In 1985, [Trina Robbins] was the first woman to draw a full issue of Wonder Woman, and a full run on a Wonder Woman series, after four decades of male hegemony. And in 1994, she was a founder of Friends of Lulu, an advocacy group for female comic-book creators and readers.
Ms. Robbins was an accomplished clothes designer and seamstress in the 1960s, outfitting music stars like Donovan and David Crosby. She became a notable figure in the hippie communities of New York City and San Francisco, and in Los Angeles she caught the eye of Joni Mitchell.
The first verse of Ms. Mitchell’s song “Ladies of the Canyon,” featured on her 1970 album of the same name, is a portrait of Ms. Robbins:
Trina wears her wampum beads
She fills her drawing book with line
Sewing lace on widow’s weeds
And filigree on leaf and vine.
Her comics about sex were often playful — the two-page strip “One Man’s Fantasy,” for example, was about a man captured by a group of attractive women, who force him to make a tuna fish sandwich. But she found that many male cartoonists were threatened by any hint of feminism.
Ms. Robbins was repulsed by the dark material in Robert Crumb’s comics and the way the underground scene followed his lead. “Rape and humiliation — and later, torturing and murdering women — didn’t seem funny to me,” she wrote in her memoir. “The guys told me I had no sense of humor.”
“Any time there was talk about integrating the industry more or getting comics to girls, that was Trina’s crusade,” the comics journalist and editor Heidi MacDonald told Vulture.com in 2018. “She didn’t want to be alone, didn’t want to be the only woman in the room.”
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