Your Best Life, Sharon Rudahl’s Way: ‘if you’re building in sand, you may as well build castles’

A member of the San Francisco underground, Sharon Rudahl was one of the “founding mommies” of the Wimmen’s Comix Collective. Besides contributing to and editing issues of Wimmen’s Comix, she made work for Anarchy Comics, Bizarre Sex, Comix Book, Corporate Crime Comics, Dope Comix, Rip Off Comix, Tits n Clits, and Wet Satin. She contributed to Strip AIDS U.S.A. and Choices. Her 1980 comic Adventures of Crystal Night was included in Dan Nadel's anthology Art in Time: Unknown Comic Book Adventures, 1940-1980. Under the pen name of Mary Sativa, Rudahl authored two novels, one of which, Acid Temple Ball, has achieved cult status. Much of her career has been spent making short comics and illustrations. The past twenty years have been some of Rudahl’s most fruitful and productive years as a cartoonist, even while sustaining immersion in her trademark elaborate page design. She wrote and illustrated two heavily researched graphic biographies, 2007’s A Dangerous Woman: A Graphic Biography of Emma Goldman and 2020’s Ballad of an American: A Graphic Biography of Paul Robeson, the two longest works she ever made. Rudahl wrote the nonfiction graphic novel The Bund. There has also been a large b...