Trina Robbins, "GoGirl!" graphic novelist: Mr. Media Interview, Pt. 2

ANDELMAN: Let’s mention some of these titles, because I’m aware that you did A Century of Women Cartoonists, and what was the other history?

ROBBINS: Yes. The Great Women Cartoonists.

ANDELMAN: And I know you also did a book, The Great Women Superheroes.

ROBBINS: Yes.

ANDELMAN: Who are some of these women? Let’s go ahead and mention some names.

ROBBINS: Well, we could start with the very, very early earliest. The earliest comic I found was from 1896, and that was drawn by Rose O’Neill, who became famous as the creator of the Kewpies, and she did Kewpie Comics. She was also an artist and a magazine illustrator, a very, very good artist.

ANDELMAN: Kewpie Comics I know about, having done Will Eisner’s biography. He published that, and he thought that was going to be so huge, and it was one of his great disappointments was that it didn’t fly for him, but I know exactly what you’re talking of.

ROBBINS: But you know, you can still get Kewpie products, and there are still lots of Kewpie fans who have conventions every year.

Another one was Grace Drayton, who was incredibly prolific. We’re talking about really early 20th Century, like she started in 1903, okay, and in 1906, she created the Campbell’s Soup Kids. She drew comics about little kids, and they all looked like that. They were all these roly-poly little kids with little round noses. She did so many, about 10 or 12 titles, really. She was amazingly prolific in American newspapers everywhere.

A little later, well, actually starting in 1907 but very popular in the teens and ‘20s was Nell Brinkley, who was famous for these beautiful, beautiful women she drew, and they were called the Brinkley Girls. They’re just breathtakingly beautiful. When I show her work in slide shows, people just gasp. She was so successful that she was a household name. Newspapers used to write articles about her. You could buy products; you could buy Nell Brinkley hair curlers. The women she drew used to have this wonderful curly hair. I guess the idea was, if you bought these hair curlers, you could have hair like that, too. The Ziegfeld Follies had an act called the Brinkley Girls in which the showgirls in the Ziegfeld Follies in the early 20th century would be all in white, and then they would be outlined in black. Their clothing would be outlined in black so that they looked like moving drawings.

Let’s see, who else? Okay, we get into the twenties, Ethel Hayes, again, was a really, really prolific cartoonist who also drew flapper comics, really cute little art nouveau women kind of inspired by John Hill, Jr., and again, she did everything. She illustrated children’s book. If you Google her, you’ll find so many children’s books that she illustrated. She was really great.






ANDELMAN: And then, Trina, if we come forward, now today, I know you’re not the only one working in the field. Who are some of the…..

ROBBINS: Oh, there are more women drawing comics now than every before, ever.

ANDELMAN: Who are some of the creators today, female creators, and what are some of their projects?

ROBBINS: Well, let’s see, immediately what comes to mind is Roberta Gregory, who does a comic called Naughty Bits about a woman named “Bitchy Bitch,” who is just as you would imagine she would be. It’s uproariously funny. Roberta has been around for quite a while doing this comic. Let’s see. Jessica Abel, who just came out with a wonderful graphic novel called La Perdida. Leela Corman, who has done a graphic novel and is about to have another one come out, is a very, very good artist. I really like her stuff. Suddenly, I draw blanks when I have to think of contemporary women, but there are so many. There are really more than ever before.






ANDELMAN: There’s actually an organization now, right, too?

ROBBINS: Friends of Lulu.

ANDELMAN: Friends of Lulu.

ROBBINS: Friends of Lulu started in 1994 when nothing was more needed than an organization to inspire women and to encourage women, because, really, women were just about invisible in comics in 1994. Things have gotten much better, but it’s still really, really helpful to have a group like this. Friends of Lulu is a non-profit international organization. We have members in Canada; some people in Europe get our newsletter. It’s dedicated to encouraging participation in comics for women both as creators and as readers, so that they’re pushing women-friendly comics just as much as they’re pushing women comic creators. And I cannot recommend it enough for women who want to draw comics or who want to know what they should be reading or what they should be looking for if they want to read comics.

ANDELMAN: It shouldn’t surprise anyone who’s gotten this far with us in the conversation that a woman who is that interested in the history of women and cartoonists has actually worked on a series also about women. You did most recently Hedy Lamar and a Secret Communication System for Capstone, and it was very interesting to me to see that. I remember, it seems like it must be almost eight to ten years ago that there was a cover story in Scientific American that got a lot of attention about Hedy Lamar having worked on this anti-torpedo system, and people were like, what?

ROBBINS: That’s right. It was a radio-controlled torpedo system.

ANDELMAN: But what made you look at that, and I don’t know if it was your idea or if someone brought the idea to you to do this.

