Comic book artist Trina Robbins, the daughter of Jewish immigrants from Belarus, died on April 3 in San Francisco. She was 85.
Growing up in Brooklyn, her mother, a New York city school teacher, would bring home “an endless supply of 8½” by 11” Board of Education paper and No. 2 pencils, from which I would chew off the erasers.”
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Those freebies inspired a lifelong obsession with drawing, design and comic books: In the 1960s Robbins befriended and designed clothes for a bevy of rock stars, selling her fashions at her Broccoli boutique in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village.
Turning to comics, Robbins drew “It Aint Me Babe,” the first comic book made exclusively by women; became, in 1985, the first woman to draw a full issue of “Wonder Woman”; and founded, in 1994, Friends of Lulu, a women’s comic book collective.
A historian of comics, her books included “Pretty in Ink: North American Women Cartoonists 1896-2013” (2013).
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In 2023, at the first-ever Jewish Comics Experience convention, Robbins was awarded the Macherke Award for lifetime achievement for works that included “Escape Artist,” a graphic biography of Holocaust survivor and cartoonist Lily Renee, and “A Minyen Yidn,” her adaptation of Yiddish short stories by her father, Muttel (Mutye) Perechudnik.
Robbins was a founder of “Wimmen’s Comix,” an anthology that ran from 1972 to 1992. She also is the co-author of “Women and the Comics,” a series on historical female cartoonists, and “Pretty in Ink: North American Women Cartoonists 1896-2013,” which inspired a Cartoon Art Museum exhibition in 2014 using material from Robbins’ collection. She also created “Sandy Comes Out,” the first comic strip to feature an out lesbian.