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Fantagraphics has reissued Roberta Gregory‘s Naughty Bits—her 40-issue, 14-year alt-comics landmark—as Bitchy!: The Exasperating Existence of Midge McCracken, reordering 30 issues chronologically for the first time. Bitchy! follows Midge’s growth from an obnoxious, crude, and self-serving narcissist to someone who is marginally less insufferable decades later, by way of religion, addiction, feminism’s second wave, and her own spectacular homophobia toward the one friend who never left.

Prism Comics caught up with Gregory about the reissue, Bitchy’s short-lived animated afterlife on Oxygen, and why a character built entirely out of bad decisions still has something to say

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

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OLLIE KAPLAN: You self-published Dynamite Damsels in 1976, which is thought to be the first self-published continuing series by a woman creator. Do you have any reflections on that legacy?

ROBERTA GREGORY: Damsels was a one-shot, not a series, though I did draw some stories for a sequel that were never published. (Some of these might appear in a future reprint of my Bitchy Butch stories that also collects my Gay Comix comics.) If you’re talking about standard format, Silver Age size, saddle-stitched mass produced comics in a press run of ten thousand that were distributed through companies like Last Gasp…. Then, yes it is. That was exactly 50 years ago, in 1976.

Women were creating feminist comics before that, though. The late Mary Wings published small press Come Out Comix, and I have Max Dashu’s Witch Dream comics, which were also not that professionally manufactured nor widely distributed, but still published at least a year or so before. I hadn’t actually seen them until post-Damsels, but they were out there, and probably even more from that pre-digital age that I’m not aware of. 

KAPLAN: For readers who are more familiar with your earlier underground work in Wimmen’s Comix and Gay Comix, what should they know about Midge and her crew—and why would they find her story appealing?

GREGORY: Well, Midge is completely heterosexual to the point of satire, almost to the level of buffoonery, in my opinion (and believe me, it was great fun to depict her sex life on overdrive) but there’s still loads of LGBT content in the overall storyline, much of it centering around Midge’s zealously born-again co-worker Marcie, along with Midge’s mindless homophobia toward someone who’s probably her only real friend, her school chum Barb. Plus, from the early 1960s through to (almost) the present, it’s a humorous and perhaps even encouraging look at one person’s VERY gradual evolution from an unaware, prejudiced, self-serving narcissist to someone who’s…. not quite as bad as all that. And besides, I had such a blast writing and drawing it! 

KAPLAN: Naughty Bits ran 40 issues over 14 years, the longest solo run by a woman in alt-comics history. What do you think made Midge, a 1990s Karen, such a readable character — and what do you hope readers take away from her story in the 2020s?

GREGORY: I think there may be a little Bitchy in everyone…her personality really exaggerates some of humanity’s less admirable traits: short sightedness, avoiding responsibility, shifting blame, plus, she really has had a pretty challenging life (thanks to some of the crap I shamelessly put her through) although it’s not always easy to feel sympathy for her when she makes a stupidly racist comment, even despite knowing how she ended up that way. I always think an antiheroine is far more interesting than a heroine. 

KAPLAN: Somewhat relatedly — thinking back on how technology (1) impacts & mediates human interaction & (2) its relationship to media literacy — how do you think Midge’s story would be different today?

GREGORY: There are certainly storylines that just wouldn’t work now that almost everyone has a phone and camera and instant link to the internet at hand, even in Midge’s “present day” stories. To Midge, an answering machine and videotape recorder are high tech, but the series did end over twenty years ago. Midge being Midge, for reasons purely her own, she would still be the very last person in the room to have a smartphone. 

KAPLAN: As you mention in the forward, Naughty Bits was adapted into an animated series on the Oxygen Network—any hope of a revival?

GREGORY: The “Bitchy Bits” and “Life’s a Bitch” animated cartoons really didn’t resemble my comics all that much. I designed characters and backgrounds and props and such, but had little if anything to do with the writing. It was basically a somewhat edgy adult animation sitcom, but in my opinion the writers never really exploited the potential for animating a character like Bitchy. The company that produced them seems to be out of business and some of the cartoons are scattered across YouTube— I just found some recently— but I would love to see her animated with an entirely different approach. Her physical properties and proportions just beg for some imaginative animation! 

KAPLAN: Bitchy! reorders 30 of the 40 issues chronologically for the first time — Young Bitchy through Old Bitchy as one throughline. What did you see in Midge’s arc once it was laid out start to finish? 

GREGORY: The rearranged episodes do seem to work fairly well chronologically. I certainly wasn’t planning on 40 issues when Gary and Kim suggested I put together a comic book of my own for Fantagraphics. From the very first issue I didn’t anticipate the two-dimensional, utterly unlikeable Bitchy character taking over as the star of the series and hadn’t expected to gradually develop such a complex character storyline by storyline. I did allow her to accomplish a bit of personal growth and make some healthier choices along the way… if only up to a point. 

KAPLAN: Did republishing Midge’s story chronologically impact how you view the character, her story, and her cultural impact?

GREGORY: It made me aware of how many topics are covered in this sprawling epic: childhood, religion, politics, dysfunctional families, sex, drugs, happiness, poor choices versus doing the right thing, along with my not-unbiased viewpoint of some pivotal eras in American history: the Kennedy Era, the Vietnam Era, the Sexual Revolution, Peace and Love, Feminism’s Second Wave, the Eighties….and even the Millennium Bug. Does anyone even remember that one?

KAPLAN: The book had a genuinely wild road to the shelves this year. Anything you want on record about what that limbo was like as the creator?

GREGORY: Fortunately, most of it ended up being, ultimately, yet more Fake News. Rumor had it the print run (printed overseas along with another Fantagraphics title) was loaded onto a cargo ship now stranded in the Strait of Hormuz back in March, and possibly even having been fired upon. This went on for months, indefinitely delaying the book’s release date. It took an NPR reporter preparing an episode of Money Matters to do a little research to discover that the book had never made it onto that particular ship to begin with. It ended up being one of the more ordinary sorts of delays instead of an entire print run going up in flames, to everyone’s great relief. 

KAPLAN: Thought balloons are doing a lot of work in this series — letting readers hear what Bitchy won’t say aloud. Was that device there from issue one?

GREGORY: Oh, yes! From the beginning the reader had a front row seat to Midge’s self-defeating, ultra-judgmental, baggage-strewn, painfully clueless mindset. Comics with word and thought balloons, along with prose fiction, seem to be about the only media where this can be presented most effectively. Some people scolded me early on for making my panels too “wordy” but I like to think of it more as mental wallpaper or something. 

KAPLAN: What would you tell a young queer or feminist cartoonist trying to make something as uncomfortable as Bitchy! in 2026?

GREGORY: If you have something to say, say it as only you can! You’ve got a darn good reason to be here. However… At the risk of sounding old, my publishing debut dates back to the Underground Comix Era, when people had to really go out of their way to find the print publications with my comix in it, usually family-unfriendly “Head Shops.” And during the Bitchy Age, that is, the 1990s, my Naughty Bits comics were mostly only sporadically available in comic book shops. Now your work can be instantly available to practically anyone in the world…. Along with the creations of millions of others. Make it your absolute best. It will find the readers who most want to see it… and these days, horrible people who might hate it will find it too. Along with honing your art and writing skills, practice thickening your skin.

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