In this paper I will present my attempts to draw a primary source-based history of two French women exploring the Sahara. The graphic novel I am writing centers on French colonial explorers Odette du Puigaudeau and Marion Senones’ travels to Mauritania and Morocco from the 1930s to the 1970s. Odette and Marion grew up in Brittany, met in Paris, fell in love, and travelled to Mauritania by themselves in 1933. They returned to France during WWII, collaborated with the Germans, only to became members of the resistance. They travelled twice more to Mauritania after WWII, then got into a fight with the president of independent Mauritania, and moved to Rabat, where they lived till their death and are now buried. Odette and Marion figure very little in the scholarship on French exploration of the Sahara, though it is not for lack of archival sources. Indeed, their archives, housed at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, include dozens of boxes of letters, administrative documents, pictures, travel diaries, published works, and drawings. Both women produced dozens of articles and nearly a dozen books. Though Odette and Marion used the French government’s influence when beneficial, and were at times funded by French cultural institutions, they did not hesitate to criticize French colonialism in the Sahara which they saw as mere profiteering. With this project I hope to contribute to the literature on gender and colonialism, which as of now has mostly portrayed colonial women as mothers. Puigaudeau and Senones were anything but mothers, in fact through their sexuality—a sexuality that was clear to many of those they met in Mauritania—they evaded traditional female roles. Puigaudeau, in particular, used her French colonial power in the Sahara to dress and act as a man. In the Sahara she could deploy a form masculine dominance over colonial subjects and over her own female intimate partner, that she never would have been able to access in Paris. This paper will present my attempts at depicting, in graphic art form, the lives of Odette and Marion and of those they encountered in Mauritania.