Please Note: All Trina Robbins quotes in the following article are from her memoir, Last Girl Standing, published by Fantagraphics in 2017, unless noted otherwise.
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“Well, I’ve been in this business a few years. It would be grossly naive and presumptuous to think that a comic book can change the world’s thinking. But it doesn’t hurt to try.”
Trina Robbins–a fictionalized version of Trina, anyway, one who lived and worked as a comic book creator in the DC Universe–spoke those words to her childhood hero in the pages of the 1989 Wonder Woman Annual, in a sequence plotted by George Pérez, scripted by Lee Marrs and illustrated by Ramona Fradon. Marrs spoke from the heart when she wrote that sequence, capturing the heart, personality and the sincerity of her longtime friend, Trina, who passed away in San Francisco on April 10 at the age of 85, after suffering a stroke in late February.
Marrs had been linked to Trina since the 1970s, through “panels, conventions, galleries and parties,” as part of the San Francisco Bay Area’s underground comix scene, the publishing movement that revolutionized comics publishing and popular culture in the late 1960s and early '70s.
Trina’s own fascination with comics began during her childhood in Brooklyn, New York, in the 1940s. Her Jewish immigrant parents, Max and Elizabeth Perlson, as well as her older sister, Harriet, made up a happy albeit poor family, subsisting on Elizabeth’s salary as a second grade teacher. Max had been employed as a tailor, but had to close his shop as the symptoms from his Parkinson’s disease progressed to the point that he could no longer work.
The Perlsons nurtured her love of reading, as the painfully shy Trina spent her weekly ten-cent allowance at Itskie’s neighborhood candy store, amassing a collection of “all the comics that featured girls or women on the cover,” including Patsy Walker, and Katy Keene, whose pin-up pages inspired Trina to become an artist, designing paper dolls and fashions inspired by the art of Katy Keene creator Bill Woggon. She supplemented her comic book reading with weekly visits to her local library, often maxing out her card with as many books as the determined preteen could carry the four city blocks to her family’s home.
At the age of 10, Trina discovered the Wonder Woman comic books attributed to William Moulton Marston and artist H.G. Peter–likely written by uncredited female assistants, including Joye Hummel–that would spark her imagination and lay the groundwork for her own comics career two decades later. “She could rescue herself and her dumb blonde boyfriend, too. And she was an Amazon! At 10 years old, I had never heard of Amazons before, but the idea of an island full of beautiful women–an island where men were not allowed–set my heart on fire,” Trina wrote in a 2021 essay for the Cartoon Art Museum's exhibition The Legend of Wonder Woman entitled "Wonder Woman and Me."
Her mother encouraged Trina to give up comic books when she entered high school, which she did reluctantly, but she immediately discovered the stories of Ray Bradbury, which led to her next literary obsession. “For the next three years, except for the books I had to read for school, I read nothing but science fiction,” Trina recalled in her 2017 autobiography, Last Girl Standing. The lonely teen wrote a letter to the SF magazine Startling Stories in search of a community - or, borrowing Kurt Vonnegut’s term, a karass, and soon found herself connected with other New York-based SF fans who welcomed her into their circle of friends with open arms, even though many were twice her age. Through science fiction fandom and conventions, Trina came out of her shell enough that she made the decision to join her high school’s literary magazine staff during her junior year, and was pleased to finally meet writers and connect with girls her own age.
Science fiction was still the driving force behind Trina’s social life, however. At the age of 16, she briefly dated the writer Harlan Ellison, then 21 years old, and would befriend SF super-fan and agent Forrest J. Ackerman, who encouraged her to model for men’s magazines, and promised to become her agent to help her become “a movie star like Marilyn Monroe.” This led to a brief modeling career and a stint in Los Angeles, where she met Paul Robbins, whom she would marry in 1962.
With access to a sewing machine and the Los Angeles music scene, Trina established herself as a hip and influential fashion designer, crafting stylish stage wear for the Byrds, “Mama Cass” Elliott, David Crosby and Donovan, among others. She turned down an invitation from Sonny Bono to create matching outfits for him and Cher, however, since tailoring men’s clothes, or anything with zippers, was outside of her skill set.