ROBBINS: Well, I was very lucky. The publisher of Capstone, you probably noticed I did four different women for them. They published these educational graphic novels for kids, and they gave me my choice of women to do. Besides Hedy Lamar, I did Elizabeth Blackwell, who was the first woman doctor. Florence Nightingale, who made the nursing profession respectable, because before that, it was not respectable at all, who did so much for nursing. Bessie Coleman. I am really proud of that one. It’s gorgeously illustrated. Bessie Coleman was the first African-American woman to get her pilot’s license back in 1921. And since they gave me a choice of subjects, when I saw Hedy Lamar, I just snapped it up, because I knew a little about Hedy Lamar. I knew she had been an inventor, but of course, researching this, I found out so much more about her, and her story is just amazing. Not just that this woman who was called the most beautiful girl in the world, and she was really was so beautiful, this actress. Not just that she was so smart and she had created this invention. But her daring escape from Austria in 1937 is just the stuff of movies itself. I’m waiting for someone to do a movie about it. She was this teenager -- she was just 17 when she made her first movie, and she was this gorgeous Austrian actress, and she was married to this rich man. She was his trophy wife, and he was a terrible person. He was selling arms to Hitler and Mussolini, and she hated the Nazis, and she hated him. But he had her closely guarded so that she couldn’t get away. He had people following her every move, so even though she lived in the lap of luxury, she was like a prisoner in her own home. She hired a maid who was roughly her size and had hair like hers, and she drugged the maid with three sleeping pills in a cup of coffee and changed clothes, changed into the maid’s uniform and made her getaway and left Austria, and eventually, she toured. She was on the stage in England. Eventually, on the ship to America, Louis B. Mayer was on the ship, and she signed a contract with him right there on the ship to become an American movie star.

ANDELMAN: And one of the most interesting parts of her story, of course, is later, she’s so frustrated with the Nazis, she finds someone, and she’s talking to them about radio-controlled torpedo systems. And they’re like, well, how do you know about this? Well, my husband doesn’t know, but I was listening very carefully when he was involved in this.

ROBBINS: Everyone thought that just because she was beautiful, she was stupid.

ANDELMAN: Right. It was a great story, and this was another one. My daughter read that this week, too, and just was like real interested, and you know, you can just see, you can see the little light going on in the little girl’s eyes and the head going, wow, when they say I can do anything, I can really do anything. I mean, I assume that’s part of what you’re getting at with these books.

ROBBINS: That’s what I hope. That is exactly the result that I hoped for in these books that I wrote. Yes.





ANDELMAN: It works. I think the more kids, the girls, especially, that have access to this…. I’ve been stocking my daughter’s shelf for when she’s a little older. Any time I see something about women accomplishing things and getting recognized for it, I’ll just slip something up into her shelf up in the top of the closet, and eventually, she’ll be old enough to, “What is that stuff up there?” And climb up and take a peek. Are there more books coming in that series?

ROBBINS: Not at the moment, but they have kind of an offshoot publication called Stone Arch that is doing books that are not specifically aimed for classrooms that will be sold in bookstores. I know that these are sold on Amazon.com. I’m not sure about the bookstores, but they are doing books that are going to be sold in bookstores, children’s graphic novels, and I wrote something for them. I really can’t tell you when it’s going to come out, because it’s in production, but I’m very proud of it, and it’s about a 14-year-old slave girl who escapes from slavery via the underground railroad, and I’m really proud of this book. I can’t wait to see the finished product.

ANDELMAN: Does it have a title yet?

ROBBINS: Well, I’m calling it “Follow the Drinking Gourd,” and I’m not sure yet if they’ve decided to keep that title or not.

ANDELMAN: Okay. Now, you and I are an easy sell on comics. Obviously, we both grew up on them, reading them, and believe in their value, both entertainment and clearly these days, with your work, educational. But not everyone believes that comics are the best format to teach children anything and, to be honest, that includes my wife. It’s an issue in my own house. How do you respond to people who are still dubious about the genre after all these years?

ROBBINS: Well, you know, that’s changing a lot. I contributed a chapter to a book on graphic novels aimed at librarians. My chapter, of course, was on graphic novels for girls. Librarians and teachers and school librarians, also, are discovering that even if kids won’t read books, they are likely to read comics, and you can produce literate comics for them. I’m very proud to say that all of my comics are very literate, that the spelling is always checked, because yes, it is true that there are comics that are pretty illiterate that are just a bunch of fight scenes. But more and more people are aware of the fact that this is a way to get kids to read. And if they read enough comics, they may decide to read a book. For Scholastic, back in the year 2000, I think, I turned a bunch of classic novels into graphic novels. I took something like, believe it or not, Hamlet, and turned it into a twenty-four-page graphic novel. I took The Odyssey and turned it into a graphic novel. I did the same thing with David Copperfield and with Jane Austin’s Emma, and the idea is that if these kids read the graphic novel and they like it that they might some day decide to read the book itself, and I’ve gotten fan mail from kids about these books. It’s really cute.

ANDELMAN: Now, before we wrap up, I wondered if you could make a case for encouraging other women to follow you into the comics field?

ROBBINS: You know, I don’t think I even have to encourage anyone any more. You know, more women than ever before are creating comics, and it’s all around you. You don’t need like the one person to say, oh, come join me, do comics. I’m surrounded in the United States by women who do comics.

© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.

Labels: Anne Timmons, Bessie Coleman, GoGirl, Hedy Lamar, Kewpies, Trina Robbins

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