I met Trina Robbins only once. It was last December, and she had come to New York to accept the Macherke Award at the inaugural Jewish Comics Experience convention and exhibition staged by the Center for Jewish History. I was intrigued by the fact that Robbins–who had as recently as 2011 said that her Jewishness had “not much” influence on her work, and that “mostly what influences my work is that I’m a woman”–seemed to be formalizing a late-period embrace of a part of her artistic identity she had once dismissed. So, seizing the moment, I took the F train out to her hotel in Manhattan, where she had graciously agreed to answer my questions.
I was, let me say, terrified. Not of the interview itself, although I knew perfectly well that Robbins’ oeuvre had by then been plumbed and interrogated many times over by interviewers more skillful and well-prepared than myself. Rather, I had scared myself speechless with the knowledge that Trina Robbins did not make her comics or her books for me, or for any of the cis male comics readership that, like me, might vainly attempt to seize on her work. She wrote, as she would be the first to tell you, for the women and girls in the audience: especially the girls, whose creative potential had been virtually erased from the concerns of the comics industry in the years since the Second World War.
The same is even more true of the two issues of Girl Fight Comics, a one-woman anthology put out by Print Mint for two issues in the first half of the '70s. Put these next to the work of the most prominent male underground cartoonists of the same era–Crumb, Spiegelman, Rodriguez–and Robbins feels like she's been studying an entirely different medium. A zippy riff on a rotating set of pop culture flavors, from jungle comics to zombie horror to blaxploitation movies, it reads with the intentional breeziness and unforced glee of a Golden Age backup feature. Spiegelman’s pre-Maus experimental period, for instance, was frequently brilliant and boundary-pushing, but not exactly fun. Robbins’ feminism was brash and unmistakable, but accessibly friendly all the same: melancholy and inquisitive, but just as easily jubilant and funny. It all feels instinctive - the work of someone for whom comics are the most simple and effective way to say something true, that needs to be said.
By that point, with the age of the undergrounds long faded, Robbins had embarked on a concerted effort to carve out a new readership of girls in mainstream comics: a quixotic mission if ever there seemed to be one, in that mid '80s era of dingy comic shops and gasping newsstands. Still, she fought the good fight, writing and drawing Misty for Marvel (1985-86), working on licensed Barbie comics in the 1990s, and creating a succession of her own tough, engaging women comic heroes, right up through GoGirl! in the early 2000s.
In the final years of her life, Robbins was probably as well known as a historian as an artist; she had largely given up drawing her own comics, partly due to age, and partly, she told me, out of spite for critics who had huffily dismissed her artwork all along. Her special focus was on the now-vanished women creators and female protagonists who had once been a vital part of comics during the prewar and wartime years. She had also begun actively incorporating Jewish elements into her creative work, adapting a book of her father’s Yiddish short stories into comic form with various artists (A Minyen Yidn; Bedside Press, 2017), and writing a graphic biography of Holocaust survivor Lily Renee (Lily Renée, Escape Artist: From Holocaust Survivor to Comic Book Pioneer; Graphic Universe, 2011). For better or for worse, these later comics seem to me more akin to the respectfully nostalgic tone of prose writers like Sholem Aleichem or Isaac Bashevis Singer, or of the later comic work of Will Eisner. As in her prose histories, Robbins was increasingly looking backward toward comics’ past more often then she was trying to battle for its future: struggling to recapture a lost Eden without any Adam to spoil the fun.
In any case, I need not have worried about interviewing Trina. Her answers to me throughout our interview were often terse, sometimes sarcastic, occasionally combative, but always given in good humor. At age 85, she seemed in astonishingly good health; she was late for our interview because she had spent the afternoon bounding around Manhattan, and offered me a pair of tickets to a Brooklyn folk music festival she had decided not to go out to that night. “As a longtime San Franciscan,” she told me, “I don't feel competent to handle the wilds of Brooklyn alone at night.” I might have thought, at that moment, we’d have her with us for the long haul.
Because of the reason for her visit, our interview centered mostly on the place and history of Jews in comics; it had a tendency to meander, though, as conversations with Robbins frequently were known to do. Afterward, I filed away the recording of our conversation, becoming sidetracked with a succession of other stories and assignments. Last night, as of this writing, I heard the news that Trina Robbins had passed away. I realize now, heartbreakingly, this must have been among the last few interviews that she ever gave. It was an honor I certainly never deserved, and I wish it were in my power to make it not so. I’d rather have more Trina Robbins. I’d rather have more life.