Trina also made inroads with the comics community during the mid '60s, including the staff at Marvel Comics. During a memorable 1966 visit, she met Stan Lee, Roy Thomas, Denny O’Neil and Flo Steinberg, who was impressed with Trina’s fashion sense. Although Trina didn’t land a job at Marvel Comics, Flo and Trina kept in touch and would become close friends soon after.
Trina–who had taken Paul’s last name and would retain it for the rest of her life–left her husband and returned to New York in 1966 to spend time with her dying father. She reconnected with old friends and discovered the independent publishing scene, including the recently-launched underground newspaper, the East Village Other, which “spoke for all us hippies of New York’s Lower East Side!”
During a bad acid trip, Trina and friends found sanctuary in EVO’s offices thanks to publisher Allen Katzman, who talked them down from their unsettling experience. On a whim, and in gratitude, Trina crafted a single-panel cartoon depicting a “teeny-bopper hippie named Suzie Slumgoddess” and slid it under the door a few days later. Katzman printed it in the next issue, and “thus began my so-called career.”
She became a regular contributor to the East Village Other, as her stylized, fashionable cartoon women, signed with a neat, confident “Trina,” established her as an up-and-coming talent in one of New York’s hippest underground newspapers. She designed and sewed an official flag for EVO, and in return they offered her free advertising space as well as a regular fashion column and a showcase for occasional comic strips and illustrations. Empowered by her artistic success and disappointed in the city’s contemporary fashions, Trina rented a storefront on East Fourth Street and opened her own boutique, Broccoli, where she would craft cutting edge “trips to wear” for the young, beautiful people of New York.
Anticipating a slow sales month in February 1968, Trina sublet her apartment for a month to visit friends in Los Angeles, including David Crosby, who was producing the first album of his ex-girlfriend, a young singer-songwriter named Joni Mitchell. The leggy blond songstress made quite an impression on Trina: “Pouring from her throat like light beams were crystalline notes that could make a lion lie down at her feet and purr.” Trina, likewise, made a strong impression on Joni, who two years later immortalized her fashion sensibilities and artistic talents in the opening verse of her 1970 song "Ladies of the Canyon":
Trina wears her wampum beads
She fills her drawing book with line
Sewing lace on widows' 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
Another life-changing event during that visit was her discovery of Robert Crumb’s just-published Zap Comix #1, given to her by friends on a side trip to San Francisco. “My mind was blown!” Trina recalled. “It had never occurred to me–never occurred to any of us!–that we could produce entire comic books, real comic books like Marvel and DC, but with our stories in them.”
Back in New York, thanks to her position at EVO, Trina became increasingly connected to the East Village comix community, consisting in part of Spain Rodriguez, Baby Jerry, Yossarian, Art Spiegelman, Roger Brand and Kim Deitch, who would become Trina’s steady romantic partner. Finding herself spending more and more time immersed in the underground comix scene, Trina sold her storefront, although she would continue to design and sell clothing as a sideline.
The success of EVO's comics section inspired cartoonist Vaughn Bodē and EVO editor Peter Leggieri to produce their own comics tabloid under paper's auspices, dubbed Gothic Blimp Works by Bodē. During its 18-month, eight-issue run, Gothic Blimp Works boasted a hall of fame lineup of comics talent, including the aforementioned East Village artists as well as Crumb, Bill Griffith, Larry Hama, Jay Lynch, Willy Murphy, Hurricane Nancy, Ralph Reese, Larry Todd and Bernie Wrightson.
Despite her featured status in EVO and Gothic Blimp Works, Trina found herself on the outside looking in when it came to comic book celebrations and gatherings, including New York’s first international comics convention in 1968. In the summer of 1969, a second convention was held, boasting the very first underground comix convention panel... with an all-male lineup assembled by Roger Brand. When this was brought to the attention of convention organizer Phil Seuling–a big fan of Trina’s comics–he insisted that Brand include her on the historic first assembly of underground cartoonists. This was not the first and certainly not the last time that Trina had to stand up for herself to claim a seat at the table.
