Cartoonist elevated women’s stories
EXPLORED ISSUES OF FEMINISM, POLITICS, MORE
(ROBBINS) LOOKED AT THE COMICS THAT WERE BEING PUBLISHED AND SHE ASKED HERSELF WHICH STORIES WEREN’T BEING TOLD ... SHE DID WHATEVER SHE COULD TO REMEDY THAT, BOTH AS AN ARTIST AND AS AN EDITOR AND PUBLISHER. — ANDREW FARAGO, CARTOON ART MUSEUM
Trina Robbins, a cartoonist, writer and editor who helped make room for women in the male-dominated world of American comics, creating books and anthologies with sophisticated female characters and an unabashedly feminist perspective, died April 10 at a hospital in San Francisco. She was 85.
The cause was a stroke, said her daughter, Casey Robbins.
Robbins was one of the most prolific and acclaimed women to come out of the underground comix movement of the late 1960s and ’70s, when creators such as Robert Crumb, Gilbert Shelton and S. Clay Wilson thrilled readers with taboo-breaking work that was by turns psychedelic, violent, sexual and political — a stark departure from the mainstream fare found in Sunday newspaper sections or in display racks stocked with tales of muscle-bound superheroes.
Describing herself as “a storyteller, not a humourist,” Robbins explored issues of gender, sexuality and politics, often drawing on her love of ancient cultures, science fiction and mythical goddesses. Her work found male readers, although she wrote for a female audience.
“From day one, she looked at the comics that were being published and she asked herself which stories weren’t being told, who felt they weren’t being seen by publishers, and she did whatever she could to remedy that, both as an artist and as an editor and publisher of anthology titles,” said Andrew Farago, curator of the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco.
She took a circuitous path to the art form as an adult. For much of her 20s, she designed clothes in L.A. and New York, where she befriended Jim Morrison, dressed folk and rock musicians including Donovan, Cass Elliot and David Crosby, and inspired a verse in Joni Mitchell’s song Ladies of the Canyon:
“Trina wears her wampum beads, she fills her drawing book with lines
Sewing lace on widow’s weeds and filigree on leaf and vine
Vine and leaf are filigree and her coat’s a second-hand one
Trimmed with antique luxury, she is a lady of the canyon”
Gradually, she became more interested in comics than fashion, and fell in with a group of feminist activists and cartoonists after moving to San Francisco in 1969.
Working with fellow cartoonist Barbara “Willy” Mendes, she produced It Ain’t Me, Babe (1970), the first U.S. comic book produced entirely by women. The cover was emblazoned with the words WOMENS LIBERATION above a cast of classic female cartoon characters raising their fists: Olive Oyl, Wonder Woman, Mary Marvel, Little Lulu, Sheena of the Jungle, Elsie the Cow.
The comic book became a hit, reportedly selling 40,000 copies over three printings, and laid the groundwork for “Wimmen’s Comix,” considered to be the longest-running comics anthology created entirely by women. Launched by Robbins and an initial team of nine other collaborators in 1972, the series lasted 20 years and featured work by celebrated cartoonists.
Its first issue featured a story by Robbins, Sandy Comes Out, inspired by the coming-out of her roommate Sandy and was thought to be the first non-pornographic comic to feature a lesbian character.
Robbins “understood and bolstered the importance of collective work between women,” said Caitlin Mcgurk, a curator at Ohio State University’s Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum.
Over the next few decades, she moved between the comics underground and the mainstream. She edited Wet Satin (1976), a collection of women’s erotica; became the first woman to draw a full issue of Wonder Woman, in 1986 and co-founded Friends of Lulu, a non-profit organization promoting the reading and creation of comics by women.
By the early ’90s, she had shifted her focus to writing, conducting research on overlooked female cartoonists including Nell Brinkley, June Tarpé Mills and Lily Renée.
“I didn’t know about the women who preceded me,” she told the Guardian in 2020, explaining how she tried to fill an information gap with books including Pretty in Ink: North American Women Cartoonists, 1896-2013 (2013) and Flapper Queens: Women Cartoonists of the Jazz Age (2020).
“We probably take for granted that great cartoonists should never be forgotten, and that their contributions to history and to popular culture should always be celebrated,” Farago said in an email. “And that’s because of people like Trina Robbins doing the research and shining a spotlight on underappreciated ... creators.”
The younger of two daughters, she was born Trina Perlson in Brooklyn on Aug. 17, 1938, and grew up Queens. Her parents were Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe: Her mother was a teacher, and her father had been a tailor. He stayed home and watched the children, teaching Robbins how to sew.
Robbins later flunked out of Queens College and lasted a year at Cooper Union in Manhattan, where she briefly studied drawing.
By the early ’60s, she had moved to Los Angeles, where she posed nude for men’s magazines then married editor, Paul Jay Robbins, who bought her a sewing machine and inspired her to make clothes. The marriage ended, but she found success as a designer and retailer and started a boutique after moving to the East Village in 1966.
Robbins also contributed cartoons to an alternative newspaper, the East Village Other.
But from the start of her career as a cartoonist, she said she felt shut out by male peers, who excluded her from parties and comic anthologies that helped draw wider attention to their work. “There are very few fields as heavily male,” she once told the Los Angeles Times.
Robbins became a fierce critic of peers such as Crumb, calling out pieces like a three-page 1970 story in which Crumb imagined himself strangling a female TV interviewer. “I think that a lot of these guys simply were misogynist,” she told the website Vulture in 2018.
In addition to her daughter, with cartoonist Kim Deitch, survivors include her partner since 1977, comics inker Steve Leialoha; her sister; and a granddaughter.
She was inducted into the Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards Hall of Fame in 2013. She was still writing in recent years.