-Zach Rabiroff
ZACH RABIROFF: You’re here to accept an award from the Jewish Comics Experience. I want to ask you about Jewishness and comics, which you’ve not talked about in-depth in very many past interviews. Were you surprised to be getting this award at this ceremony?
TRINA ROBBINS: I was surprised that there was going to be a Jewish comics convention. I think it's fabulous. As soon as I got the email, I just started chuckling. “Whoa. A Jewish Comicon.”
The reason I asked that question specifically is because I saw an interview with you from back in 2011 where they had asked you about Jewishness in your work. In the interview, you said your Jewishness wasn't very important to your work; that it was much more important that you were a woman in comics. So I'm wondering what changed between 2011 and now to make you want to be a part of this.
I've gotten much more into my Jewishness, basically. I started taking Yiddish classes about eight years ago. And then my daughter found my father's book on the internet, and I bought it and had it translated, and I decided that this was a graphic novel. [A Minyen Yidn was adapted into comics form by Robbins with a number of artist collaborators in 2017.] I started getting more and more into Jewishness, especially Yiddishkeit [the culture of Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazi Jews]. I don't believe in a bearded guy in the sky or that Moses made the Red Sea part, but Yiddishkeit? Yes. That's part of me. If I were to rank them, however, I would still put being a woman cartoonist ahead of being a Jewish cartoonist.
This shift in your outlook was about eight years ago. What spurred that on? What made you decide to look into Yiddish classes at all?
That was pure accident. I had a friend who said she was taking Yiddish, and I said, “You're kidding! Where at?” Turns out it was the LGBT senior center. And although I am not LGBT, I am a definite Friend of Dorothy. So we went together. It’s been wonderful. I love it.
And how is your Yiddish now?
I can still read it better than I can say it. And a person has to speak very, very slowly for me to understand. [Laughs]
The reading comprehension is no small feat, because it means taking on a new alphabet.
We've been doing it in English and in Hebrew. So far, I've only been doing it in English.
Your father wrote for a Yiddish-language newspaper.
For the Forward, the Freiheit, the Zeitung. Yes. All the Yiddish papers.
Have you gone back and read his past work for those papers?
I haven't been able to find it. And the only paper that still exists is the Forward. I have thought of looking it up in the Forward. I haven't done that yet.
That would be fascinating. Do you happen to have any idea what he was writing about, what topics?
I don't, but I am in touch with the children of another friend of my father's who also was a Forward writer. He was a friend of my father's. He did, believe it or not, the crossword puzzle for the Forward. In Yiddish! Isn't that amazing?
That would be a way to practice your Yiddish skills, I suppose.
[Laughs] Yes.
I'm curious about how much you know about your family's background in Europe and then coming to the United States.
Most of what I know was in my father’s book. He didn't tell me much. He told me only one story about his childhood, and that was that they kept geese. And in the mornings, my grandmother–his mother–would take a potato hot out of the oven: really, really hot, so you're kind of juggling it in two hands. And she would give the potato to my father to put in his pocket to keep him warm. He would take the geese out to the stream or the pond, or wherever it was they went. By the time he got there, the potato would be cool enough to eat. And he would sit there, eating the potato. That was his breakfast.
With the goose by his side?
Mmm-hmm!
That is remarkable. One of my forebears in Ukraine was a chicken plucker. So I think we have a similar poultry-themed history. Your family came to the United States, and they settled in Tom's River, New Jersey, is that right?
No, no. My father owned land in Tom’s River, and he wanted to have a chicken farm there, but he never did. They lived in New York. Well, Queens. They started in the Lower East Side, and that's where they [my mother and father] met each other.
So he never actually decided to pull up stakes and try out chicken farming.
He owned the land but never got to use it. All that he had left when he died was a book, a small illustrated book on chicken diseases, which fascinated me.
I think I've seen those books before. They were materials prepared by the Jewish Agricultural Society, because they were trying to encourage Jews to move out there and farm the land.
It turns out that Tom's River was a haven for Jewish chicken farmers.
That's right. I have some of those materials that I saved because my grandpa was living in the Bronx, and I guess they got the chicken farming books too. They must have considered doing it.
In my book, I did talk about how I finally grew vegetables, which was what my father had done during the war. And what I have also finally done is keep chickens! We had two chickens in our backyard and we ate their eggs. Unfortunately, the raccoons got them one night. We worked on fixing their coop, their little house, making it absolutely impregnable. And then we got two more chickens. I love them. Once you know chickens, once you keep them, you really grow to love them. They are really very funny.