Always looking to expand her client base, Trina reconnected with Ackerman, who introduced her to publisher James Warren, who considered Trina as a potential artist for his new magazine, which he hoped would build on the success of his comics horror magazines Creepy and Eerie. The new title, Vampirella, was to feature a scantily-clad character from the planet Drakulon, but Warren and cover artist Frank Frazetta were struggling to come up with a signature look for their new heroine.
“Jim wasn’t satisfied with the costume that Frank had drawn for her, and he was attempting to describe what he wanted,” Trina recalled. “As he described the costume, I grabbed a piece of scrap paper and sketched it.” Warren put Trina on the phone with Frazetta, who drew the character exactly as she described, and the rest was history. Trina’s payment was a “lifetime” subscription to Vampirella, although she admits the subscription petered out sometime after her next move.
Despite her growing prominence in the New York comix scene, Trina felt restless and set her sights on San Francisco, which was “becoming more and more the place to be.” In November 1969, three months pregnant, her and Kim Deitch packed up and hitched a ride with Gilbert Shelton to San Francisco’s Mission District, where they moved into the home of Gary Arlington, owner of the San Francisco Comic Book Company, one of the very first comic book specialty shops in North America.
A “lemming-like migration of almost all the underground cartoonists from New York to San Francisco” followed, as many of Trina’s friends from the east coast soon joined her in California, including Art Spiegelman, Bill Griffith, Spain Rodriguez and Flo Steinberg - along with Trina’s cat that she’d left behind when she moved. “As far as I’m concerned, rather than being energy rip-offs, cats are muses,” she opined, “and I couldn’t live without one.”
Trina also reunited with the cartoonist Barbara "Willy" Mendes, who had also made the pilgrimage to San Francisco. “I met Trina in 1967 through underground cartoonist Kim Deitch when we all were in the East Village,” Mendes recalls. “Kim was old pals with my hubby, musician Rick Kunstler, and [Deitch's] Sunshine Girl strips for the East Village Other inspired me to do comics, initially as spoofs.... I first noticed Trina’s art in her cartoon ads for her Broccoli boutique. When Kim became editor of EVO’s comic supplement, Gothic Blimp Works, both Trina and I were included. Then everyone moved to SF. We ran into Kim and Trina while apartment hunting and rented a house all together on Edgar Place, near SF City College.”
Trina’s relationship with Deitch deteriorated quickly during this time, and Mendes and her husband soon moved out to find their own apartment elsewhere in San Francisco. It was also becoming clear to Trina that she was being dismissed as Kim Deitch’s girlfriend and not an artist in her own right. Invitations to artist gatherings and to participate in comics anthologies were directed toward Kim and only Kim, even from close friends and associates. “Cartoonists would phone Kim: ‘Hey, man, I’m putting together a comic. You wanna contribute four pages, six pages, eight pages?’ But they didn’t ask me,” Trina later recalled.
The local underground papers were much more receptive to her work, however, and she soon became a regular contributor to the Berkeley Tribe, receiving $20 for each month’s work. Her discovery of the first issue of feminist underground paper It Ain’t Me, Babe electrified Trina, who immediately called up the staff to volunteer her services. Trina’s liberal politics came through in every illustration for It Ain’t Me, Babe, as she produced cover art reflecting her anti-war sentiments, a celebration of her newborn daughter Casey, and her support of activist Angela Davis in the form of a poster that people willing to harbor Ms. Davis in the event that she needed to evade the police could proudly display in their windows.
Her turn at “none-too-subtle propaganda” inspired Trina to take her politics and her cartooning to the next level with the production of an entire feminist comic book, bearing the same name as the underground paper that had inspired her, It Aint Me Babe. Trina recruited Mendes and friends Hurricane Nancy, Lisa Lyons, Meredith Kurtzman and Michele Brand to create a 36-page comic book sporting a colorful cover by Trina “in which all the female comic characters finally rebel and join together against their oppressing male characters… with Olive Oyl, Wonder Woman, Little Lulu, Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, and Elsie the Borden Cow all marching together, fists raised, looking pissed off.”
