Trina Robbins obituary: the first female illustrator to draw Wonder Woman

Born August 17th, 1938

Died April 10th, 2024

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 specialised in books about female cartoonists, has died aged 84.

In 1970, 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.

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In the 1960s, before she devoted her life to comics and to the women who make them, Robbins was an accomplished clothes designer and seamstress who outfitted rock stars such as Donovan and David Crosby. In Los Angeles she caught the eye of Joni Mitchell, who wrote about her in her song Ladies of the Canyon.

Trina Perlson was born in Brooklyn, New York, 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; her mother, Elizabeth (Rosenman) Perlson, was a teacher.

At a young age she became obsessed with comic strips and comic books. When she began high school, her mother told her it was time to abandon comics, and Robbins complied, shifting her obsession to science fiction.

After college, she moved to Los Angeles, where she posed nude for pin-up 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 later said, and was soon making dresses, which she sold at craft and Renaissance fairs.

Robbins was repulsed by the dark material in Robert Crumb’s comics and the way the underground scene followed his lead

Robbins befriended the rock bands the Byrds and the Doors, and moved between the coasts. In New York, 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 realised 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. Her comics about sex were often playful, but she found that many male cartoonists were threatened by any hint of feminism.

And 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 humour.”

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 would say.

After the underground comics scene declined, 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.

While 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.

Along with her partner since 1977, Steve Leialoha, Robbins is survived by Casey Robbins, her daughter with fellow cartoonist Kim Deitch, her granddaughter, Tabitha, and her sister, Harriet Nadel. – The New York Times