Fiona Smyth draws like she’s throwing a punch. Her lines are thick, unruly, and full of sharp elbows—deliberately unsmooth, defiantly unpretty. But that’s the point. Smyth’s girls are messy. They’re hairy. They leak and ooze and shout. They spit in the face of your good taste. And they don’t give a damn if you’re uncomfortable.
Long before “body positivity” was a hashtag and decades before zines became a nostalgic aesthetic, Smyth was out here building an unapologetic world of girls who wouldn’t—and couldn’t—fit the mold. Her comics and illustrations, which started cropping up in Exclaim! magazine and indie galleries in the ’80s and ’90s, created space for female grotesquerie that wasn’t sanitized or made palatable. These weren’t cute rebels. These were weirdos, punks, perverts, queers, outsiders. Women whose power came not from being desired, but from refusing to perform at all.
I remember rushing to grab the latest issue of Exclaim! at the local mall in my small town. I was there for the new Canadian bands—and for Fiona Smyth’s latest comic strip. I have to confess, I didn’t always read the comic, but I loved the illustrations. I’d cut out my favourite cels and tape them onto my “memory box” (an old, beat-up Puma shoebox). Fiona Smyth was the only artist on that box, surrounded by a collage of band logos and teenage scraps of devotion. The internet was full of holes back then, so I didn’t really know anything real about Fiona Smyth. All I knew was that she was the coolest girl in the world.
Smyth’s work is rooted in underground comix tradition—think R. Crumb’s influence with none of the leering misogyny and all of the feminist rage. She’s a true zine-world matriarch: creating black-and-white mini-comics by hand, screen printing show posters, and teaching younger artists how to draw badly on purpose. Her legacy is graffiti-meets-gallery, DIY with a PhD in don’t-fuck-with-me.
And while her girls may be “ugly” in a world that still demands contouring and quietness, they’re beautiful in their grotesque honesty. They bleed, drool, snarl, and sometimes turn into monsters. That’s because for Smyth, femininity is a mutation machine. Her art shows what happens when we stop trying to be pleasing: we become powerful.
A Feminist Cartoon Freakout
Fiona Smyth’s work can feel like a psychic scream—a riotous blend of pop surrealism, feminist commentary, and punk zine rebellion. Her colour palette? Aggressively bright. Her subjects? Sexually explicit, emotionally explosive, spiritually raw. She’s one of the rare artists who can draw a masturbating alien and make you cry about patriarchy in the same panel.
Her 2008 graphic novel The Never Weres, a dystopian sci-fi coming-of-age story, gave us a taste of her longer-form storytelling. But it’s her sketchbooks and zine work—raw, loud, and often hand-lettered in sharpie—that feel closest to the gut.
Much of her art reads like a diary of the subconscious: dreams, crushes, menstrual cycles, pop culture crushes, orgasms, old wounds. She pulls no punches and leaves no secrets. Smyth’s girls are not interested in being saved or explained. They already know what you think of them—and they’re laughing.
Where Is She Now?
Still in Toronto. Still drawing. Still teaching at OCAD University. Still filling the world with strange, feral women who demand to be looked at without being consumed.
In recent years, she’s returned to gallery work while continuing to publish zines and contribute to indie anthologies. A retrospective of her work would be long overdue, but Fiona Smyth doesn’t really care about legacy in the traditional sense. Her work is already living in the bones of every DIY girl who ever cut up a magazine, drew boobs in the margins, or stapled their own story together.
You can check out this 2024 with the Onsite Gallery at OCAD University:
For artists today, especially those who feel like they don’t belong in the polished feeds of Instagram art culture, Smyth is a lighthouse. She’s proof that ugliness can be sacred. That weirdo girls with sharp teeth and bigger ideas deserve to be here, loud and unfiltered.
She’s not trying to go viral. She’s not rebranding for relevance. She’s still scribbling in the margins—exactly where we need her.
Want more ugly girl energy?
Check out Fiona Smyth’s ongoing zine work and projects via @fionasmythart on Instagram or dig up copies of The Never Weres. Better yet, draw your own monsters. They don’t need to be pretty to be perfect.
And you love ugly pretty, weird girl art with all the feels and a penchant for pink then check out my interview with Ambivalently Yours!
Share this piece, tag it with #newgirlarmy, and pass it on to your favourite rebel.
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AXO (she/her) is a multidisciplinary creator, editor, and builder of feminist media ecosystems based in Toronto. She is the founder of She Zine Mag, Side Project Distro, BBLGM Club, and several other projects under the AXO&Co umbrella — each rooted in DIY culture, creative rebellion, and community care. Her work explores the intersection of craft, technology, and consciousness, with an emphasis on handmade ethics, neurodivergent creativity, and the politics of making. She is an advocate for accessible creativity and the power of small-scale cultural production to spark social change. Her practice merges punk, print, and digital media while refusing to separate the emotional from the practical. Above all, her work invites others to build creative lives that are thoughtful, defiant, and deeply handmade.