And they have affectionate personalities. Let's just put it this way. When they would see me coming down the stairs in the morning to feed them, they would run to the gate. We had the stairs gated off, because in the beginning they did run up and down the stairs, but they left poop all over. It's not their fault, they can't control it. They're not like cats and dogs. So we gated the stairs, but they would run to the gate when they heard and saw me coming down the stairs. And they definitely knew me and liked me. It could have been because they associated me with food, but I liked them too.
So you grew up in Queens. I think you've said before that it was an Irish and Italian neighborhood.
Italian, Irish and German. And very, very Catholic. Also quite conservative.
What was your family's relationship to Jewishness, and their attitude toward Jewishness and Judaism when you were growing up?
Both of my parents were decidedly Jewish. They celebrated the major Jewish holidays. My father was more Jewish than my mother, in that they both would go to the synagogue for the special holidays, but my father would also go with a group of men to form a minyan [a group of 10 adult Jews, the minimum number required for certain religious obligations according to traditional practice]. But neither of my parents believed in the bearded man in the sky.
And what about you? What was your attitude towards being Jewish? Especially in what wasn't a Jewish community? Did you want to be gentile?
I didn't necessarily want to be gentile, but I wanted to be American. Like in the movies in those days: an American family. In the movies, they never specified what the family’s religion was. But it was not Jewish.
Was your family also strongly political? You were forbidden from reading the Hearst newspapers, I know.
My father wouldn't have Hearst newspapers in the house because it was “a rag.” But I wasn't forbidden to read it in somebody else's house, which is what I did.
You just couldn't bring it inside the confines of your home.
Exactly. Like, “Get that rag out of the house!”
Do you think that radical politics are tied to Judaism at all? It was common for quite a number of Jews of that generation.
Especially in America, I think that Jews have always been left-wing. I don't know if it's the religion or the culture, but we are just more open-minded. My partner [the cartoonist Steve Leialoha] is half-Jewish and half-Hawaiian, and there are so many more people who are half-Jewish and half-Black, half-Jewish and half-Hispanic. We intermarry like mad. More, I believe, than other religions.
I wonder why that is. Because if you think of Jewish culture in the Old World, certainly in the shtetls in Europe, it's not so open-minded or radical in any respect. I wonder why there was a shift?
The way they lived in the shtetls, first of all, they were separated from other people. Isolated. And they were also hated, so who would marry them? Only other Jews.
I want to detour here just a little. Tell me about how you first encountered your father’s book.
I had always known that he wrote a book. But it was in Yiddish, so I didn't care. It wasn't American. It wasn't until much later in life, when I had a grown daughter, that I wondered if it was possible to find it. My daughter found it on the internet; she understands the internet better than I do. You can find anything on the internet.
Were you able to read it on your own at that point, because of the Yiddish classes you had been taking?
No! [Laughs] I had it translated.
What made you feel like it was right for a graphic novel? Obviously comics are your field, but was there anything about the stories in it that made them feel particularly suited?
To me, it was obvious. As soon as I read it, I knew that it was a possible graphic novel. A probable graphic novel.
Why?
How can you explain an impulse? How can you explain artistic discoveries and decisions? I can't explain it. [It was] visual, maybe, because of the colorful characters he talks about.
So something in the personalities, perhaps? What called out to you that made it seem particularly visual? An instinct?
It was an instinct. I just knew that it was visual, and that it would be a perfect graphic novel.
How did you know who you wanted to draw it? How did you find the artists that you wanted?
Some of them I knew, and I even knew they were Jewish and they'd be perfect. The few that I didn't personally invite in, my publisher knew. And there were some people, I didn't know them, but I know their work, and I thought they'd be perfect. One of them was Terry LaBan. I'd never met him, but I saw his work and I knew he would do a good job. So I asked him, and he was great. He did a wonderful job. He drew my father as a young man, and that is exactly how my father looked. It was remarkable.
Were any of the artists using photo reference of your father?
Oh, all of them. I sent them all photos. Of course, good heavens, yes. And both Steve Leialoha in the first story and Miriam Katin in the last story both drew my father perfectly, just absolutely perfectly. It's almost like he lives again.
What about the town? Were you able to find photos and documents that helped to inform the setting for the graphic novel?
Well, I think Duboy was a classic shtetl. I think they all really looked the same. And Duboy still exists, by the way. I looked it up on the internet, but the only image I could see was of a wooden house and a tree, which is pretty depressing. The Jews are all gone, but it's still there somewhere in Belarus. I just found pictures of shtetls and sent them as reference.
