Shary Flenniken

Shary Flenniken (born 1950) is an American editor-writer-illustrator and underground cartoonist. After joining the burgeoning underground comics movement in the early 1970s, she became a prominent contributor to National Lampoon and was one of the editors of the magazine for two years.

Flenniken is widely recognized as an influential figure in the integration of feminist concerns into underground comics. Her best-known creation is the comic strip Trots and Bonnie, a no-holds-barred satire of the adult world seen through the eyes of the naïve girl of the title and her talking dog (and their worldly-wise, precocious friend Pepsi); these three main characters are all sex-obsessed, and the two girls are in eighth grade, i.e. the final year of Junior High. Available in a 1989 French edition entitled Sexe & Amour for many years, an American edition was not released until 2021; it provides much cultural context. Despite the sometimes raunchy subject matter, it is illustrated in the vein of early comic strip artists like Clare Briggs and H. T. Webster. Shary Flenniken grew up in Alaska, Panama, and Seattle, where she studied at a commercial art school.