After mulling over an offer from Print Mint to publish and distribute the comic, Trina approached Ron Turner, whose new publishing house Last Gasp had recently released its first publication, Slow Death, since she’d heard they were in the market for a “Women’s Liberation” comic. “We met on a phone call in 1970,” recalled Turner on a Last Gasp Facebook post. “She had the original art for a feminist comic and I was looking for a feminist comic. I went to her house in San Francisco, near City College. She had the art and baby Casey, I had the thousand in cash and we traded art for $$.”
Turner’s immediate and generous payment secured the publishing rights, a small fortune for the new mother who’d been taking the bus to Berkeley once a month to collect $20 from her local underground paper. Kim Deitch was prone to days-long absences and generally left Trina and Casey to fend for themselves. Upon realizing that their differences were irreconcilable, she threw him out of their apartment. Deitch moved back in with Gary Arlington, and “at least I didn’t have to share my welfare money with him anymore,” Trina noted.
The success of the It Aint Me Babe one-shot inspired Trina and others to produce their own women-only comics and anthologies, a welcome and necessary counterpoint to the male-produced and decidedly un-feminist content that had come to define the underground comix scene. Robbins and her collective produced individual projects and collaborations over the next two years before she—at the behest of Ron Turner, who wanted to publish a new, ongoing women’s comic—met with a group of women organized by Last Gasp employee Patricia Moodian. The meeting, attended by Sharon Rudahl, Aline Kominsky and several other artists, was held at Moodian’s cottage, and the collective came together to produce an ongoing anthology title called Wimmen’s Comix.
“The stories in the first few issues ranged from the polished to the incredibly crude, but Wimmen’s Comix, at least in the beginning, was not so much about artistic perfection as giving women’s comics a place to be seen and giving the contributors a voice,” Trina recalled. “The most professional of the group was Lee Marrs, who already had a polished style and had worked as an assistant to Little Orphan Annie artist Tex Blaisdell.” Seventeen installments, released on a mostly-annual basis, were published between 1972 and 1992, each issue under the guidance of a different editor. More than 40 women contributed to the series, many of whom reached a national audience for the first time in the pages of Wimmen’s Comix, and some of which broke off to launch a rival anthology, Twisted Sisters, in the mid '70s.
One of Trina’s comics in that first issue of Wimmen's Comix, "Sandy Comes Out," is generally acknowledged as the first depiction of an “out” lesbian in comics. Trina drew inspiration for the story from real women in her life, notably Robert Crumb’s sister, Sandy. Reception was and continues to be overwhelmingly positive for this story among the LGBTQ+ community. “With 'Sandy Comes Out' in 1972, Trina created the first ‘literary’ story about a queer person: in other words, one that was not erotic, a gag, or derogatory,” says Justin Hall, author of the queer comics history No Straight Lines. “And she remained a fierce advocate for queer cartoonists throughout her career; we all owe her a huge debt of gratitude.”
A young artist named Mary Wings took offense at Trina’s depiction–and oversimplification–of the coming out process, and channeled that outrage into the creation of her own underground comic, the first lesbian comic book, Come Out Comix in 1973. “I thought 'Sandy Comes Out' was awful, and that Trina wasn’t lesbian enough to write that story,” Wings recalls. That animosity, however, dissapated “in about one minute, once I met her. We just fell in love with each other on the spot,” she laughs, recalling their first meeting. “That hatchet was buried immediately.”
Bolstered by the commercial and financial success of Wimmen’s Comix and her own solo comics, including the 1972-74 Print Mint series Girl Fight Comics, Trina and Casey moved into a large flat on Guerrero Street. “The new place was a perfect setup for communal living: a typical San Francisco Edwardian flat, with rooms opening off both sides of a long central hall. Everyone, even Casey, could have their own room, and we could all share the rent,” Trina recalled. Roommates included Rudahl, teenage cartoon historian Leslie Cabarga and up-and-coming underground cartoonist Larry Rippee. “It was supposed to be a cartoonist commune," Casey Robbins recalls. “But my mom was always kind of the leader. She’s too strong to let it be otherwise. But it was all cartoonists. So we were really in it as far as the underground comics scene during that time. Even me because I was around it.“
The local cartoonists community came together across the Bay in 1973 to host Berkeley Con, a gathering of fans and creators with a focus on underground comix. Many cartoonists met each other in person for the first time, including the Wimmen’s Comix collective and Joyce Farmer & Lyn Chevli, whose own women-produced anthology Tits & Clits had beaten Last Gasp’s publication to shops by just a couple of weeks. “We held the first of what would become scores of women’s cartoonist’s panels,” Trina recalled. “In Ted Richards’s cartoon of the con, from the San Francisco Bay Guardian, he featured the women’s panel.”
