Aack! Cathy, the iconic and much-maligned comic strip by Cathy Guisewite, chronicled the day-to-day tribulations of its titular working woman for 35 years, met with equal praise and derision. In this podcast, Jamie Loftus (Lolita Podcast, My Year in Mensa) weaves between reporting and fiction, putting a cruelly treated cartoon everywoman in context.

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Allow me to be the first to advise you: Cathy comics are good as hell — but it’s complicated. Today, Jamie takes a look at what exactly happens in the 34 years of Cathy lore, and it’s way more than you think.

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For an author constantly conflated with her most famous creation, would the real Cathy Guisewite please stand up? In this two-part interview, Jamie and Cathy talk about what the journey from unknown diarist to world-famous aack connoisseur was like, and all the misjudgments and road blocks that came up along the way. 

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Today, we hear what happened to Cathy at the height of the comic’s popularity in the late 1980s until now. Cathy Guisewite tells Jamie all!

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This week, Jamie takes a look at it where Cathy falls in the history of American feminism — and take a look at how the feminist movement has progressed, regressed, and gatekept. Why are feminists frustrated with Cathy? 

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Cathy Guisewite is often hailed as one of the only women in comic strips, but that's far from the truth -- this week, we uncover her frequently overlooked predecessors going back to the flapper age, and the underground scene that developed when the funny pages wouldn't address the issues feminists wanted to hear about, Wimmen's Commix. 

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In part two of Jamie's exploration into who shared the American funny pages with Cathy Guisewite, we take a look at the artists chronicling the experiences of the boomer and Gen X crowd day to day along with her -- Gary Trudeau of Doonesbury, Aaron McGruder of The Boondocks, Alison Bechdel of Dykes to Watch Out For, and Lynn Johnston of For Better or For Worse. Tell your moms!

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In this minisode, Grammy award-winning electronic music producer Jamie Loftus shares a Pulitzer Prize-winning song teaching your mom how to access a podcast. Aack Cast will be back next week to kick off the second half of our series!

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