Trina Robbins

Trina Perlson was born on August 17, 1938, in Brooklyn, New York City, to Jewish immigrants originally from Belarus. Her mother was an elementary school teacher. Her father Max B. Perlson was a tailor who also wrote for Yiddish-language newspapers; his short stories were collected and published in book form in 1938. She grew up in South Ozone Park, Queens, and held an early fascination with comic book heroines, especially Sheena, Queen of the Jungle. As a teenager, she attended science fiction fan conventions.

Robbins attended Queens College in New York, and dropped out. She then attended Cooper Union for a year, where she studied drawing. She moved to California in 1960, settling in Los Angeles. There she attempted to start a career in the movies, including by appearing nude in men's magazines such as Rogue. She returned to New York in 1966 and lived in Manhattan's East Village, where she worked as a stylist and ran a clothing boutique called "Broccoli". In the late 1960s, she designed clothes for Mama Cass, Donovan, David Crosby, among others. She was intimately involved in the 1960s rock scene, where she was close friends with Jim Morrison and members of The Byrds. Robbins was the first of the three "Ladies of the Canyon" in Joni Mitchell's classic song from the album of the same name.

Early work

Robbins was an active member of science fiction fandom in the 1950s and 1960s. Her illustrations appeared in science fiction fanzines like the Hugo-nominated Habakkuk.

Comics

Robbins' first comics were printed in the East Village Other in 1966; she also contributed to the spin-off underground comic Gothic Blimp Works in 1969. That same year, she designed a one-piece costume for the Warren Publishing character Vampirella for artist Frank Frazetta in Vampirella #1 (September 1969).

Robbins left New York for San Francisco in 1970, and that year she co-produced the first all-woman comic book, the one-shot It Ain't Me, Babe Comix, with fellow female artist Barbara "Willy" Mendes. The book is a feminist satire on gender stereotypes in comics. Robbins became involved in creating outlets for and promoting female comics artists, through projects such as the comics anthology Wimmen's Comix, with which she was involved for twenty years. Wimmen's Comix #1 featured Robbins' "Sandy Comes Out", the first comic strip featuring an "out" lesbian. During this time, Robbins also became a contributor to the San Francisco-based underground paper Good Times, along with art director Harry Driggs and Guy Colwell.

Robbins spoke out against the misogyny and "boy's club" of comics creators, criticizing underground comix artist Robert Crumb for the perceived misogyny of many of his comics, saying, "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?"

In the early 1980s, Robbins created adaptations of Sax Rohmer's Dope and Tanith Lee's The Silver Metal Lover. In the mid-1980s she wrote and drew Misty for the Marvel Comics children's imprint Star Comics, Misty being a niece of the long-standing Marvel character Millie the Model. She followed Misty with California Girls, an eight-issue series about teenagers published by Eclipse Comics in 1987–1988.

In 1990, Robbins edited and contributed to Choices: A Pro-Choice Benefit Comic Anthology for the National Organization for Women, published under Robbins' own imprint, Angry Isis Press. The all-star list of contributors, mostly women, included representatives of the underground — Lee Marrs, Sharon Rudahl, Harry Driggs, Diane Noomin, Harry S. Robins, and Robbins herself; alternative — Nina Paley, Phoebe Gloeckner, Reed Waller & Kate Worley, Roberta Gregory, Norman Dog, and Steve Lafler; queer — Leslie Ewing, Jennifer Camper, Alison Bechdel, Angela Bocage, Jackie Urbanovic, Howard Cruse, Robert Triptow, and M. J. Goldberg; and mainstream — Cynthia Martin, Barbara Slate, Mindy Newell, Ramona Fradon, Steve Leialoha, William Messner-Loebs, and Bill Koeb — comics communities. A number of contributors — Nicole Hollander, Cathy Guisewite, Garry Trudeau, Bill Griffith, and Jules Feiffer — were comic strip creators whose work in the anthology was reprinted from their syndicated strips.

In 2000 Robbins introduced GoGirl! — stories about a second generation teen superhero with the power to fly, designed to appeal to young girls. Robbins wrote the stories, with Anne Timmons providing the bulk of the art. The series ran for five issues with Image Comics, and then was picked up by Dark Horse Comics, with the final issue coming out in 2006.

In 2010, she began writing comic adventures of the woman detective character Honey West for a series published by Moonstone Books.

In 1962, she married Paul Jay Robbins in Los Angeles; they divorced four years later. Robbins also had a daughter with cartoonist Kim Deitch. She wrote a memoir entitled Last Girl Standing, released in 2017 by Fantagraphics.

Robbins died after a stroke in San Francisco, California, on April 10, 2024, at the age of 85. Her partner was artist Steve Leialoha from 1977 until her death.

Writing and activism

She worked on the newspaper It Ain't Me, Babe, a newspaper published in 1970 by Berkeley Women's Liberation, a feminist organization. The paper has been called "the first feminist newspaper," although that distinction may only be accurate within second-wave feminism in the United States.

Robbins was also an author of nonfiction books on the history of women in cartooning. Her first book, co-written with Catherine Yronwode, was Women and the Comics, a history of female comic-strip and comic-book creators. Subsequent Robbins volumes on women in the comics industry include A Century of Women Cartoonists (Kitchen Sink, 1993), The Great Women Superheroes (Kitchen Sink, 1997), From Girls to Grrrlz: A History of Women's Comics from Teens to Zines (Chronicle, 1999), and The Great Women Cartoonists (Watson-Guptill, 2001). Her later work included Pretty In Ink, published by Fantagraphics in 2013, which covers the history of North American women in comics dating from Rose O'Neill's 1896 strip The Old Subscriber Calls. Robbins was a co-founder of Friends of Lulu, a nonprofit formed in 1994 to promote readership of comic books by women and the participation of women in the comic book industry. Robbins is featured in the feminist history film She's Beautiful When She's Angry.