Despite the regular, powerful presence of women in the underground comix scene, and finally being invited to contribute to other artist’s anthologies, Trina felt increasingly unsure about her place within that industry. “Even though I was finally being published by other cartoonists, I had long given up on being accepted by the Inner Circle,” she wrote. “And those guys were getting grosser than ever. They started producing Tijuana bible-sized comics that had to be sold under the counter.” Years later, when teaching a comics class at the California State University, Chico alongside Spain Rodriguez, Spain suggested that Trina hadn’t been excluded from their comics because of her gender, but because she was “just too damned sweet” to take part in that style of comics. "A strange kind of left-handed compliment," Trina mused.
By 1975, Trina was successful enough as a cartoonist that she and Leslie Cabarga made the decision to move out of the Guerrero Street cartoon commune and purchase their own three-story flat in San Francisco’s Castro District. They passed their lease on to Wimmen’s Comix cartoonist Becky Wilson and Paul Mavrides, who was working with Gilbert Shelton on The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers. Mavrides remained after Wilson moved out, and as Trina proudly noted, “the flat has continuously been inhabited by cartoonists for more than forty years.”
The late '70s was a boom time, as Trina's work appeared in major periodicals that paid top rates, including High Times, Heavy Metal, National Lampoon, and even the occasional one-page comic to Playboy. Alongside Denis Kitchen, Trina produced two issues of an anthology comic entitled Wet Satin, celebrating sex from a woman’s point of view, culminating in an original art exhibition at San Francisco’s infamous O'Farrell Theatre, owned by porn empresarios and comix enthusiasts Jim & Artie Mitchell.
In the summer of 1977, Trina was invited to be a guest at the San Diego Comic-Con, her first–but far from last–appearance at the nation’s largest comic book convention. “The con was still small enough that almost everybody knew everybody else, and who you hadn’t known before, you made friends with,” she recalled fondly. “The underground clique didn’t accept me at all - but the old guys liked me! I do believe they thought it was cool that a young woman was drawing comics.” Trina was honored with Comic-Con’s Inkpot Award that summer–the mid '70s comics equivalent of an Oscar–but more importantly than that, she struck up lasting friendships with some of her favorite Golden Age cartoonists, including C.C. Beck, Will Eisner and Harvey Kurtzman. The convention also provided Trina the opportunity to meet many of her female colleagues and collaborators in person for the first time, at “probably the most women-populated con that the San Diego people had put together at that point.”
Trina capped off the year with a trip to Europe, bringing daughter Casey along for a whirlwind tour of Holland, England and France, all in the span of two weeks. After a visit to Stonehenge, Trina took a detour to Birmingham, having gotten word of a small cartoonist collective based there, including famed cartoonist Hunt Emerson. She also made the acquaintance of Suzy Varty, who was assembling England’s first all-woman comic book, Heröine, and who insisted that Trina contribute to the premier issue.
Her working vacation continued in France, where Métal hurlant publisher Jean-Pierre Dionnet invited her to contribute to an anthology called Ah! Nana, which derived its name from the French word for pineapple (anana) and French slang for girl (nana). Trina’s work was translated and published alongside comics by Rudahl, Shary Flenniken and M.K. Brown, as well as several major European women cartoonists. “My God, I was being published in France!” Trina recalled. “I had really arrived!” Ah! Nana folded after nine issues, as its risqué subject matter proved too much for even mainstream European audiences, but Trina looked back on that period as “[a] glorious two-year ride, during which I felt as though I were part of the European comics elite.”
