"... that helped draw wider attention to their work. 'There are very few fields as heavily male,' she once told the Los Angeles Times. 'Maybe the only equivalent is the fire department.' Ms. Robbins became a fierce critic of peers such as Crumb, calling out pieces like a three-page 1970 story in which Crumb imagined himself strangling a female television interviewer. 'I think that a lot of these guys simply were misogynist,' she told the pop culture website Vulture in 2018. 'It turned out what a lot of these guys, what they had in their head was very vicious stuff, very violent stuff.'"
Trina Robbins was also a clothes designer of the very coolest kind: "For much of her 20s, she designed clothes in Los Angeles and New York, where she befriended Jim Morrison, dressed folk and rock musicians including Donovan, Cass Elliot and David Crosby, and inspired a verse in Joni Mitchell’s song 'Ladies of the Canyon.'" It's the first verse. Listen here.
And here's some video of Robbins, talking about women comic artists:
I don't particularly like Crumb - but I can think of a lot of Female Journalists that I wouldn't mind being strangled (in a cartoon).
This is one reason why feminists are such bores. If Crump drew himself hitting a male journalist that would be OK. But if its a woman, well that means he "hates women". What nonsense!
And was she shut out because she was a wimmen. Or was she shut out because she wasn't that good?
I'd say the 2nd. Usually owners/publishers LOVE female anything because they want females to buy their product. You even see that in the NFL where they see female sports fans as a great "Untapped Market". Every TV show or Movie, even when its an explicitily "male" story, hasn't shoehorn some actress or female angle in the story so the wimmen will show up and watch.
Right now, I'm watching a crime show on DVD starring two male detectives set in back in the 90s. Y'know - ye olden days. The crime they're investigating is rape/murder of prostitutes Why? Because "women". ONe of the detectives has two girls and a troubled marriage. Why? To bring in women viewers. Almost every media product is made to ensure wimmen will watch.
It feels like the internet has made all of this obsolete. Women didn't crash the glass ceiling; all the buildings stopped being built with ceilings. It's a good lesson. Look for an exit strategy that redefines the rules.
Still can't figure out what she drew or if she had a recurring comic strip. That's what makes you famous and rich, when people read your output on a daily/weekly basis.
All of this "I'm a xyz and I'm oppressed" bullshit was old two decades ago.
I'm surprised she didn't come up with another differentiator (gay, handicapped, etc.) so that she could be even further oppressed.
And a note to womyn of the world. You are more than half the population of earth.
Since the '60s women and your low-T penis-having allies have been telling everyone that you are much smarter than men.
Watch any TV show or movie today. Men, especially white men, are portrayed as troglodytes.
You are the majority. If you can't figure out how to get shit done then you don't deserve it.
Going by what’s in Vulture, I can see why men weren’t interested in her work. Sure, there were boobies. That’s always fun. But her stories were better suited for a critical women’s studies PhD thesis.
If "Cathy" represents the pinnacle of distaff cartoonists' success/fame/reach, color me uninterested. That cartoon tried but was so b'anal that it was really naff and I always wondered why it kept getting printed. An early affirmative-action/ERA move by the syndicate.
I followed the Washington Post link — paywall. The L.A. Times link mentioned the name of the strip — “Sylvia” — but showed no examples. I finally found some examples of he’d cartoons at govomics.com. Frankly, the drawings suck — she has little to no skill at drawing — and the texts are generally pretty polemic. I can see why men who put genuine effort into their work would not think her to be one of their peers.
Still can't figure out what she drew or if she had a recurring comic strip.
She's best known for Wimmen's Comix and Tits & Clits Comix, both underground comics that had somewhat spotty publishing records. She did some special edition historic Wonder Woman stuff for DC in the 1980's because she tended to use a 1940's cartoonish drawing style.
Trina was not as talented a cartoonist as the top tier of male underground comix cartoonists, (R. Crumb, Gilbert Shelton, Victor Moscoso, Rick Griffin, the rest of the ZAP comics and a fair number of others producing underground comix), but she was a decent enough cartoonist, stronger in her writing than her drawing. (There were certainly scores of male underground cartoonists whose work was far less accomplished than Trina's, and they remain rightfully forgotten.) Trina's greater contribution to comics was an an editor of UG comix and of books about forgotten women cartoonists, and collections of their work, reviving them from obscurity.
From the baffled responses above, I gather most of the commenters have little or no familiarity with the underground comix and the "alternative comics" that followed. Yet, this didn't prevent them from making comments that are authoritative in their know-nothing vacuity.
