Diane Noomin  (née Rosenblatt, May 13, 1947 – September 1, 2022) was born in Brooklyn, New York, in and attended the High School of Music and Art, Brooklyn College and Pratt Institute.

She was the creator of the comic character DiDi Glitz, a curvy, big-haired, leopard-print-loving, fishnet-stocking-and-miniskirt-wearing and hard-drinking single mother. DiDi, whose world was filled with bad sex, sleazy men, cocktails and extravagant decorating, was a sendup of a certain kind of suburban stock character, but she was rendered with both affection and compassion.

Noomin joined a San Francisco feminist collective of women cartoonists in 1972. They put out a publication called Wimmen’s Comix, which would go on to be the longest-running female underground comic, publishing 17 issues until 1992. Their sisterly meetings were run like a feminist consciousness-raising project, which drove Diane and her Wimmen's Comix friend Aline Kominsky crazy. It also seemed to irritate members of the collective that Diane and Aline were dating the enemy — their already famous future husbands Bill Griffith and Robert Crumb, whom they later married.

Noomin and Kominsky-Crumb were co-editors of the anthology series Twisted Sisters, a 36-page gem published in 1976 featuring Diane's alter-ego DiDi and Aline's alter ego, “the Bunch,”. It was their retort to rigid feminism and was gross, confessional, controversial, sexually explicit and utterly alluring. They decided to do their own comic, Noomin said, because “basically we felt that our type of humor was self-deprecating and ironic, and that what they were pushing for in the name of feminism and political correctness was a sort of self-aggrandizing and idealistic view of women as a super-race. We preferred to have our flaws and show them."

"Diane treated her comics as a kind of exorcism," Mr. Griffith said in a phone interview. "There were things inside her that had to get out. DiDi was an amalgam of all the parents, all the housewives in Canarsie when she was growing up, the person she was afraid she might become, so in order to deal with that she took control."

Noomin's work has also been published in a number of books, magazines and comic books including Weirdo, Young Lust, Arcade:The Comics Review, Lemme Outta Here, Dangerous Drawings, Mind Riot,The Comics Journal/Special Editions, The New Comics Anthology,True Glitz, The Nose and The Nation. She also did theatrical work, creating a stage adaptation of DiDi Glitz.

In 1981, she collaborated on the musical comedy "I'd Rather Be Doing Something Else:The DiDi Glitz Story" with the San Francisco- based women's theater group, Les Nickelettes.

Noomin was nominated for Harvey and Eisner awards and was given the Ink Pen award in 1994.
She curated and showed her work in the Twisted Sister's Show at White Columns Gallery in 1996, The Museum of Cartoon Art of San Francsico in 1995 and La Luz de Jesus Gallery in Los Angeles in 1991.

In 1994, Noomin had a solo exhibition at the Little Frankenstein Gallery in San Francisco.

In 2019, she edited a comics anthology "Drawing Power: Women's Stories of Sexual Violence, Harrassment and Survival", inspired by the global #MeToo Movement, featuring personal stories from 60 female cartoonists from around the world.

DIANE NOOMIN WEBSITE

DIANE NOOMIN: UNDERGROUND COMIX ARTIST GOES FROM TWISTED SISTER TO EMPOWERING WOMEN

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