Guisewite, Cathy

Cathy Guisewite, (born September 5, 1950, Dayton, Ohio, U.S.), American cartoonist who created the long-running comic strip Cathy (1976–2010).

Guisewite graduated from the University of Michigan with a B.A. in English in 1972. Both of her parents worked in the advertising business, and she initially followed them into that field. She found success as an ad writer, but she explored cartooning as an outlet for the frustration that she felt in her career and her personal life. She sent the simple stick-figure drawings to her parents, and her mother encouraged her to submit them for publication. To her surprise, Guisewite was awarded a syndication contract with Universal Press Syndicate in 1976, and Cathy began running as a daily strip that year.

Cathy detailed the daily life of a single career woman whose struggles with her weight and romantic relationships were frequently resolved with a cry of “Aack!” and a binge shopping spree. Upon its debut, Cathy was one of the few daily strips written by a woman, and it was the first to speak humorously and directly to a female audience. Female protagonists such as Brenda Starr and Little Orphan Annie had been mainstays of the comics page for decades, but such strips were generally written as soap operas or serial adventures. Cathy’s semiautobiographical content added a feminist voice to the comics world.

At its height, Cathy ran in some 1,400 newspapers worldwide, and Guisewite won an Emmy Award for a 1987 animated television adaptation of the strip. Cathy merchandise, often depicting the namesake heroine struggling with a towering mound of paperwork, struggling to shed a few more pounds, or engaging in therapeutic shopping, became a multimillion-dollar business, and the strip was collected in some 30 books. In 2005 the strip marked a major turning point when Cathy married her longtime boyfriend, Irving. Citing a desire to spend more time with her family and explore other creative avenues, Guisewite ended the strip in 2010. Cathy’s 34-year-long story concluded on October 3, 2010, with Cathy announcing to her parents that she was pregnant.

In addition to her Cathy books, Guisewite also wrote Fifty Things That Aren’t My Fault: Essays from the Grown-Up Years (2019).