catherine ("cat") yronwode (born May 12, 1947) is a writer and editor with an extensive career in the comic book industry.
She was born Catherine Manfredi in San Francisco to "bohemian/academic parents"[1], and grew up in Berkeley, Santa Monica, Sacramento, and traveling abroad. She attended Shimer College in Illinois as an early entrant, but dropped out, living as a hippie in various places including the Tolstoy Peace Farm, an anarchist commune in Washington. She met her former partner, Peter Paskin, and they invented their last name "yronwode" in 1969 (it is pronounced "Ironwood"), and continued to travel.
While living at a commune in the Missouri Ozarks, yronwode began freelance writing, starting with how-to articles for low-tech living. She and peter yronwode broke up, and she began an interest in sex magick and began writing about popular culture, and in 1980 began a long-running column titled "Fit to Print" for the Comics Buyer's Guide. The column was widely read and gave her a gatekeeper role in comics. Beanworld creator Larry Marder credits her positive review therein for the title's success.[2]. Similarly, when Dan Brereton received a poor review from yronwode for an early project, he felt his "promising career in comics was over".[3] The column, and her work with the APA-I comic-book indexing cooperative, led to freelance editing jobs for Kitchen Sink Press, an important early alternative comics imprint. She wrote The Art of Will Eisner in 1981, an overview of the work of seminal cartoonist Will Eisner, and continued to write books for Kitchen Sink for several years.
She became life and business partners with Dean Mullaney in 1983, who with his brother Jan had co-founded Eclipse Enterprises, a comic book and trading card publisher. With yronwode as editor-in-chief during a period of expanding attention to the art form, Eclipse would publish many innovative works and championed creators' rights in a field which at the time barely respected them. During her tenure, Eclipse published titles including Miracleman, The Rocketeer, and Zot!.
yronwode was involved in two important free expression court cases. In the Michael Correa case that led to the founding of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, yronwode was an expert witness for the defense.[4] In 1992, Eclipse was a defendant when Nassau County, New York seized a crime-themed trading card series they had published under a county obscenity ordinance. The case reached the 2nd Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, where the ordinance was overturned.[5][6][7]
In 1993-94, Mullaney and yronwode, who had married in 1987, divorced and Eclipse went bankrupt.
A freelance writer for many years, yronwode has been published in a number of fields. During the 1990s she was a staff editor and contributor to Organic Gardening Magazine. The California Gardener's Book of Lists (Taylor, 1998) is one of her books on gardening. With her mother Liselotte Glozer, she co-wrote and hand-lettered the faux-medieval cook book, My Lady's Closet Opened and the Secret of Baking Revealed by Two Gentlewomen (Glozer's Booksellers, 1969). Other subjects she has written on for various magazines include collectibles, popular culture, and rural acoustic blues music.
Today yronwode works at Claypool Comics. Since 1996 she and her husband have run the website luckymojo.com, covering magic, occultism, sex magick, and folklore subjects, especially American folklore and the system of African American folk magic called hoodoo. The website hosts extensive text archives including the works of Aleister Crowley, the lyrics of Pink Floyd's Syd Barrett, essays on sex and architecture, magic spells, usenet posts about magic, and annotated blues lyrics related to hoodoo. The website sells occult items and self-published books by yronwode through an online shop, and also hosts a hoodoo podcast.
Yronwode is also notable in the history of Usenet for having written a complaint that was indirectly responsible for the closing of the University of Texas's mail-to-news gateway by Fletcher Mattox in 1995.
Today, yronwode lives in Forestville, California in "tantric partnership"[1] with tyagi nagasiva (now nagasiva bryan w yronwode), whom she married in 2000.
Bibliography
- My Lady's Closet Opened and the Secret of Baking Revealed, by Two Gentlewomen (with Liselotte Erlanger Glozer). Glozer's Booksellers, 1969.
- Will Eisner Color Treasury (with Will Eisner). Kitchen Sink Press,1981. ISBN 0-87816-006-X
- The Art of Will Eisner. Kitchen Sink Press, 1982. ISBN 0-87816-004-3
- Women and the Comics (with Trina Robbins). Eclipse, 1983. ISBN 0-913035-01-7
- The Outer Space Spirit: 1952 (with Will Eisner, Wally Wood, and Pete Hamill). Kitchen Sink Press, 1989. ISBN 0-87816-012-4
- The California Gardener's Book of Lists (with Eileen Smith). Taylor Publishing, 1998. ISBN 0-87833-964-7
- Hoodoo Herb and Root Magic. Lucky Mojo, 2002. ISBN 0-9719612-0-4
- Hoodoo Rootwork Correspondence Course. Lucky Mojo, 2006. ISBN 0-9719612-2-0
References
- ^ a b Catherine Yronwode. "catherine yronwode (biography page)". yronwode.com. Retrieved 2006-09-25.
- ^ Jeremy York (9 November 1991). "Larry Marder interview". Gunk'L'Dunk e-zine. Retrieved 2006-09-26.
{{cite web}}: Check date values in:|date=(help) - ^ Rick Beckley (May 25, 2000). "Interview with Dan Brereton". themestream.com (defunct, via Brereton's website). Retrieved 2006-09-26.
{{cite web}}: Check date values in:|date=(help) - ^ "Censorship of Comics Bibliography: 1980s". Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. Retrieved 2006-09-26.
- ^ "Arts & First Amendment Issues: Comic Books". First Amendment Center. Retrieved 2006-09-26.
- ^ "Battling Against Censorship: Killer Cards". Long Island Newsday. Retrieved 2006-09-26.
- ^ "Eclipse Enterprises v. Gulotta". FindLaw. Retrieved 2006-09-26.
External links
- cat yronwode's autobiography at yronwode.com
- luckymojo.com, yronwode's folklore and occult website
- Ex-Slave Narratives About Hoodoo edited by catherine yronwode at southern-spirits.com