her debut “Restless Reverie” in 1974’s Family Fun Comics, are finally back in print for the first time in over 30 years.

Noomin was a pioneer in the emergence of women cartoonists in the 1970s. Along with cartoonist and co-editor Aline Kominsky-Crumb, she edited and contributed to Twisted Sisters Comics in its original incarnation as an underground comic book in 1976, and in the early 1990s edited the celebrated collections Twisted Sisters: A Collection of Bad Girl Art and its sequel Twisted Sisters: Drawing the Line, featuring the work of a generation of women cartoonists.

Like many women who wrote and drew underground and alternative comix in the ’70s, Noomin’s contribution to the form has been unjustly overlooked. This book goes toward rectifying that by collecting all of Noomin’s best comics as well as spotlighting Noomin’s other creative outlets such as reproducing set and costume designs and cast photos of I’d Rather Be Doing Something Else: The DiDi Glitz Story, performed by the women’s theatre company, “Les Nickelettes” in San Francisco in 1980 and photos of a larger-than-life DiDi papier-maché sculpture of DiDi that Noomin did for San Francisco’s Little Frankenstein Gallery in 1994.

Fantagraphics has been at the forefront of preserving the best comics by the groundbreaking “underground” generation of cartoonists who revolutionized the form in the ’60s and ’70s. Glitz-2-Go is the first solo collection by Diane Noomin.

17-page excerpt (download 2.6 MB PDF):

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“Diane developed characters in an altered reality to express her alienation, with her scathing black sense of humor and an incredible eye for detail. Her visual universe is so kitsch, so stupefyingly overdone, something like a mixture of Liberace, Joan Rivers and Jackie Mason — Graceland on the Borscht Belt.” – from the Foreword by Aline Kominsky Crumb

“Tarty, naive Glitz is part Barbie Doll, part Alice in Wonderland and part Madonna.” – Art Forum

“Diane Noomin has been producing some of the most hysterically funny comics on the market.” — Hypno Magazine

"Middle-aged vamp Didi Glitz, otherwise unable to escape her own pastiche as a cocktail slugging sassy dame, becomes a developed character when presented in book form. Her endless misadventures of failed sexual encounters and dismissive mothering habits ride on both titillation and disgust, as each disappointing potential father figure impels another emotional breakdown. It’s a shame that Noomin has been under-appreciated since the ‘70s, as her sweet-talking’ slang and sexually explicit art create mini-narratives that are part tragedy and part, well, party." – Olivia Saperstein, Bust

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