Legends Live Forever, drawn and signed by Trina Robbins
I said I’d post earlier this week and I did not do this. I’m sorry.
In Canada we must say Sorry at least three times a day whether or not we did anything to deserve it. This may be a bylaw (a bylaw is a local ordnance in American English.) Canada is the only country where people say Sorry when they are not even remotely in your personal space and nowhere near colliding with or spilling anything on you. Canadians say Sorry when they are on the SAME side of the crosswalk. Canadians are sorry BEFORE something happens.
I’m sorry about something that just happened, and while it was expected, it is a great loss to the world of cartooning and cartoon history.
Trina Robbins was a great cartoonist, a great cartoon historian (she would say HERstorian) and a great friend.
Trina was the first woman to draw Wonder Woman. Trina WAS Wonder Woman. Here is an interview with Trina about that experience. It appeared, appropriately, in a Canadian paper.
https://vancouversun.com/news/staff-blogs/trina-robbins-wonder-woman-comics
Of course Trina did much more than that. She created a place for women cartoonists in the insanely sexist and male dominated underground comix scene in the Sixties and made the crossover to mainstream comics. That is a truly impressive achievement.
It Ain’t Me, Babe (1970) by Trina Robbins. The first comix drawn and designed for women.
I met Trina when she flew in from San Francisco to do a presentation at the downtown Los Angeles library in May, 1992, just after the Los Angeles Riots ended (google Rodney King). Much of the downtown burned and the smell of smoke was still in the air. The area near the library was quiet due to heavy police presence. There was a curfew.
I offered to pick Trina up at her hotel and drive her to the Library, and she accepted.
Her presentation was fascinating but I only remember the aftermath. I could not get out the way I got in (police directive) and got lost. The streets were deserted. I found myself in a dead end, a cul de sac. Trina looked around. “Nancy, there are bullet holes in the walls.”
I kept trying to reverse the car. It was a stick shift. I was in Neutral.
“Nancy, there are machine gun bullets in the walls.” Trina sounded a little shaky.
I got the car out of Neutral and we got out of there. Trina and I remained friends (Sorry about that experience, Trina. Welcome to L.A.)
Trina wrote her ‘herstories’ of women cartoonists after this famous exchange between her and Mort Walker at the San Diego Comic Con in 1979 or 1980. Here she tells it in her own words (excerpted from SPYVIBE’s 2020 article about Beetle Bailey’s 70th anniversary)
Trina Robbins told me this great story: “In about 1979 or 80, he came to the San Diego Comic Con and we women underground cartoonists all came to see his panel and challenge him. When I asked him about his in famous remark [about women not having a sense of humor], his reply showed how stereotyped his thinking was. He said (I’m paraphrasing) that he was surprised that there were so few women cartoonists because drawing comics was something you could do while the baby is sleeping or the laundry was getting done. We women walked out. But I’ll say this for him: he was good natured and open minded about it. Next time I saw him was at the SF Cartoon Art Museum, where I told him that I had considered pie-ing him, so that when he got mad I could tell him he had no sense of humor. My conversation with him opened his mind a little and he put on the first ever show of women cartoonists at his museum. And when he wrote to me announcing the show and asking my participation (remember letters?) he ended the letter by writing, ‘Next time we meet, I want the pie.’”
A Century of Women Cartoonists is out of print. Reprint it, please.
I attended the opening of the WOMEN AND THE COMICS show at Mort Walker’s Cartoon Art Museum in Rye, New York in 1984. Trina co-curated the show with Walker. Her work was on display along with that of Wendy Pini and 48 other female cartoonists. It was the first (and possibly only) time that female cartoonists were invited to draw on the museum’s bathroom walls. The men’s room in that museum was famous, or infamous, for its great drawings of cartoon characters enacting hilarious ‘bathroom’ gags. Chuck Jones was the only cartoonist who did not do a toilet joke, and he was the one who started the tradition!
I have a few photos of both bathrooms somewhere. Someday I will add them to this article.
Wendy Pini inaugurated the ladies’ room comics with an Elfquest character on a gold chamber pot; Selby Kelly drew POGO’s Miz Mamzelle Hepzibah explaining to Miz Beaver that an outhouse contained a ‘bidet’, not a ‘bed’; and I drew a nude Donald Duck covering his groin and yelling “I’ll get you for this, Mickey!” I found it hilarious that Donald only noticed that he didn’t wear pants when his shirt was taken off.
That building was sold a long time ago. The cartoons were probably painted over by the corporation that bought it.
I last saw Trina at the American Association of Editorial Cartoonists/ Association of Canadian Cartoonists co-convention in San Francisco in October 2023. She gave an outstanding presentation on female editorial cartoonists (Edwina Dumm was the first, in 1910. Edwina did political cartoons, comic strips, and comic illustrations for over sixty years. Why is there no book on Edwina Dumm, while there are three on Ernie Bushmiller? Check out her work and think hard before you answer that question.)
Trina Robbins gives the power salute after her presentation on female editorial cartoonists, October 6, 2023.
And she brought along her newest book, THE FLAPPER QUEENS. The 1920s was a golden age for female cartoonists. Most are undeservedly forgotten today.
https://www.tcj.com/reviews/the-flapper-queens-women-cartoonists-of-the-jazz-age/
Afterward, Trina and I talked for a while. She said she was no longer drawing but she continued to write. “I feel that I still have one more book in me.”
Sadly, that’s all she wrote.
Trina wrote her autobiography, LAST GIRL STANDING, and it’s one of her few books that are still in print.
Get the others back in print.
Farewell to the Lady of the Canyon.
Trina (Perlson) Robbins August 17, 1938 – April 10, 2024
There is quite a bit of Trina’s work to be found in the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/search?query=Trina+Robbins