Trina’s reputation as an artist had grown back in the United States, too. Although the underground comix scene was winding down, appreciation for comics as a legitimate art form was growing. In 1977, Joel Tornabene, owner San Francisco’s Art for Art's Sake gallery, approached Trina about mounting an exhibition of her original artwork. Not feeling that she had enough work to justify a solo show, she recommended the addition of friends Lee Marrs and Sharon Rudahl, the first of many original comic art exhibitions that would be curated by Trina over the next 50 years. A memorable opening reception attended by Trina’s friends and colleagues from all corners of the local comics scene saw her talking up artist Steve Leialoha, who “had taken his ponytail down and his long black hair flowed down past his shoulders,” Trina recalled. “He was also about seven feet tall, and suddenly he looked very good to coked-out me.”
They soon became a steady couple: Trina standing five feet, bright red hair, always impeccably dressed, always the center of attention; Steve towering over her, hair tied back, as calm and outwardly serene as Trina was boisterous, a combination that made them one of the most beloved couples in comics. “Steve always thinks things through before doing or saying anything, which continues to drive me up the wall, and makes him the slowest person on earth,” Trina recalled. “I am the opposite, impulsive and given to leaping before looking. Steve has saved me more than once from being hit by a car.”
When underground comix were no longer a viable career option, Trina looked to 'mainstream' comics publishing as an outlet for her creativity. In 1985, she convinced publisher Jim Shooter to let her produce Misty, a six-issue miniseries for Marvel Comics’ recently-launched Star Comics line, a mix of licensed properties and kid-friendly characters intended to attract young readers. “I made Misty the niece of Millie the Model, the star of their most successful girls’ comic back in the day… with an added dose of Katy Keene. I encouraged readers to send in designs for Misty and included paper dolls,” Trina said. Sales on the series were disappointing, however, due to limited newsstand distribution and a decided lack of support from comic book specialty shops. “[T]he comic book store manager [would] order two issues and when they sold, had not reordered. Because it was, you know, a girl’s comic, and everyone knew 'girls didn’t read comics.'”
Trina made a follow-up attempt featuring a similar approach and a fashion-conscious cast of beautiful young characters the following year under the auspices of cat yronwode and Dean Mullaney of Eclipse Comics. California Girls lasted eight issues, but fell victim to the same “boys club” mentality of comic shop owners. “I don’t mind not making money on California Girls,” Trina recalled Mullaney telling her, “[b]ut I can’t afford to lose money."
In 1986, DC approached Trina about drawing a four-issue run on Wonder Woman to bridge the gap between the final issue of her original series and the 1987 relaunch to be helmed by writer-artist George Pérez. Given carte blanche, she pitched a Golden Age throwback tale to be illustrated in a style reminiscent of original series artist H.G. Peter and scripted by Kurt Busiek, as Trina didn’t feel confident enough to write a mainstream superhero title at that point in her career.
Published as a four-issue miniseries titled The Legend of Wonder Woman, the retro-styled series pitted Wonder Woman against the long-forgotten Golden Age villainess Atomia, Queen of the Atom World. The series allowed Trina to draw her a lifelong favorite, and also secured her place in comics history as the first credited woman to illustrate a full issue of a Wonder Woman solo title. (Trina, a stickler for accuracy, would have been the first to acknowledge the contributions of the uncredited female ghost artists and writers who assisted creators William Moulton Marston and H.G. Peter, as well as her friend Ramona Fradon, who illustrated the Wonder Woman-featuring Super Friends comic book series in the 1970s, and artist Jan Duursema, who drew a chapter in the landmark 300th issue of Wonder Woman published in 1983.)
Indifference toward her artwork from mainstream retailers and audiences led Trina to shift her focus toward writing, and it didn’t take long for her to decide on the subject matter for her first book. “Since the early 1980s, I had been growing sick and tired of being told by men, both underground and mainstream, that not only did girls not read comics, but that women had never or hardly ever drawn comics. I knew the former was not true, because I remember my girlfriends and myself reading comics, and I suspected the latter was also untrue,” Trina recalled, discussing her inspiration for teaming up with yronwode to write the Eclipse paperback Women and the Comics, which was to be the first comprehensive history of female comics creators.
Trina wistfully noted that the book was “doomed from the start,” in large part because there was very little existing information about her subjects that was in print, readily available or accessible during that pre-internet era; some of the source material that Trina could locate was incomplete, or in some cases completely inaccurate. But it was a start, and an important breakthrough in documenting the often-overlooked women who had been part of comics history from the beginning. “[Women in Comics] was published in 1985 to great reviews; it was the first book of its kind,” she noted.
Eight years later, with considerably better resources at her disposal, Trina reworked and rewrote that first book for publisher Kitchen Sink, under the title A Century of Women Cartoonists. Over the next 30 years, she would establish herself as the preeminent comics herstorian, through titles such as The Great Women Superheroes (Kitchen Sink, 1996); From Girls to Grrrlz: A History of 
Comics from Teens to Zines (Chronicle Books, 1999); Pretty In Ink: North American Women Cartoonists 1896-2013 (Fantagraphics, 2013); and The Flapper Queens: Women Cartoonists of the Jazz Age (Fantagraphics, 2020). She also authored artist monographs such as Nell Brinkley and the New Woman in the Early 20th Century (McFarland, 2001) and Gladys Parker: A Life in Comics, A Passion for Fashion (Hermes Press, 2022).
In the pages of Trina’s books, many artists whose works had not seen print in a half century or more were acknowledged and embraced by modern audiences. She also celebrated newer and younger artists, many of whom saw their names and their artwork in a proper, professionally published book for the first time thanks to Trina’s efforts. “As I learned more about her through my research on comics, I couldn't believe the breadth in which she worked in the industry, says Jacque Nodell, curator of Sequential Crush. “The first time I heard her speak was around 2009 when her Nell Brinkley book came out. I was immediately charmed by Trina's candor and blown away by her knowledge. As a young comic book historian, I knew I wanted to have the same impact.”
Trina was a world traveler, a global ambassador of comics who rarely went a month without attending a convention, seminar, lecture, festival, museum opening or other literary event, to share her own stories, to learn more about her favorite artists, to discover new favorite artists, to catch up with old friends, and to make new ones. “I found her as a historian, and used her beautiful herstorian work to help ground my research on romance comics," scholar Sydney Heifler says. “She was gracious enough to be on every panel I ever asked her to be on and I think that’s a testament to her as a member of the comics community and as a mentor.”
Creating that community, one that celebrated and encouraged women to read and to create comics, led Trina and friends, including Heidi MacDonald, Deni Loubert, Anina Bennett, Liz Schiller and Jackie Estrada, to form a nonprofit organization in 1994 called Friends of Lulu, named for the beloved comic icon Little Lulu created by cartoonist Marjorie Henderson Buell in 1935. Just as Little Lulu sought to prove that she deserved a place right alongside her friends in the boys’ clubhouse, the Friends of Lulu aspired to make a place for women in the boys’ clubhouse that was the comic book industry through women-created comics, networking, convention appearances and an annual awards ceremony that celebrated the achievements of women in comics.
”Trina was instrumental to the founding of Friends of Lulu and her instinctive activism was a driving force behind much of it,” Friends of Lulu co-founder MacDonald says. “We had so many lofty goals and ideals, but Trina was unwavering in wanting comics to be a safe space for women to be heard and to create. She worked on the newsletter for years, even when the rest of the organization was struggling. When Trina believed in something, she never gave up!”
Although Friends of Lulu folded in 2011, Trina’s passion for social justice carried on unabated, as she dedicated herself to making her community and her world a better, kinder place for all. “Trina was one of the few people I know who continued to volunteer for progressive causes her whole life,” notes longtime friend Becky Wilson. “Not just organizing comics, though she did lots of that, too - she was always out there for every march and never too proud to staff a phone line, address envelopes, and do the other grunt work any good cause requires. If you had called San Francisco's Hillary Clinton campaign office in 2016, Trina would probably have answered the phone.... She and Sharon [Rudahl] both donned pink pussy hats and came to DC for the women's march that dwarfed the previous day's Trump inauguration. I will miss comparing notes with her about our various political activities but I know she's out there somewhere egging me on.”
