Xingyu Wang-Trina Robbins,who Revolutionized Comic Books

Ain’t Me Babe Comix comic wasn’t the only instance in which Robbins helped shape the development of comic books and the way we perceive women in them. Just two years later, 

Trina Robbins helped launch the longest-running comics series created and edited entirely by women, Wimmen’s Comix. On top of that, in its first issue, she wrote and drew a short story called “Sandy Comes Out,” which starred the first extant lesbian comic-book character outside of pornography. Later, she became the premier historian of female comics creators, penning one prose book after another on the topic. The women she writes about managed to carve out niches in the boys’ club that is the American comics industry — an achievement she shares with them.

If you haven’t heard of Robbins, it’s in no small part due to the fact that the comics ecosystem has historically been uninterested in feminist rhetoric and female achievement. That’s changed to a significant degree in the past decade, which has seen more and more outspoken women creators rising in the ranks. But Robbins was their distant forerunner. Her time in the underground was rarely a smooth ride, and the bumps along the way were sometimes created by her tendency to advance a version of feminism that both inspired and rankled those around her in that underground.

Throughout it all, she has remained a firebrand. “Any time there was talk about integrating the industry more or getting comics to girls, that was Trina’s crusade,” says comics journalist and editor Heidi MacDonald. She would speak out on behalf of women creators past and present and help organize campaigns to promote them. As MacDonald puts it, “She didn’t want to be alone, didn’t want to be the only woman in the room.” She stopped drawing comics in the early 1990s due to a bout of depression and, according to her, the fact that people ceased inviting her to draw. But she has continued to write comics and prose. Just last year, in addition to publishing Last Girl Standing, she also put out an adaptation of a Yiddish short-story collection her father wrote in the late 1930s, illustrated by 15 different artists. At one point in our conversation, she draws a comparison between herself and Hilda Terry, a cartoonist she’s written about, who died at her computer at the age of 93: “That’s how I want to go,” she says.