There's a new kind of comic event coming to our shores, modelled not on the superhero-focused all-American approach, but on a much closer neighbour: the European comic festival. With founder patrons including the Costa prize-winning Mary and Bryan Talbot, the Lakes International comic art festival has an eclectic guest list, from the artist of The Walking Dead, Charlie Adlard, to the graphic journalist Joe Sacco.

And unlike a fair number of other conventions, which have come under fire in the past few years for only inviting only one or two women guests – if any – this weekend's event taking over the whole of Kendal, Cumbria, aims to include talents old and new from both sides of the gender divide.

Long-time Guardian favourite and multiple award-winner Posy Simmonds is one such guest, a prolific artist who has been drawing comics since she was a little girl. Her collection last year, Mrs Weber's Omnibus, brought together her long-running strips for the Guardian about a well-meaning middle-class family.

"As a child," Simmonds tells me, "I liked the combination of words and pictures - in bound copies of Punch magazines and, later, in the piles of comics some American kids used to give me. There was also something subversive about comics that appealed - adults didn't approve of them."

That subversiveness has long been a key component of the medium, and something that has tied comics to women's history throughout the decades. Visiting from the US, the cartoonist Trina Robbins will be discussing her half-century career in comics, from her beginnings as one of the most influential underground comix artists in the 1970s, when she led the feminist charge against the boys' club attitude that prevailed at the time.

But comics and feminism have been intertwined long before underground comix hit the counterculture scene, as can be seen in the movement covered in Mary Talbot's second graphic novel, Sally Heathcote: Suffragette (Jonathan Cape, to be published May 2014), illustrated by Edinburgh artist Kate Charlesworth.

"I seem to have arrived at comics accidentally," Charlesworth says. "I've never aspired to art or literature, but comics are an astonishingly accommodating medium - narrative and visuals creating something bigger than the sum of their parts - like two good collaborators getting together."

The late 19th and early 20th century witnessed the Suffragette struggle on many fronts, and cartoonists did battle in the pages of newspapers. A history of the movement in this very medium is perhaps rather fitting.

"Comics can put the drama and humanity back into histories which may have been stripped back to key facts," Charlesworth says, "and also have the space to investigate complex issues, in this case feminism. Both sides in the suffrage debate employed cartoons and comic narratives as powerful propaganda tools."

The ability of comics to explore issues is something that Katie Green has made the most of in her first graphic novel, Lighter Than My Shadow (Jonathan Cape). The story of her own struggle with an eating disorder, it's a heavy book, both literally and in subject matter.

"Comics is a very accessible medium," Green explains. "You don't need any fancy equipment or a special place to display them, you can start with just a pen and some paper. I'm a very visual person, but I am also a control freak. When making comics you have ultimate control over every aspect of set and costume design, pacing and storytelling, character and dialogue, while still creating something visual and utterly immersive in a way that the written word isn't."

"Reading a comic is very intimate," she continues, "and for me that was always a comfort when drawing about such personal stuff: that it would be experienced by one person at a time in the privacy of their own reading. Also the combination of visual language with text gives so many possibilities for expression: there are things words can say that images can't, and likewise things images can say that words can't. But there are also things that can only be said with both words and images working together, a language that is unique to comics."

For others looking to work out their own difficult issues on the page, Green advises: "If it feels important to tell, tell it. The more we talk about the difficult things, the less difficult they become to talk about."

Relative newcomer Isabel Greenberg has made a big impact in the last couple of years, and the winner of the Jonathan Cape/Observer/Comica graphic short story prize in 2011 has now released her first graphic novel, The Encyclopedia of Early Earth (Jonathan Cape). Unfortunately she has also experienced one of the major difficulties many comic creators experience in the mainstream press – condescension. A recent interview described her as a "petite blonde", "princess", and compared her to Tinkerbell.

Greenberg hasn't felt sidelined in the UK comics scene itself however, and certainly indie comic fairs have a very even gender split. "Generations of women have struggled so that I can be so lucky," she tells me.

One such generation of course includes Posy Simmonds and Trina Robbins. Pretty in Ink (Fantagraphics, December), Robbins's most recent "herstorian" or feminist history, illustrates the struggles that women artists and cartoonists have faced across the decades. But overall, coverage of comics and women creators has almost certainly improved - not least because the audience is ever expanding, and increasingly diverse.

"Graphic novels and comics are getting a bit more attention in the mainstream media," says Simmonds. "Nothing like the attention paid to comics in France and Belgium, say, but a big difference from 20 years ago. I remember telling someone I was writing a graphic serial and they said 'Graphic? Why're you writing filth?'"

The Lakes International Comic Art Festival runs from October 18-20; comicartfestival.com