Trina Robbins, cartoonist who elevated women’s stories, dies at 85 (2024)

Ms. 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 humorist,” Ms. Robbins explored issues of gender, sexuality and politics, often drawing on her love of ancient cultures, science fiction and mythical goddesses. Her work found plenty of male readers, although she wrote for a female audience, aiming to tell the kind of stories that she had once sought out as a young girl in Queens.

“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.

Although she spent much of her childhood writing, drawing and reading comics, Ms. Robbins took a circuitous path to the art form as an adult. For much of her 20s, she designed clothes in Los Angeles 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 secondhand one

Trimmed with antique luxury, she is a lady of the canyon

Gradually, she became more interested in comics than the velvet minidresses and ruffled shirts she was known for designing, and fell in with a community 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 American comic book to be produced entirely by women. The cover was emblazoned with the words “WOMENS LIBERATION” above a parade 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 Ms. Robbins and an initial team of nine other collaborators in 1972, the series lasted 20 years and featured work by celebrated cartoonists including Aline Kominsky-Crumb and Diane Noomin.

Its first issue featured a story by Ms. Robbins, “Sandy Comes Out,” that was inspired by the coming-out of her roommate Sandy — Crumb’s sister — and was believed to be the first non-p*rnographic comic to feature an openly lesbian character.

Ms. 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, “and through these anthology comics she provided a platform for voices that had been historically marginalized.”

Over the next few decades, she bounced between the comics underground and the industry’s 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; created a Marvel comics character, Misty, geared toward young women; and co-founded Friends of Lulu, a nonprofit organization that promoted 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 — partly out of irritation that men just wanted “to write about Jack Kirby,” the creator of comic book heroes like Captain America and the Incredible Hulk.

“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 through 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 and sometimes completely forgotten creators.”

The younger of two daughters, she was born Trina Perlson in Brooklyn on Aug. 17, 1938, and grew up in the South Ozone Park neighborhood of Queens. Her parents were Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe: Her mother was a second-grade teacher, and her father had been a tailor before he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. He stayed home and looked after the children, teaching Ms. Robbins how to sew costumes for her dolls.

Ms. Robbins later flunked out of Queens College — “partially due to my amazing inability to pass math,” she said — and lasted a year at Cooper Union in Manhattan, where she briefly studied drawing.

By the early 1960s, she had moved to Los Angeles, where she posed nude for men’s magazines before marrying an editor, Paul Jay Robbins, who bought her a sewing machine and inspired her to start making clothes. The marriage didn’t last, but Ms. Robbins soon found success as a designer and retailer, and started a boutique named Broccoli after she moved to the East Village of Manhattan in 1966.

The name, she explained in an oral history for the University of California at Berkeley, was inspired by “a fit of stoned hilarity” in which she “decided that I could talk to broccoli.”

Ms. Robbins ran the shop while contributing cartoons to an alternative newspaper, the East Village Other; she had an in through an old friend, Hollywood chronicler Eve Babitz, who was working as the paper’s managing editor.

One of her early coups as a cartoonist came in 1969, when she developed the seductive one-piece costume for Vampirella, a bloodsucking superhero created by Forrest J. Ackerman.

But from the start of her career as a cartoonist, she said she felt shut out by her male peers, who excluded her from parties as well as 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. “Maybe the only equivalent is the fire department.”

Ms. 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 television interviewer. “I think that a lot of these guys simply were misogynist,” she told the pop culture website Vulture in 2018. “It turned out what a lot of these guys, what they had in their head was very vicious stuff, very violent stuff.”

In addition to her daughter, from a relationship with cartoonist Kim Deitch, survivors include her partner since 1977, comics inker Steve Leialoha; her sister; and a granddaughter.

Ms. Robbins was inducted into the Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards Hall of Fame in 2013. She was still writing in recent years, putting out books that included the 2017 volumes “A Minyen Yidn: A Bunch of Jews (And Other Stuff),” a graphic novel adapted from a book of Yiddish stories by her father, and “Last Girl Standing,” a memoir.

By then, she was delighted to see a new generation of female writers and artists getting recognized for their comics. “The misogyny is still there,” she told The Washington Post, “but to counter it, we have smart, young, feminist women on the internet raising their collective voices when they find sexism — and their voices are heard! It’s kinda nice not to be a lone voice crying in the wilderness anymore.”