The tone of the stories strikes me as more than a little like Sholem Aleichem’s stories. I would suspect that was deliberate on the part of your father, do you think?
Oh, I think the style was his style. He had this really interesting, subtle sense of humor. I love his sense of humor. I didn't appreciate it as much when I was a kid as I appreciate it now. I always tell people, if they're trying to figure out what this book is, think of Aleichem - and then, of course, think of Fiddler on the Roof.
Do you feel like there is a risk when you approach a project like this of sentimentalizing the Jewish past? Harvey Pekar once said that he thought Will Eisner, in his later comics, became too schmaltzy about Judaism for his own good. Is that something that you felt like you needed to avoid?
I don't think I even considered it. It wasn't a case of not avoiding it. It was a case of not even thinking of it.
And why is that?
I was adapting my father's stories. They were his; all I did was the adaptation.
So you felt like you weren't trying to insert any of your own interpretation or your own viewpoint on top of it?
I didn't have to. It's his viewpoint.
Maybe this was a factor of when your father was writing it, but I don't get the sense that there's an undercurrent of tragedy behind the story. Much of the time when you read works that have that setting, the story is really about the Holocaust, or it's about pogroms, even if it's not saying that it is. Did you feel that was there, or did you feel it was absent?
I think it was absolutely absent, because when my father was living these stories, they didn't dream that Hitler would happen, that the Nazis would happen, that the Holocaust would happen; they didn't dream of it. And, to me, that is part of what makes it touching. All these people who are in these stories didn't know what was going to happen.
Backtracking a little bit, you've talked about how you were drawn to comics for the first time through newspaper strips, right?
No. My first comics were in comic books. My mother used to bring me home kids’ comics like Raggedy Ann and Andy and Our Gang. You know, really good kids’ comics published by Dell. My mom was a schoolteacher, and she approved of the Dell comics because they had capital letters and small letters, which was different from all of the other comics where it was all caps.
Did either of your parents ever read comics as well?
Yes. My father liked comics. He used to tell me about the old comics, like Reg'lar Fellers. I remember that one.
There's been so much discussion about comics as a “Jewish” medium. I don't think that was as true of newspaper comics compared to comic books. But at the time, were you at all aware of the Jewishness of comics or of comic creators?
Absolutely not. I didn't know any of the names. In those days, you didn't know who created the comics. We certainly didn't know who published the comics.
And even if you did, so many of them were changing their names.
Right, exactly.
At what point did you become aware of the influence, that culture that was a part of comics?
Oh, probably around the '70s.
How did that come to your attention?
In those days I wasn't yet thinking in terms of Judaism. The most interesting thing to me was how they changed their names. Stan Lee and Stanley Lieber, you know. Or Jack Kirby, what was his name?
Jacob Kurtzberg.
Yeah. That, especially. From Kurtzberg to Kirby. It sounded Irish. I talked about that with Bill Loebs. I said, ”Why is it there were so many Jews in the movie industry, the early films, and yet you see those films from the '40s, and everyone, for some reason, is Irish?” And his theory was that the Irish had immigrated to America before the Jews, so the Jews felt that the ones who had immigrated before them were American. So they gave themselves Irish names, like Kirby, and they had Irish characters in their movies. It also happened in the comics - a lot of Irish characters, or at least characters with Irish names.
That’s interesting. Fashioning themselves as outright WASPs was unrealistic, but they could be Irish. That they could achieve.
Exactly.
What do you think it was that drew so many Jews of that generation to comics as a profession? Was it simply exclusion from other things, or was there anything particular about it?
I think that comics in the early days was not a high class thing. It was low class. And because of that, they would hire Jews. A lot of other industries would not hire Jews. We could only work for the low class industries that would hire us. So we did comics, and we did movies. In the very beginning, movies were also low class.
As a result of that, do you think there's anything about comics then, or even now, that strikes you as fundamentally Jewish?
Well, that would depend on the artist. I mean, Will Eisner, for instance, who-- you know, what Harvey Pekar and Gary Groth said about him. I mean, comics are very Jewish.
Denny Colt is about as Irish a name as you can get, right?
There you go.
It's the same as when people will write about Clark Kent as an alter ego of Superman. It seems like such a fake name that it's Jewish because of the absence of Jewishness.
Like Jack Kirby and Stan Lee.
So do you think there was a change in the Jewishness of comics over the generations?