Kind of a nice story. But not sure it's as important as the story makes it out to be. I mean...women can and have drawn men for eons. And, of course, men have drawn, painted, sculpted women for just as long. And some of them were pretty good at it. People still line up to see it. Not sure that WonderWoman needed a woman instead of a man to draw it. Just needed someone talented. And a decent storyline. Not sure it ever had that.
Still, it seems like she had a great, full, productive life right up to the end, and for that I'll gladly tip my hat to her.
Also- from the first notes of "Ladies of the Canyon", I was immediately taken back to the 70s, walking down Abbot Avenue in East Lansing, turning onto Grand River Ave. Strolling around, the music from the record shops heard on the sidewalk. Joni Mitchell...a beautiful spring day, full of youth and my entire life ahead of me.
A comic book created entirely by women was a thoroughly stupid goal, consequently, Trina Robbins' resentment of men for not buying her publication was also thoroughly stupid. It is also unjust. A comic book created entirely by women who had competed fairly against anyone for their contribution would be a worthwhile purchase, assuming one didn't outgrow the genre while still in elementary school, because the magazine could be marketed on its literary and artistic merits rather than its "feminist" merits if there are such things. In other words, imaginative literature is a product of the imagination, a faculty of the brain, not the genitalia.
Men and boys bought and continue to buy well over 90% of everything ever published within the comics genre. (I'm chagrined that the readership isn't entirely boys 13 years and under.) However, men and boys are fewer than half the reading population. Women could have made Trina Robbins a successful comic book creator, but they did not. Evidently, far too many but not nearly enough women were sufficiently oafish to buy into that thoroughly stupid project. The historical facts were stacked against Ribbin's project from the start, as elementary marketing would have revealed if it had been done. All of the major publishing houses struggled over decades to establish an economically viable female readership and generally failed. Wonder Woman, Supergirl, and Lois Lane are minor or supporting characters because the magazines devoted to those characters were all either unprofitable or merely break-even projects. The girls were just not interested enough to allow these comics to pay their bills. They also tried romance-oriented magazines and generally failed to sell enough to gain and hold shelf space. Comic books are a male thing because boys tend to lag behind girls academically until puberty. Therefore, illustrated narrative has more appeal to the reluctant readers most prepubescent boys are.
I remember underground comix and I thought they were underground for a reason. Most weren't that good once you got past the sneer at and rage against society part.
As others have said, a big part of getting your comic strip out there is to find out what the audience is made up of, what that audience seeks, and craft your comic to meet an existing audience. As woke Hollywood and the woke game industry is learning the audience won't stick around if you don't produce what they want.
Robert Cook writes, "From the baffled responses above, I gather most of the commenters have little or no familiarity with the underground comix and the "alternative comics" that followed."
Or they have matured past the self-aggrandized dope-smoking poltroon stage of extended adolescence that constitutes the market for "alternative comics."
"As others have said, a big part of getting your comic strip out there is to find out what the audience is made up of, what that audience seeks, and craft your comic to meet an existing audience. As woke Hollywood and the woke game industry is learning the audience won't stick around if you don't produce what they want."
That's sort of the motive of a hack. An artist produces what he or she feels compelled to produce, and he/she offers it to the world. (This is what Charles Schulz did, btw. For decades, many or most newspaper comics were driven by the personal interests and imaginations of their creators. It was later on that the syndicated newspaper comic strips became transformed into stale canned goods, mere page-fillers around which to fit the advertisements.)
Also, with regard to Trina in particular and underground comix in general, we're not referring to comic strips, which are syndicated and appear in newspapers, but to comic books, just like the Archie or Superman comic books one would see on drugstore racks, but dealing with sex, drugs, violence, politics, or whatever the underground cartoonists were inclined to produce. As grownups who had read commercial comic books as kids, they tended to produce comics that were often counter-cultural versions of the comic books they had grown up with, using the common comic book genres to tell stories about or with the outlook of the "counterculture," (that is, they were long-haired, smart-aleck baby boomers, influenced by rock n' roll, Viet Nam, and drugs).
Yes, of course. But in Althouse comments the New Yorker bad, the cartoons are never funny, SNL hasn't been funny since the Coneheads, etc, etc blah blah.
"For much of her 20s, she designed clothes in Los Angeles and New York, where she befriended Jim Morrison, dressed folk and rock musicians including Donovan, Cass Elliot and David Crosby"
Hope she was a better cartoonist than a clothing designer.
"Robert Cook writes, 'From the baffled responses above, I gather most of the commenters have little or no familiarity with the underground comix and the "alternative comics" that followed.'
