I’d never seen Trots and Bonnie before, and needed it badly. You do too. I’m so glad it’s back.
—Liana Finck
Dangerously funny, charming, and sexy—all of the things I hope to be one day.
—Jack Handey
Drawn in an exquisite pastiche on the classic comic strip style of George McManus (Bringing Up Father) and the like, [Trots and Bonnie is] a slyly whimsical take on feminism, hippies, the counterculture, and more. . . . Flenniken [is] . . . one of the best cartoonists of her time, full stop.
—Heidi MacDonald, Comics Beat
A naïve 13-year-old girl named Bonnie and her wisecracking dog Trots star in this uproariously funny and bawdy collection of comics, which originally ran in National Lampoon magazine throughout the 1970s–80s. Much about Bonnie’s life is typical of fiction about young teens . . . Yet Flenniken touches on these familiar tropes in order to twist and subvert them into a brutal satire of American culture from a brazenly feminist perspective. . . . An intelligent, uncompromising, and singularly candid chronicle of young womanhood.
—Library Journal (starred review)
I remember being around the age of these characters when I first read some of these tales of nearly feral adolescence in the National Lampoon in the 1970s. . . . While everything else in the Lampoon was all about the “male gaze,” Shary gave us the “female gaze.” She offered National Lampoon's predominantly young male readership a view that was out of our comfort zone, into the inner workings of girls like the ones who surrounded us at our own schools; highlighting that they have their own motivations, their own curiosities and desires, and their own humor—a brilliant antidote to the male-centric mindset that was being shoveled onto us by so much of the media.
—James Romberger, The Comics Journal
Flenniken wanted to widen the eyes of these [National Lampoon] readers to what the world was like for women. . . . She conveys emotions and personalities with the slightest tweak of an eye. . . the pictures consistently delight. As the eye takes them in, one smiles, then giggles, before being overtaken by sputters and spleen. . . . Flenniken had a full set of artistic chops.
—Bob Levin, The Comics Journal
[Flenniken] never takes it easy on herself, even strips that are mostly just two people talking feature different poses in each panel, reflecting adolescents’ tendency to fidget about. Her titles are different each time too, which is appropriate for a strip that, in many ways, is about trying on different identities: bad girl, Girl Scout, sex worker, artist, activist, dutiful daughter, anarchist and more. That’s what 13 is, and that’s what Flenniken got. . . Flenniken was writing female characters from the inside, not the outside.
—Hillary Brown, The Comics Journal
Trots and Bonnie was then and remains unique. . . . Most of [the strips’] adventures turn on sex, common enough even then, but in a way that no other episodic comic I know of did, and hasn’t since.
—John Crowley, Boston Review
Cuttingly funny and empathetic. . . . Flenniken’s comic strips are about trying to live through the experience of being a woman and come out emotionally whole on the other side. . . . Trots and Bonnie remains a jarringly relevant, insightful work of art, one that predicted the path forward for contemporary explorations of sexuality and gender by numerous cartoonists over the last decade.
—Dan Nadel, Art in America