We're certainly not like our ancestors. Like, our parents or grandparents lived in a different world. There Dropsie Avenue. Or maybe... I was staying with a friend last night who lives upstate in the Hudson Valley, and she pointed out that there were a lot of Orthodox neighborhoods in those small towns.
What is your sense of when, or if, there began to be any explicit mention of Judaism in comics The earliest explicitly Jewish work I can think of is "Master Race" by Krigstein.
Oh, earlier than that. There are things like [Harry Hershfield's 1914-debuted newspaper strip] Abie the Agent, which is very definitely Jewish. I can't think of the name of the artist, but there was a Jewish cartoonist, and his comics were very Jewish. His book is Nize Baby [Milt Gross]. I think [comics were] formed as a Jewish medium, but that was almost a century ago. It's all things to all people now, which is wonderful.
Do you think this is for the better or for the worse?
Oh, definitely for the better. Especially since this century. There was the horrible period that took over the 20th century where there was nothing but superheroes. White superhero guys beating each other up. That was a terrible period. That was awful.
Do you feel like we're getting away from that now?
Oh god yes. I'm so grateful. And that's because of graphic novels. You don't have to work for Marvel or DC. In graphic novels, you can tell a real story without men beating each other to a pulp.
So it's the bookstore market that has really provided an escape.
Yes. Yes.
When you came into comics, it was through the underground scene. It doesn't seem to me that there was much of a Jewish element to it at that time. Was there?
No there wasn't. It was simply a counterculture element; that was specifically what it was.
Many times, you’ve called out the movement in that era for having a misogynist streak. Others have called it out for a racist streak. Was there anything antisemitic about it, do you think?
The only one I can think of is Crumb, who did 'When the Jews Ruled The World,' something like that. [“When the Goddamn Jews Take Over America!” from 1993’s Weirdo #28.] It was very nasty, and everybody said, “Oh, it's just satire.” Except for me, I knew it wasn't satire. One thing that I have learned is that when people say insulting things or hateful things, and you disagree, when you speak out about it, they always say it was just a joke, or it was just satire. But it isn't.
I take it that your views around Crumb haven't moderated or changed over the years. Do you still feel now the way you did then?
Yes. I mean, he doesn't do that anymore, but he did do it then.
Since the last time you spoke to the Comics Journal, Aline Kominsky-Crumb died. I don't know if it made you want to reassess anything about your past disagreements with her, or if you still feel the way you did before. [Robbins and Kominsky-Crumb, once collaborators in the Wimmen’s Comix collective, had a highly publicized falling out in the later 1970s.]
I don't see anything to reassess, but I don't believe in speaking ill of the dead. I would no longer say anything negative about her. I really never did.
Certainly the two of you didn't seem to be on the best of terms.
That was really on her part and not mine.
Had you spoken to her at all in the years before she died?
No. They were in France, you know. I'm very sorry that she died. And I don't bear ill feelings towards her. I never really did, but she didn't like me.
Was that a personal thing or a political thing?
I think it was more personal than political. I don't really know.
Going back to what we were talking about earlier: given your involvement in feminism and feminist comics, have you found Judaism as a religion or culture to be supportive of feminism, antithetical to it, or somewhere in between?
When I was beginning to get into the movement, the counterculture was not interested in any established religion. We were breaking away from all of that. My friend Willy Mendes is Orthodox, but it's her own kind of orthodoxy - she has been drawing comics for a long time. We first met because of [the] East Village [Other], because of Gothic Blimp Works in 1968. She's an extreme example. I don't think anyone else is actually Orthodox.
I had said that there wasn't a lot of explicit Jewishness in the underground movement, but of course she's really the major exception to that rule.
Yes. But at that time, she wasn't. It was later that she decided she was Orthodox.
It really wasn’t until [around] the '80s that there seems to have been a deliberate effort for a lot of Jewish cartoonists to recapture something explicitly Jewish in their art. Art Spiegelman doing Maus, Eisner doing A Contract with God. What do you think happened that caused that shift?
Maybe we suddenly got interested in our past. Maybe in the '60s we were still too young to be repudiating everything. And we reclaimed it as we grew up. As you get older, you do get wiser.
You weren't a part of that movement. Why not?
Because I was still interested in–and I am still, of course–interested in feminism. I just automatically drew women and wrote women because I was a woman. Because I cared.
What did you think of the attempts that others were doing? What did you think of the work that Spiegelman and Eisner were putting out in that era?
Brilliant. They're wonderful. They're brilliant, obviously.
And now? What do you think is the place of Jews in comics right now, in 2023?
Look, we're having a convention of Jewish comics, so of course there's still a huge amount of Jewish cartoonists and Jewish comics writers.
