The Big She-Bang

One of O Magazine’s Best Books of Fall 2020

One of Comics Beat’s Most Anticipated Graphic Novels for Fall 2020

Writing as if in a fever dream, iconic New Yorker cartoonist Marisa Acocella channels God the Mother and all of the goddesses, saints and sinners, and real-life women from our storied past in this epic retelling that begins with the Big She-Bang. The rest, as they say, is herstory.

Hilarious, profound, and (at times) profane, The Big She-Bang is virtuosic storytelling in which the rules are bent back to where they should have started in the first place. It is abundantly clear that the past has been recorded in big books “written by a bunch of men about a bunch of men.” Now Acocella challenges our understanding of humanity’s past with her own Big Book.

Narrated by God the Mother, The Big She-Bang celebrates the Shevolutionaries: a goddess roster that includes Eve, the Marys (Virgin Mother and Magdalene), Persephone, Sophia, Isis, Pope Joan, the Suffragettes, Gloria Steinem, Tarana Burke, Malala, and more. By Klieg-lighting the ways women have been erased, vilified, and dominated across eons—blamed for original sin, destruction, betrayal, witchery, and other assorted (and false) evils and ills—Acocella sets the story straight from the beginning of time to the present day. Not to be exclusionary, this new herstory features cameos from Yaldabaoth, Zeus, Noah, and the Rapacious Phalluses on the rampage. In the end, what hangs in the balance is nothing less than the future of humanity and Mother Earth herself.