Lyn Chevli

Lyn Chevli (December 24, 1931 – October 8, 2016), also credited as Lyn Chevely and Chin Lyvely, was an American cartoonist who participated in the underground comix movement. With Joyce Farmer, she created the feminist comic-book anthology series Tits & Clits Comix (1972–1987) and Abortion Eve (1973), an educational comic book about women's newly-guaranteed reproductive rights.

Lyn Chevli
BornMarilyn Keith
(1931-12-24)December 24, 1931
Milford, Connecticut
DiedOctober 8, 2016(2016-10-08) (aged 84)
Laguna Beach, California
NationalityAmerican
Area(s)Cartoonist, Writer, Editor, Publisher
Pseudonym(s)
  • Lyn Chevely
  • Chin Lyvely
Notable works

Biography

Lyn Chevli was born in Milford, Connecticut, on December 24, 1931, as Marilyn Keith.[1] She graduated from Skidmore College in New York[2] and exhibited at the International Festival of Arts and Sawdust Festival as a silversmith and then sculptor.[2] She married Narendrakumar Aditram Chevli, with whom she lived briefly in Mumbai.[1] After moving to the U.S. she had two daughters, Neela (born 1957) and Shanta (born 1959).[1] She and her children moved to California with her mother in 1961.[1]

She ran Fahrenheit 451 Books with her husband Dennis Madison in Dana Point, and then from Laguna Beach from 1968. The store specialized in new age literature.[1] Chevli was the designated owner of the store because she already had a reseller license in California.

Fahrenheit 451 carried the new underground comix, which impressed Chevli with their anarchic spirit, but she was concerned with their male-centered content. She sold the book store in 1972,[1] and she and Joyce Farmer founded Nanny Goat Productions as a feminist publishing company, with the goal of giving a voice to female creators in the male-dominated and often misogynist underground comix movement.[3] They published all-female Tits & Clits Comix in July 1972, preceding Wimmen's Comix by a few weeks. Its first printing of 20,000 copies sold out by the next year. Because the series' title limited its exposure, the second issue appeared in 1973 under the title Pandoras Box Comix [sic]. Around this time, sellers of underground comix faced prosecution for selling obscene material, and the new owners of Fahrenheit 451 were arrested, though the charges were later dropped with help from the American Civil Liberties Union. The series returned to its original title in 1976, with a new issue #2, and continued until its seventh issue in 1987; Chevli stopped contributing after the third issue, but continued as co-editor through the sixth.[1]

In June 1973, following the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision on abortion, Chevli and Farmer published Abortion Eve, an educational comic begun the year before about women's reproductive rights.[3] Drawing upon their experiences as birth control and pregnancy counselors[1] at Laguna's Free Clinic,[3] the single-issue comic book presented the stories of five women – all of them named variations on Eve, each in differing circumstances – going through the process of obtaining abortions.[4][5]

Chevli turned to prose in 1981 when she published an erotic book for women titled Alida. She wrote pieces for a number of publications, including local gay magazine The Blade. She wrote two unpublished memoirs, one about her time in underground comix and another about her life in the 1950s, when she married and moved to India. Chevli died in Laguna Beach on October 8, 2016, of age-related causes.[1]

References
  1. Farmer 2016.
  2. "Humor from the underground". Coastline Pilot. Retrieved October 10, 2016.
  3. McCabe 2016.
  4. Meier 2016.
  5. Trina, Robbins (April 1999). From girls to grrrlz : a history of [women's] comics from teens to zines. San Francisco. ISBN 0811821994. OCLC 39130766.

Works cited
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