Does it serve a particular artistic function? Is it adding something in particular to the field? Or is it just a matter of, “Here we are, let's pat ourselves on the back”?
Oh no, it definitely adds to the field. Now with graphic novels, you can do so much more. You don't have to just draw white Protestants or white Irish guys beating each other up. There's so much more that you can do now. And we're doing it.
Jews were so much a part of inventing that reliance on the violent pulp genres, though. So much of what we think of as the heavily Jewish era of comics was dedicated to the two-fisted approach.
Yes, but the characters were not Jewish. Well, they [the writers and artists] were Jewish, but they changed their names, and their characters were not Jewish. Look at Jules Feiffer's book, The Great Comic Book Heroes. He shows a couple of pages of a comic that he drew as a kid, and the guy's name, the hero, is Flash something-or-other, or Speed something-or-other. He has an Irish last name.
I think the same even remains true into Marvel comics in the '60s, where none of the characters have Jewish names. None of them are explicitly Jewish, but there's so much of a Jewish overtone.
I think it's accidental. I think they couldn't help it.
Right. When Kirby would draw settings or characters, they ended up looking like he was drawing from his childhood.
Yes. Now, what is that neighborhood that they talked about in Marvel Comics? Yancy Street, in Fantastic Four. I mean, that's Dropsie Avenue, you know? And also, remember MAD? MAD had so much Jewish humor in it.
Given that we're talking about Jews and comics, I feel like I'd be remiss if I didn't ask you about the war happening between Israel and Palestine. I don't know what your feeling is on it, and if you feel that it's something comics can comment on as a medium.
I would be very uncomfortable commenting on it. I don't think I would even want to read comments on it. I mean, I get them on Facebook and I just don't want to know about it. What Hamas did was so unbearably awful. And at the same time, what Netanyahu is doing now is equally terrible. Hamas started it, but Netanyahu—- I've only been to Israel once, and it was in connection with [Ben-Gurion University of the Negev]. All the teachers I met there hated Netanyahu. He doesn't represent Jews. He represents himself.
That’s not something you’d want to explore in your own comics?
I can't ever say “never,” but I don't think I would. I know the history, and a lot of people get online and say things on Facebook that they absolutely do not understand. They say that in 1948, when Israel became recognized by the United Nations, that they declared war on the Arabs. They didn't. The Arabs declared war on them. People have no knowledge of real history.
But if you feel passionately about that, wouldn’t comics be a useful tool for examining that history?
Yeah, I just can't see myself doing something.
Ok. You’re making comics, but you're not really drawing anymore, is that right?
I'm not drawing anymore. I'm just writing them.
What made you step back from doing your artwork?
That is a very personal thing. There were people in comics who just didn't like me, and they made the atmosphere very unpleasant.
So it wasn't a choice that you would have liked to make?
No, I just reacted to the point where I couldn't draw anymore.
You never say “never,” but at this point do you feel like you are committed to writing but not to drawing?
I think at this point I am. For one thing, as I've gotten older, my hands shake. I can still doodle, I can draw pretty girl faces, and shoes and things when I'm on the phone. But I don't think I'm ready to do inking. For penciling, you can be pretty loose. But for inking, I don't think I could do it.
Is that difficult for you? Is it sad for you to not be doing that part of your work anymore?
No, because I love writing. And it's so much easier than drawing comics.
Have you found that you've preferred working in prose or in comics?
Well, I love writing comics. And the books that I've written have been about comics.
You've kind of fashioned yourself as the unofficial chronicler of women creators in the comics industry.
Well, that's because no one else has done it. It was one thing at a time, but I didn't know that. I discovered all these amazing women, people like Nell Brinkley and Lily Renée. Nobody knew about them before. I mean, a few people did. Obviously they had a cult following, but now people know about them.
When you started writing these histories, it was the pre-internet era…
Oh, yes. It was very hard in the beginning, and I had a lot of misinformation. I would say to take those very early books with a large grain of salt. The internet has made things so much easier.
How were you doing your research back then?
Well, obviously we were not doing it with the internet. For the first book [Women and the Comics; Eclipse Books, 1985], the one that I did with Catherine Yronwode, there was a group in Los Angeles who wrote about early 20th century American illustrators. We took a lot of information from them, which turned out to be misinformation. [Laughs] Like, all about Nell Brinkley: everything they said was wrong, even to the color of her hair. So it was very hard. I was very lucky in that Bill Blackbeard liked me, so he would say, “Look, here's a comic by a woman,” and he would lend them to me so I could photocopy them. In those days, we didn't even have scanners - it was photocopies, but I was very lucky that I had Bill Blackbeard and people like that.