"Or they have matured past the self-aggrandized dope-smoking poltroon stage of extended adolescence that constitutes the market for 'alternative comics.'"
That still assumes they once had a familiarity with the underground comix, which is belied by the comments of most who felt compelled to say something.
(BTW, I was a fan of underground comics, but I was not a dope or pot smoker. I was a fan of comics who had matured past the stage of extended adolescence that constitutes the market for super-hero comics.)
So she was "bored" by cartoons drawn by men.... Pretty judgemental, ain't it. How would she react to a reader who syas they don't read comics drawn by women because they are boring. REEEEEEeeeeeeeee!
Forty years of GUYS drawing Wonder Woman... One wonders (heh) how WW survived all those years before a woman drew her.
"So she was 'bored' by cartoons drawn by men.... Pretty judgemental, ain't it."
She was "bored" by and angry at their (some of them) frequent and gratuitous depictions of violence and sex directed at women. Her remarks about being "bored by male cartoonists" might apply very generally to male-created comics of all kinds, but she was particularly agitated by the work of the male underground cartoonists, in most particular R. Crumb. But, she was also friendly with many of the male cartoonists, so there may have been personal factors involved, (envy or jealousy, perhaps). She was friendly with S. Clay Wilson, whose comics were far more pornographic, violent and grotesque than Crumb's. Some of the women cartoonists found her to be, let's say, a "Karen," to use a current term. Many other women cartoonists worked well and happily with her, so her attitude likely had to do with a mix of legitimate gripes at the men's work along with other personal resentments at her secondary status in the small, incestuous community of underground comix artists.
Oh no! A competitive and cliquish art form from decades back was peopled by competitive and cliquish artist people! And the ins and outs of their interpersonal soap opera lives is so much more important than their work itself, because by applying modern standards to the behavior of people from 50 years ago we can preen about how much better we are all than those lower forms of life from before our time!
Next, do women in the 1960s Sexual Revolution, who were dumbfounded that guys just wanted to get in their pants.
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47 comments:
What comics did she draw?
Women are never trying to crack the “glass ceiling” at the sewage department.
Nor are they demanding equal representation on the third shift.
I'll go eat worms...
Never heard of her.
I looked up some of her work on Google images. I was not impressed.
I don't particularly like Crumb - but I can think of a lot of Female Journalists that I wouldn't mind being strangled (in a cartoon).
This is one reason why feminists are such bores. If Crump drew himself hitting a male journalist that would be OK. But if its a woman, well that means he "hates women". What nonsense!
And was she shut out because she was a wimmen. Or was she shut out because she wasn't that good?
I'd say the 2nd. Usually owners/publishers LOVE female anything because they want females to buy their product. You even see that in the NFL where they see female sports fans as a great "Untapped Market". Every TV show or Movie, even when its an explicitily "male" story, hasn't shoehorn some actress or female angle in the story so the wimmen will show up and watch.
Right now, I'm watching a crime show on DVD starring two male detectives set in back in the 90s. Y'know - ye olden days. The crime they're investigating is rape/murder of prostitutes Why? Because "women". ONe of the detectives has two girls and a troubled marriage. Why? To bring in women viewers. Almost every media product is made to ensure wimmen will watch.
I always wondered who was responsible for the way Donovan dressed.
Tina who?
Certain leftist men seem to get a pass for being angry woman-haters.
It feels like the internet has made all of this obsolete. Women didn't crash the glass ceiling; all the buildings stopped being built with ceilings. It's a good lesson. Look for an exit strategy that redefines the rules.
I tolerated more of R Crumb than I should have, for sure. It was the most pornographic stuff I'd ever seen, at 19, and truly shocked my sensibilities.
Haven't been the same since.
After him the comics got even worse so I stopped buying them. So I be er saw Robbins' work.
Still can't figure out what she drew or if she had a recurring comic strip. That's what makes you famous and rich, when people read your output on a daily/weekly basis.
All of this "I'm a xyz and I'm oppressed" bullshit was old two decades ago.
I'm surprised she didn't come up with another differentiator (gay, handicapped, etc.) so that she could be even further oppressed.
And a note to womyn of the world. You are more than half the population of earth.
Since the '60s women and your low-T penis-having allies have been telling everyone that you are much smarter than men.
Watch any TV show or movie today. Men, especially white men, are portrayed as troglodytes.
You are the majority. If you can't figure out how to get shit done then you don't deserve it.
There was Cathy Guisewite ("Cathy") so it's not as if all women are failures.
>'I think that a lot of these guys simply were misogynist,' she told the pop culture website...<
Anyone tired of misogyny whining yet? "Misogyny" - that handiest of catch-alls for the discontents of unhappy women.
