This summer, meet the most unlikable character you’ll ever love. Fantagraphics is releasing Bitchy!: The Exasperating Existence of Midge McCracken, the definitive collection of one of comics’ most distinctive and pioneering voices — in stores now, as of July 21, 2026.

The volume draws from Roberta Gregory‘s Naughty Bits, her 40-issue solo series published by Fantagraphics from 1991 to 2004, a run that remains the longest-running solo comic title by a woman creator. Bitchy! gathers over thirty of the strip’s most iconic and irreverent installments and, for the first time, arranges them in chronological order, tracing the entire life story of Midge McCracken, the crude, irascible, and altogether obnoxious woman better known to readers as Bitchy Bitch.

Bitchy!: The Exasperating Existence of Midge McCracken is available now on the Fantagraphics website.

Who is Roberta Gregory?

Roberta Gregory has been a foundational figure in feminist, queer and underground comics since the 1970s. Born in Los Angeles in 1953 — the daughter of Disney comics artist Bob Gregory (best known for his work on the Duck) — she debuted in 1974 as a contributor to the influential all-female anthology Wimmen’s Comix, before creating the strip Feminist Funnies later that year. In 1976, she self-published Dynamite Damsels, which she has described as the first regulation-sized comic book put out by a woman working alone.

After relocating to Seattle in 1989 to work full-time at Fantagraphics, Gregory launched Naughty Bits in 1991, introducing Bitchy Bitch, who is later joined by her lesbian counterpart, Bitchy Butch. The series became a critical mainstay of ’90s alternative comics, earning Gregory multiple Eisner Award nominations across Best Humor Publication, Best Short Story, Best Writer, and Best Writer/Artist categories, along with a 1994 Inkpot Award from Comic-Con International and a 1998 Golden Toonie from Cartoonists Northwest. The character later crossed over into animation, headlining shorts and the series Life’s a Bitch on Oxygen and The Comedy Network in the early 2000s.

Gregory’s broader body of work spans the graphic novel Winging It, the gender-identity-focused Artistic Licentiousness, and the strip Sheila and the Unicorn.

Bitchy!: The Exasperating Existence of Midge McCracken

Arranged for the first time in chronological order, the witty, irreverent, and unvarnished stories that make up Midge’s troubled and troubling life coalesce into a lively narrative built to captivate new and old readers alike. Bitchy! features a candid, illuminating new introduction from Gregory herself, plus an all-new afterword from comics critic Helen Chazen.

“Midge’s story unfolds, age by age, era by era, not necessarily in the order in which they were created,” Gregory writes in her introduction. “It’s an epic. Continuity was not my first thought as I churned out issue after issue… [but] these stories do seem to add up to a comprehensive narrative of sorts. And, our deeply flawed Midge does gain insight and achieve some measure of enlightenment in her journey through these pages. Sort of.”

Midge McCracken is, to be blunt, a real bitch — bitter, judgmental, and expecting the worst, which she usually gets. She’s the office sourpuss everyone avoids, her inner monologue mind-numbingly negative, and she can be shockingly nasty, hateful, and even racist. Known for smashing through the boundaries of uncomfortable subject matter, the stories collected in Bitchy! follow Midge from a traumatic childhood through an awful adolescence and into an embittered middle age, with flickers of self-awareness and insight along the way. If enlightenment is possible for Bitchy, nobody’s beyond hope.

In her afterword, Chazen frames the compilation itself as a transformation of the material: “The weighty tome in your hand tells the story of Bitchy Bitch’s life so far as we know it, an unending cavalcade of frustrations from youth to womanhood… Not only through arrangement but the very act of compilation, the story of Midge McCracken is changed forever, simply because it is, in fact, a story. It’s a story of a girl who grows up to be a woman, challenged from the start by the violent sexual and social contradictions of heteronormative life… This is Bitchy’s life, and now, in this collected form, it is Bitchy’s life story.”

Prism Comics is excited to share an exclusive preview of the Bitchy! omnibus below: