Trina Robbins

Trina Robbins: The Woman Who Kept the Receipts

In 1970 she co-produced *It Ain't Me, Babe Comix* with Barbara "Willy" Mendes — the first comic book entirely created by women, a feminist satire on the gender stereotypes of the medium that had raised her. Two years later she helped launch *Wimmen's Comix*, whose debut issue carried her strip "Sandy Comes Out," the first comic strip featuring an out lesbian. Then she spent the next four decades on a second project, proving with archives and reprints that women had been drawing comics all along and the industry had simply lost the paperwork.

South Ozone Park, and Sheena

Trina Perlson was born on 17 August 1938 in Brooklyn, the daughter of Jewish immigrants from Belarus. Her mother was an elementary school teacher; her father, Max B. Perlson, was a tailor who also wrote for the Yiddish-language press. She grew up in South Ozone Park, Queens, fixated on comic book heroines — above all Sheena, Queen of the Jungle — and attending science fiction conventions as a teenager. That combination, a girl reading adventure comics for the women in them and finding her people at fan conventions, is the entire career in embryo.

Her formal education did not take. She attended Queens College and dropped out; she studied drawing at Cooper Union for a year.

Ladies of the Canyon

The 1960s took her somewhere else first. She moved to California in 1960 and attempted a film career in Los Angeles, including nude modelling for magazines such as *Rogue*. In 1966 she returned to New York, settled in the East Village, worked as a stylist and ran a boutique called Broccoli. She designed clothing for Mama Cass, Donovan and David Crosby. She was close friends with Jim Morrison and members of the Byrds, and she is one of the women in Joni Mitchell's "Ladies of the Canyon."

Her first comics appeared in 1966 in the *East Village Other*. In 1969 she designed the costume for Vampirella at Warren Publishing — a job whose irony she would spend the rest of her life unpacking, having drawn one of the most efficiently objectified figures in the medium shortly before turning her guns on exactly that.

The Underground, and the Fight Inside It

Underground comix promised freedom from the Comics Code and delivered, for women, a new set of walls. Robbins became the movement's most persistent internal critic, and she never softened it. On the field's most revered figure she was blunt: "It's weird to me how willing people are to overlook the hideous darkness in Crumb's work … What the hell is funny about rape and murder?"

That sentence cost her. It also frames everything else she did. *It Ain't Me, Babe Comix* in 1970 and then *Wimmen's Comix* — which she co-founded and worked on for twenty years, from 1972 to 1992 — were not niche projects. They were the construction of an alternative distribution channel for a body of work the mainstream and the underground had each, in their own way, declined to publish.

Adaptations, Wonder Woman, and the Mainstream

Her commercial career ran in parallel. She adapted Sax Rohmer's *Dope* for Eclipse Comics between 1981 and 1983, and Tanith Lee's *The Silver Metal Lover* for Crown Books in 1985. She created *Misty* for Marvel's Star Comics imprint in 1985–86 and the eight-issue *California Girls* for Eclipse in 1987–88.

In 1986 she drew *The Legend of Wonder Woman*, a four-issue limited series written by Kurt Busiek. In 1998 she co-wrote the graphic novel *Wonder Woman: The Once and Future Story* with Colleen Doran, taking on spousal abuse. In 1990 she edited and contributed to *Choices: A Pro-Choice Benefit Comic Anthology* for the National Organization for Women, published under her own Angry Isis Press imprint. From 2000 to 2001 she created *GoGirl!* for Image Comics, five issues about a second-generation teen superhero who flies. Later she wrote the *Honey West* detective series for Moonstone Books.

The Historian

The scholarship may outlast the comics. *Women and the Comics*, co-written with Catherine Yronwode, appeared in 1985; *A Century of Women Cartoonists* in 1993; *The Great Women Superheroes* in 1996; *From Girls to Grrrlz: A History of Women's Comics from Teens to Zines* in 1999; *The Great Women Cartoonists* in 2001; *Pretty in Ink: North American Women Cartoonists 1896–2013* in 2013; *The Flapper Queens: Women Cartoonists of the Jazz Age* in 2020. Her memoir, *Last Girl Standing*, came out from Fantagraphics in 2017. In 1993–94 she co-founded Friends of Lulu, a nonprofit promoting women's readership and participation in the industry.

The date in that first subtitle — 1896 — is the argument. Robbins was not claiming women should be admitted to comics. She was documenting that they had been there since the beginning and had been erased.

Why Trina Is Called a Genius

The faculty involved is not draftsmanship, and pretending otherwise would flatter no one. Robbins was a capable, professional cartoonist; her line was not the reason the field remembers her. What she had was an unusually early and unusually accurate read on a structural absence — the ability to look at a medium and see not what was in it but what had been removed, and then to build the institutions required to put it back. Recognising a gap is common; most people who notice one write an essay. Robbins built a publishing imprint, an anthology that ran twenty years, a nonprofit, and a seven-book archival record spanning 1896 to 2013. That is a rarer cognitive profile: pattern recognition fused to infrastructure-building.

The honest counter-case: no source calls her a genius, and her awards — an Inkpot in 1977, a San Diego Comic-Con Special Achievement Award in 1989 for *Strip AIDS U.S.A.*, Lulu of the Year in 1997, 2000 and 2001, the Friends of Lulu Women Cartoonists Hall of Fame in 2001, a Haxtur Award in 2002, the Will Eisner Hall of Fame in 2013, Eisner Awards in 2017 and 2021 — recognise contribution and advocacy at least as much as artistic achievement. Several came from an organisation she co-founded. She ranked twenty-fifth in CBR's 2015 poll of the top fifty female comic creators, respectable rather than commanding. The case for her is not that she drew better than her peers. It is that she saw the shape of the omission first and did the unglamorous archival labour nobody else would do.

Legacy

Robbins died on 10 April 2024 in San Francisco, aged eighty-five, after a stroke. She had been in comics for fifty-eight years, from the *East Village Other* to the Eisner Hall of Fame. Her partner of nearly half a century, the artist Steve Leialoha, survived her, as did a daughter with the cartoonist Kim Deitch. The field she entered treated women cartoonists as an anomaly. The field she left treats their absence as the thing requiring explanation — largely because she spent forty years assembling the evidence.