Inside The Hilarious, Brilliant, Messy World Of Roberta Gregory’s ‘Bitchy’

Image from cover of Bitchy: The Exasperating Existence of Midge McCracken by Roberta Gregory, published by Fantagraphics Books, 2026.

Art by Roberta Gregory

Roberta Gregory wasn’t looking to create a classic when she knocked out the first “Bitchy Bitch” story for issue #6 of Graphic Story Monthly (Fantagraphics) in 1990. But over more than 30 years, the irascible Midge McCracken transcended her “date from hell” joke origins to become one of the foundational feminist independent comics and the spiritual antecedent for a generation of unapologetically dislikable comedic female anti-heroes.

Midge’s story unfurled in 8-page increments in Naughty Bits, a periodical comic from Fantagraphics anthologizing Gregory’s work, which ran 40 issues from 1991-2004. While Naughty Bits focused on the breadth of Gregory’s interests, including autobiographical, slice of life and experimental stories, Midge grabbed the spotlight, spawning several trade collections, a queer-themed spinoff Butchy Bitch, and even an animated series that ran in the early 2000s on the Oxygen cable network.

Now Fantagraphics has collected the entire saga in a deluxe new edition, Bitchy: The Exasperating Existence of Midge McCracken (2026). For the first time, Gregory has arranged the stories in chronological order of Midge’s life, starting from her childhood and adolescence before moving into her messy adulthood, catastrophic sex life, toxic friendships and soul-crushing workplace.

In a phone interview last week, Gregory said she realized as she was putting all the stories together for the book that they formed the story of a complete life, even though she was initially just focused on telling one-off humor stories. “I asked myself, what happens if you put them all in consecutive, chronological order, and it actually works out pretty well,” she said.

Gregory said that she began doing the Bitchy stories as a lighthearted complement to the other work she was publishing in Naughty Bits, as a way to fill pages as she juggled day jobs and other life obligations. Several stories in, she realized Midge was starting to develop into a real character and needed a backstory to explain some of her troublesome behavior.

“I really didn’t want to keep doing stories about a cranky bitch having bad sex and all that,” she said, “So in issue 6, I showed her as a teenager and getting knocked up and having to get an illegal abortion in Mexico. I did a story about her childhood. And that’s when she started fleshing out as a real person.”

Gregory says throughout her career as a cartoonist, which began in the days of underground comix in the 1970s, she gravitated toward stories and subjects that weren’t being told elsewhere. “People weren’t really doing stories about the sexual abuse of children or illegal abortion,” she said. “I thought, ok, I’ll make up these interesting stories for myself and for Naughty Bits, and it kind of worked out. They started getting out into the world for people to find and read in the 1990s.”

Gregory says she drew inspiration from her own upbringing. “I grew up surrounded by Republicans and didn’t really have a liberal family, so I’m used to dealing with people I have nothing in common with, but still need to get along with. Maybe that helped.”

Midge’s enduring strength is being completely out of f’s to give and careening through every situation like a demolition derby. Gregory drew her as mean, menacing, and thoroughly indifferent to male-centric standards of beauty and decorum. “On one cover, I drew her lying on the beach in a bikini with a tampon string hanging out,” she said.

Midge is less a “flawed protagonist” than a grotesque in the style of the underground comix tradition of the 1960s. Her anger, lust, racism, selfishness and resentment are exaggerated into comic types, similar to what underground icons like Robert Crumb or Gilbert Shelton did. But Gregory did them one better by employing these tropes on female-centric topics at a time when even “alternative” cartoonists didn’t think women were capable of doing “in-your-face, exaggerated comics.”

“It was a comic featuring a woman, by a woman, with really funny exaggerated stuff that people don’t want to talk about,” she said. “I did it because it was the kind of work I wanted to see.”

Bitchy is not only good gag humor, it is powerful satire. Through Midge’s eyes, Gregory laid waste to the casual cruelty, cattiness, sexism and narcissism of 90s workplace culture, dating, family relationships, female friendships, consumerism and more. While some of the references are dated, the sources of humor remain painfully relevant.

Gregory says she has her doubts about whether today’s culture would be as understanding of deliberately problematic and abrasive material, but echoes of Bitchy can be found all over Millennial and Gen-Z entertainment, including 2010s-era “messy female antihero” series like Lena Dunham’s Girls, Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag, Rachel Bloom’s Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and Gretchen (Aya Cash) from You’re the Worst.

Naughty Bits ended in 2005 and Gregory’s work has appeared sporadically in other outlets. She says she is currently working on a graphic biography of Clara Schumann and various other projects. Though having Bitchy in print in such a complete and deluxe edition is a treat for fans, it risks distorting Gregory’s larger legacy and importance in comics, including her pioneering underground work in the 70s, being the first cartoonist to bring queer themes into “wimmin’s comix,” and some of the more serious and more tightly-drawn strips that appeared in Naughty Bits alongside the broad humor of Midge and her pals.

Gregory said there has been some talk of a Butchy Bitch collection and a broader retrospective, but she is currently focused on her upcoming projects and keeping up her health.

Bitchy: The Exasperating Existence of Midge McCracken was published in June, 2026 by Fantagraphics Books.