Trina managed to combine her advocacy with comics several times throughout her career, spearheading several fundraising anthologies over the years. Her first, Strip AIDS USA: A Collection of Cartoon Art to Benefit People With AIDS was published by Last Gasp in 1988, and raised over $11,500 for AIDS-related causes thanks to an all-star lineup of cartoonists from the Golden Age through the underground era to the contemporary superhero scene. Choices: A Pro-Choice Benefit Comic was edited by Trina and published by Angry Isis Press in 1990, while her final book as an editor, Won’t Back Down: An Anthology of Pro-Choice Comics, was published in late 2023 by Last Gasp as a fundraiser for Planned Parenthood. Several of the featured creators in Won’t Back Down had never written or illustrated comics before but wanted to support the cause, and Trina relished the opportunity to bring new friends into the comics community.
A bout with breast cancer when she turned 70 in 2009 threatened to put a hold on Trina’s writing, travels and political activities, but even that couldn’t slow her down. “I think it was a month after her last chemotherapy appointment that she went to China for a comic convention,” marvels cartoonist Caryn Leschen. “Who does that? Okay, Trina does that.”
As Trina slowed down–the word “retirement” was not in her vocabulary–she set her sights on taking care of unfinished business: namely, fulfilling the unrealized dreams of her immigrant parents. Her mother taught elementary school students; Trina lectured at schools, universities and libraries all over the world. Her father had to close his tailoring business due to his failing health; Trina became a celebrated fashion designer and ran a successful boutique. She described her father as “a frustrated chicken farmer,” who owned a few acres of land in New Jersey but couldn’t bring himself to leave New York. Trina moved to the west coast, and after several decades in San Francisco adopted a pair of chickens–Speckles and Ester–that she raised in her own backyard.
One of her very last projects was a collaboration with her father, her daughter and her friends. Casey Robbins, conducting research online, managed to track down a Yiddish-language book her grandfather had authored, A Minyen Yidn un Andere Zakhn. Trina commissioned a translation of the Yiddish text into English, recruited friends new and old including Ken & Joan Steacy, Jen Vaughn, Steve Leialoha, Shary Flenniken and Anne Timmons (artist on Trina’s short-lived but much-loved early 2000s teenage superhero comic GoGirl!) to adapt her father’s prose into a graphic novel, published by Bedside Press in 2017 as A Minyen Yidn: A Bunch of Jews (and Other Stuff). “It’s a portrait of the shtetl where he grew up back in Belarus, and of the Brooklyn he lived in once he got to America,” said Trina, describing Max’s prose. “He didn’t know when he wrote it that he was describing a way of life that would disappear forever with the coming of the war and the Nazi mass murderers. When I read the translation, I can hear his voice: his sarcasm and his subtle humor.”
Trina, thankfully, got her flowers while she was able to fully appreciate them. If she had any doubts that she’d earned her place in the clubhouse, she had a shelf full of awards given to her by her peers and colleagues to remind her of everything that she–and women in comics–had accomplished. Trina was a three-time recipient of the Friends of Lulu’s Lulu of the Year Award, and was inducted into their Hall of Fame in 2001. The following year, she was honored with the Special John Buscema Award at the Haxtur Awards, recognizing comics published in Spain. In 2013, she was inducted into the Will Eisner Hall of Fame, with the award presented to her by her dear friend Sergio Aragonés. When Sergio received that award in 2002, he protested that it was much too soon - he wasn’t done yet! And Trina, following his lead, spent the next decade reinforcing her credentials.
Health issues in her later years and the loss of many friends and colleagues over the decades put her in a philosophical mood, but no matter what life had in store for her, Trina always faced it with a smile and a sharp sense of humor. “That babe I was is long gone, and the most I can hope for [today] is to look intelligent and well dressed. I’m in good shape, but what do I know?” Trina posited in the final chapter of her memoir. “Once they hit seventy, sixty even, my comix creator contemporaries tend to start dropping like flies. I’d like to make it one hundred and be found at at the computer like Hilda Terry, but just in case, I have one more project to complete before I’m ready to embark on what Amelia Earhart called ‘the great adventure.’ And after that? If I may quote Yogi Berra one more time: ‘It ain’t over ‘till it’s over.’”
Trina is survived by Steve Leialoha, her partner since 1977; her daughter, Casey Robbins; a granddaughter; her sister, Harriet Nadel; and a legion of friends, fans, and admirers worldwide.
The post Trina Robbins, 1938-2024 appeared first on The Comics Journal.
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