Someone had to do it. I do things when nobody else has done it, and you have to do it. It came from my anger at the Supreme Court, a rogue Supreme Court. They're not my Supreme Court anymore. I'm a woman, and I had to do it.
Do you still feel that kind of anger, that kind of passion, for politics?
I suppose that particularly with the overturning of Roe v. Wade, that has reignited an awareness of the need for feminist politics. Not just feminist politics, but also left wing politics in general. The right wing, it's horrible. It’s since Trump, really. But maybe it was building up to that, and we are really in genuine danger of living in a fascist state.
Do comics have a capacity to be an adequate response to that, or a response to that with any kind of power?
I hope so. I hope so. People do read them. Wimmen’s Comix was started in 1972, and a lot of well-known women cartoonists published their first stuff in Wimmen’s Comix. Obviously we didn't create a revolution for women, but we were the beginning of a revolution - a comics revolution for women.
When you look at the field now, does it seem to you that it has opened up to more women, to more categories of people? Where are we now, compared to when you were getting in?
It's beyond my wildest dreams. It isn't just women; it's people of color. The year that I was nominated for an Eisner [2018, for A Minyen Yidn], the comic that won in that category was an anthology of Black cartoonists [Elements: Fire, A Comic Anthology by Creators of Color]. I remember the editor gave such an impassioned speech when she accepted the award that I wanted to tell her that I so deeply related to her talk; I was glad that she had won the award and not me.
One of the things that you’ve been criticized for about Wimmen’s Comix is that it didn't have enough women of color. I would presume that you still disagree with that charge.
Of course I do. There were women of color and lesbians who wrote comics, but they didn't send us anything. We were open to people sending us work. Once a month, we would just sit there on the floor surrounded by all of this work and pick what we wanted to publish. A good example is Roberta Gregory. She did the first lesbian comic in Wimmen’s Comix, and we loved it. We didn't say, “Oh, she's lesbian. We must print her.” We said, “Oh, she's so good. This is such a great story. We must print it.”
But there wasn't any sort of deliberate recruitment effort for Black cartoonists, or--
Well, actually yes. On the part of Angela Bocage in the late '80s. She recruited the lesbian cartoonists that she knew and we started publishing them because they sent us their work. They weren't known at all. They didn't exist.
What about trans women cartoonists? What was the state of that community in comics at the time, if present at all?
There were so few trans [cartoonists] to start with. There are more people who are aware now, reading trans stuff and speaking to trans people and thinking, “Hmm, I've always felt like that too.” It didn't occur to me. I mean, there are so many different kinds of people now who are considered okay, when 50 years ago they would have been weird Uncle Gregory who lives in the basement. The field [today] is so diverse, but there's never not a need for diversity. There's always a need for diversity.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me the tone of your work has mellowed a bit with time. It's a little bit more peaceful in its engagement with the past than it was when you were starting out.
Of course it is. Absolutely. I think that I got older, that I grew up. We were just kids in the '60s. My early, earliest stuff that I did in the '70s, a lot of it was so angry. Well, I'm still angry. I'm mad at the Supreme Court, and at right wing people. But I'm more interested in showing people stuff they didn't know before.
What’s fueled your desire to look backwards in that way?
I'm very much into everything retro, everything old, but that's not just me. Obviously there are lots of people, including lots of people in comics, who are into old stuff.
Do you keep up with new cartoonists? Is there anybody in the scene who interests you at all?
Few. There are so many new cartoonists, including women cartoonists, that I can't keep up with it. But I certainly still read comics, and buy new comics that I haven't heard of the author before. I'm less controversial [now] because women are in the field now. So many women are in the field that they're accepted, feminism is accepted. I remember Wally Wood saying to me–in those days [the 1960s] we called them, “women's libbers”–saying, “Women's libbers are just a bunch of ugly women who can't get men.” Wally said that to my face. And it just so happens that in the '60s, I was a serious hot babe! I mean, I was a real looker. And he's saying that to me!
I don't know how close you are to the mainstream comic circles now, but do you get the sense that that's changed, or is it as much of a boys' club now as it was then?
Well, what is "mainstream"? Do you mean the superhero comics? Because graphic novels are now mainstream. I think that there are a lot of guys in mainstream comics who are sexist. If we're talking about the superhero books, they're still so male-dominated. There are more women now, and they're really good. Some of these women - wow, they're fabulous. But it's still male-dominated. Because superheroes are a male thing. They're a boy thing.
