Trina Robbins, Creator and Historian of Comic Books, Dies at 84
Trina Robbins, who as an artist, writer and editor of comics was a pioneering woman in a male-dominated field, and who as a historian specialized in books about women cartoonists, died Wednesday. She was 84.
Her death at a San Francisco hospital was confirmed by her longtime partner, the superhero comics inker Steve Leialoha, who said she had recently suffered a stroke.
In 1970, Ms. Robbins was one of the creators of It Ain’t Me Babe Comix, the first comic book made exclusively by women. In 1985, she was the first woman to draw a Wonder Woman comic after four decades of male hegemony. In 1994, she was a founder of Friends of Lulu, an advocacy group for female comic-book creators and readers.
In the 1960s, before she devoted her life to comics and to the women who make them, Ms. Robbins was an accomplished clothes designer and seamstress who outfitted rock 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 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.
Trina Perlson was born on Aug. 17, 1938, in Brooklyn, the younger of two daughters of Jewish immigrants from what was then Russia but is now Belarus. Her father, Max Bear Perlson, worked as a tailor until Parkinson’s disease forced him to retire; her mother, Elizabeth (Rosenman) Perlson, was a second-grade teacher.