MARISA ACOCELLA
With her latest book, the cartoonist brings history’s forgotten women back into the picture
marisa acocella was raised in a devout Catholic family. But one of the Bible’s main teachings bugged her. “I always thought, ‘How could a male God give birth to all this?’ ” Acocella says, gesturing at . . . everything. “It never made sense to me. There had to be a God the Mother.” The question nagged her all through her childhood in Roselle Park, New Jersey, her college years studying art at Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute, her early jobs in advertising in the Eighties. In 1992, while she was working on her first comic strip, “She,” for Mirabella magazine, another idea for a title popped into her head: The Big She-Bang.
Which just so happens to be the name of her latest graphic novel, published last fall.
The Big She-Bang (subtitle: The Herstory of the Universe According to God the Mother) is a historical corrective that retells the tale of human existence through a feminist lens. A dizzying trip through wormholes of theology and spiritual ideology, the book highlights goddesses, female divinities, and real women who’ve been downplayed or stripped from the record. You’ll meet Sophia, a socalled divine twin to Jesus; Hypatia, a Hellenistic philosopher executed by religious zealots; and Pope Joan, who was exactly what she sounds like. Acocella did a year’s worth of research, consulting close to 50 books on everything from Buddhist scriptures to Mayan texts to inform her work.
“I loved doing deep dives into Mary Magdalene,” she says. “Did you know she was a princess? And then she was sex-trafficked when she was 16. The more I dove in, the more I wanted to know.”
Acocella, 60, has been a haveit-all kind of feminist her entire life. “She” was a Sex and the City
precursor that followed Acocella’s alter ego through her time as a high-powered but unfulfilled Manhattan ad exec dating cute but unfulfilling men and wearing expensive but very fulfilling shoes. (She comes by that love honestly — her mother designed heels for Jackie Kennedy.) That strip begat a book, Just Who the Hell Is She Anyway?,
which led Acocella to pursue cartooning full time. Soon, she was landing spots in The New Yorker,
where her work is still featured. Her second book, Cancer Vixen, is an illustrated memoir that kicks off with the discovery of a tumor in her breast at 43, three weeks before her wedding. A frank and often hilarious account of the doctor appointments and chemo sessions that followed, it also charts a fairy-tale love story that sadly ended in divorce 12 years later. But that experience led her to finally write the book she’d been musing about for a lifetime. “Going through the divorce, it was hard for me to find my voice,” Acocella says. “I was trying to figure out who I was as an artist. That’s when I went back to these stories. And the more I dived into the stories of women being gaslighted, scapegoated, minimized, the stronger my voice got.”
She-Bang is hardly a condemnation of the opposite sex. Throughout, Acocella explores the notion that a balance of male and female energies is foundational to many creation myths. “[The Bible tries] to do that with Mary Magdalene and Jesus,” she notes. “I’m still finding stuff out. I’m going to have to do another volume.”