And you think that is because of the reliance on violence as a genre tool?
Yes. You pick up these comics, some of them are good, but some of them-- I heard someone refer to them as empty calories, because that's it. There's no story. There's just a setup for a fight, and then there's a big fight, and then it ends. I think that's because there's an unending supply of 12-year old boys, and 12-year old boys still want to read comics in which overly-muscled guys fight each other.
These days, it’s more likely to be a 45-year old boy.
Still 12-year old boys.
In a 45-year old boy's body.
Exactly. Yes.
If you look at, say, the late '40s, you have things like Patsy Walker; there was that whole booming genre of women-centered comics, and there were a lot of women creators involved with that too. You’ve written about them, but they've been almost erased from the historical record.
Oh, come on. You know what happened. Rosie the Riveter - you know, the war. The war ended, and the boys came back, and the women were forced back to the kitchen. Most of them didn't want to go back to the kitchen. They liked what they did, but they weren't given any work anymore. I look at old magazines a lot. I have a huge collection of old magazines. And you can see during the war when they show women, the women are in some kind of uniform. They're in overalls or some kind of uniform, or they're nurses, army nurses - and then the war ends, and suddenly the women aren't in uniform anymore. They're wearing fluffy little frilly aprons, and they're concerned about their wash being good, so when he comes home his sheets will be whiter than white. You can see it. It’s such blatant propaganda in the ads in those magazines.
One of my favorite ads-- I don't remember what they were advertising, but the photo is this guy, and he's still in uniform. He's just come home, and in front of him is this happy, smiling woman, and she's wearing a frilly apron, and she's drying a pot that she has just washed. And he just looks so happy that she is drying this pot in her frilly apron. There are little hearts all over his head. That ad tells us, “Go back to the kitchen, wear a frilly apron, wash the dishes, and he will love you.”
A lot of those women’s comics of the 1940’s kept running, and they just replaced the women creators with men. And with men who, increasingly, it seems to me, really did not know how to do it. They did it for decades. But it's very strange to read the output as produced by men.
Yes, because they're not women, and they didn't understand. They didn't even know how to dress the women. I talk about the Red Dress with a capital R and a capital D – comics drawn by women. They always pay attention to the clothes. When men drew these comics, they would just put the women in a v-neck, knee-length red dress, a featureless red dress.
[By the '60s], the superhero comics were becoming so successful that they basically just threw the girl comics under the bus. They didn't feel there was a need, because the superhero comics were doing so well. Also, by the '60s, they were incredibly unaware of how times had changed. And their attempts to capture the '60s and the whole counterculture thing were really embarrassing, because they just didn't get it at all.
The romance comics were certainly feeling woefully out of date.
God. Yeah. It was always the same story: she's in love with her boss, and she sees him with another woman, and she weeps, but it turns out it's his sister or something like that. So predictable.
What do you see as your own legacy in comics at this point in your career?
I've brought recognition to some women. These are women that nobody knew about before, because no one had written about them. And of course, I did start back when there were no other women. I started comics by women. I produced the very first all-woman comic: that was It Aint Me Babe [1970].
Where do you see your work going from here?
I have no idea. There's one more book I want to do about a woman who, again, was so good and so successful, and has been forgotten. I don't know what I want to do after that. Maybe something will pop up.
Can you talk a little bit more about the project that you want to do?
It’s about Grace Drayton. She's the last of the very, very early women cartoonists that I want to talk about. She started in 1903, so she really was one of the very, very few women drawing comics. And she drew until she died, which was 1936. She was incredibly prolific, and she did lots and lots of strips. I've never tried to count them all, but she had all these different characters who basically looked alike. They were unbelievably cute, little chubby-cheek children. She was the queen of the chubby-cheek children. She created the Campbell’s Kids. That's what most people would recognize. I think most people still know the Campbell’s Kids.
How have you been finding information about her?
There's a woman who has a couple of hundred pages of comics by Drayton, and I have also collected objects from Campbell’s Soup, like cups and saucers, and little figurines. I have two cartons full.
How far along are you on the project?
I haven't started it yet. After this trip, a week later, I'm off to France, and when I get back from France, three days later, we're all going to a convention in Hawaii. When I get back from Hawaii is when I will start this book.
I look forward to seeing it. And in the meantime, congratulations on this award. It's well deserved and I'm very pleased to see it happen. I appreciate all of your time this afternoon.
It’s been great.
