Trina Robbins, who as an artist, writer and editor of comics was a pioneering woman in a male-dominated field, and who as a historian specialized in books about women cartoonists, died Wednesday. She was 84.
Her death at a San Francisco hospital was confirmed by her longtime partner, the superhero comics inker Steve Leialoha, who said she had recently suffered a stroke.
In 1970, Ms. Robbins was one of the creators of It Ain’t Me Babe Comix, the first comic book made exclusively by women. In 1985, she was the first woman to draw a Wonder Woman comic after four decades of male hegemony. In 1994, she was a founder of Friends of Lulu, an advocacy group for female comic-book creators and readers.
In the 1960s, before she devoted her life to comics and to the women who make them, Ms. Robbins was an accomplished clothes designer and seamstress who outfitted rock stars like Donovan and David Crosby. She became a notable figure in the hippie communities of New York City and San Francisco, and in Los Angeles caught the eye of Joni Mitchell.
The first verse of Ms. Mitchell’s song “Ladies of the Canyon,” featured on her 1970 album of the same name, is a portrait of Ms. Robbins:
Trina wears her wampum beads
She fills her drawing book with line
Sewing lace on widow’s weeds
And filigree on leaf and vine.
Trina Perlson was born on Aug. 17, 1938, in Brooklyn, the younger of two daughters of Jewish immigrants from what was then Russia but is now Belarus. Her father, Max Bear Perlson, worked as a tailor until Parkinson’s disease forced him to retire; her mother, Elizabeth (Rosenman) Perlson, was a second-grade teacher.
At a young age, she became obsessed with comic strips and comic books, gravitating to female characters like Brenda Starr, Patsy Walker and Millie the Model. A particular favorite was the fashion plate Katy Keene, who inspired Ms. Robbins to make dresses for her own paper dolls.
She also drew comics: In her 2017 memoir, “Last Girl Standing,” she wrote, “My wonderful mother brought home from school an endless supply of 8½” by 11” Board of Education paper and No. 2 pencils, from which I would chew off the erasers.”
When she began high school, her mother told her it was time to abandon comics, and Trina complied, shifting her obsession to science fiction. In her senior year, she wrote and costumed a sci-fi play called “Twenty Years Later.”
After one year at Queens College, she moved to Los Angeles, where she posed nude for pinup magazines in the erroneous belief that doing so would lead to a movie career. In 1962, she married Paul Jay Robbins, a magazine editor; they divorced in 1966. During that time, she “locked herself in a room with an electric sewing machine,” she was quoted as saying in “Dirty Pictures,” Brian Doherty’s 2022 book about underground comics; she was soon making dresses, which she sold at craft and Renaissance fairs.
Ms. Robbins befriended the rock bands the Byrds and the Doors, and moved between the coasts. In New York City, she opened a clothing boutique on East Fourth Street called Broccoli, a name inspired by a claim she had made, while stoned, that she could communicate with vegetables.
When she read the alternative newspaper The East Village Other, she was captivated by its surreal comic strips and realized that the doodles she had been making could be comics too. As a lark, she illustrated, in Aubrey Beardsley style, a one-panel cartoon about a teenage hippie named Suzi Slumgoddess and slipped it under the door of the paper’s office. To her surprise, it was printed, launching her career as an underground cartoonist.
Ms. Robbins became a regular contributor to The Other, making comic strips that doubled as advertisements for Broccoli. She often rendered her characters like the paper dolls that had captivated her when she was a child, and her strips mined the contrast between that innocent style and taboo-breaking subject matter. When The Other published a comics tabloid called Gothic Blimp Works in 1969, she contributed a strip about having sex with a lion.
Her comics about sex were often playful — the two-page strip “One Man’s Fantasy,” for example, was about a man captured by a group of attractive women who force him to make a tuna fish sandwich. But she found that many male cartoonists were threatened by any hint of feminism.
And Ms. Robbins was repulsed by the dark material in Robert Crumb’s comics and the way the underground scene followed his lead. “Rape and humiliation — and later, torturing and murdering women — didn’t seem funny to me,” she wrote in her memoir. “The guys told me I had no sense of humor.”
Ms. Robbins was responsible for the first publication of some notable cartoonists in The Other, including Vaughn Bode and Justin Green, but she took particular pride in the women’s anthologies she edited and co-edited, and in their explicitly feminist content: It Ain’t Me Babe Comix, Wimmen’s Comix and the erotic Wet Satin.
She also designed the famously skimpy outfit for Vampirella, a female vampire who appeared in black-and-white comics beginning in 1969 — although her design was not as skimpy as the costume later became. “The costume I originally designed for Vampi was sexy, but not bordering on obscene,” she told the Fanbase Press website in 2015. “I will not sign a contemporary Vampirella comic. I explain, that is not the costume I designed.”
Along with her partner since 1977, Mr. Leialoha, Ms. Robbins is survived by Casey Robbins, her daughter with fellow cartoonist Kim Deitch, her granddaughter, Tabitha, and her sister, Harriet Nadel.
After the underground comics scene declined, Ms. Robbins took on more mainstream work. When DC Comics approached her to work on Wonder Woman, she chose to draw the character in a classic Golden Age style.
She also wrote and drew Meet Misty, a 1985-86 mini-series for Marvel Comics, aimed at young girls, about a teenage soap opera actress who was the niece of Millie the Model. Although the series generated fan mail, it didn’t sell well enough to have its six-issue run extended; Ms. Robbins believed that male comic-shop owners had ordered as few copies as possible. She then wrote and drew a similar title for Eclipse Comics, California Girls, which lasted eight issues in 1987 and 1988.
She also wrote more than a dozen prose books, including “Pretty in Ink: North American Women Cartoonists 1896-2013” (2013) and “Flapper Queens: Women Cartoonists of the Jazz Age” (2020).
“Trina didn’t just support women,” Shary Flenniken, who created the “Trots and Bonnie” strip for National Lampoon, said in an interview, “she unearthed the history of all these women cartoonists who had never been talked about.”
While Ms. Robbins was happy to have male readers, she knew all too well that the comics industry was full of men making comics for other men, and her goal was to reach a female audience.
“Any time there was talk about integrating the industry more or getting comics to girls, that was Trina’s crusade,” the comics journalist and editor Heidi MacDonald told Vulture.com in 2018. “She didn’t want to be alone, didn’t want to be the only woman in the room.”
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