I'm sure they exist but in my long life I've never known a man who hates women. Have you?
The guy who created Wonder Woman used to live with two broads at the same time, and he'd tie them up during sex.
Going by what’s in Vulture, I can see why men weren’t interested in her work. Sure, there were boobies. That’s always fun. But her stories were better suited for a critical women’s studies PhD thesis.
If "Cathy" represents the pinnacle of distaff cartoonists' success/fame/reach, color me uninterested. That cartoon tried but was so b'anal that it was really naff and I always wondered why it kept getting printed. An early affirmative-action/ERA move by the syndicate.
I followed the Washington Post link — paywall. The L.A. Times link mentioned the name of the strip — “Sylvia” — but showed no examples. I finally found some examples of he’d cartoons at govomics.com. Frankly, the drawings suck — she has little to no skill at drawing — and the texts are generally pretty polemic. I can see why men who put genuine effort into their work would not think her to be one of their peers.
'The guy who created Wonder Woman used to live with two broads at the same time, and he'd tie them up during sex.'
The obligatory, 'Not all heroes wear capes.'
: )
What do you call feminist comic strips?
The “that’s not funny!” papers.
Joe Smith said...
Still can't figure out what she drew or if she had a recurring comic strip.
She's best known for Wimmen's Comix and Tits & Clits Comix, both underground comics that had somewhat spotty publishing records. She did some special edition historic Wonder Woman stuff for DC in the 1980's because she tended to use a 1940's cartoonish drawing style.
Trina was not as talented a cartoonist as the top tier of male underground comix cartoonists, (R. Crumb, Gilbert Shelton, Victor Moscoso, Rick Griffin, the rest of the ZAP comics and a fair number of others producing underground comix), but she was a decent enough cartoonist, stronger in her writing than her drawing. (There were certainly scores of male underground cartoonists whose work was far less accomplished than Trina's, and they remain rightfully forgotten.) Trina's greater contribution to comics was an an editor of UG comix and of books about forgotten women cartoonists, and collections of their work, reviving them from obscurity.
From the baffled responses above, I gather most of the commenters have little or no familiarity with the underground comix and the "alternative comics" that followed. Yet, this didn't prevent them from making comments that are authoritative in their know-nothing vacuity.
Kind of a nice story. But not sure it's as important as the story makes it out to be. I mean...women can and have drawn men for eons. And, of course, men have drawn, painted, sculpted women for just as long. And some of them were pretty good at it. People still line up to see it. Not sure that WonderWoman needed a woman instead of a man to draw it. Just needed someone talented. And a decent storyline. Not sure it ever had that.
Still, it seems like she had a great, full, productive life right up to the end, and for that I'll gladly tip my hat to her.
Also- from the first notes of "Ladies of the Canyon", I was immediately taken back to the 70s, walking down Abbot Avenue in East Lansing, turning onto Grand River Ave. Strolling around, the music from the record shops heard on the sidewalk. Joni Mitchell...a beautiful spring day, full of youth and my entire life ahead of me.
Interesting that the first - "the fucking first" - all female comic book features a bunch of female comic book characters that were created by men.
Derivative...
A comic book created entirely by women was a thoroughly stupid goal, consequently, Trina Robbins' resentment of men for not buying her publication was also thoroughly stupid. It is also unjust. A comic book created entirely by women who had competed fairly against anyone for their contribution would be a worthwhile purchase, assuming one didn't outgrow the genre while still in elementary school, because the magazine could be marketed on its literary and artistic merits rather than its "feminist" merits if there are such things. In other words, imaginative literature is a product of the imagination, a faculty of the brain, not the genitalia.
Men and boys bought and continue to buy well over 90% of everything ever published within the comics genre. (I'm chagrined that the readership isn't entirely boys 13 years and under.) However, men and boys are fewer than half the reading population. Women could have made Trina Robbins a successful comic book creator, but they did not. Evidently, far too many but not nearly enough women were sufficiently oafish to buy into that thoroughly stupid project. The historical facts were stacked against Ribbin's project from the start, as elementary marketing would have revealed if it had been done. All of the major publishing houses struggled over decades to establish an economically viable female readership and generally failed. Wonder Woman, Supergirl, and Lois Lane are minor or supporting characters because the magazines devoted to those characters were all either unprofitable or merely break-even projects. The girls were just not interested enough to allow these comics to pay their bills. They also tried romance-oriented magazines and generally failed to sell enough to gain and hold shelf space. Comic books are a male thing because boys tend to lag behind girls academically until puberty. Therefore, illustrated narrative has more appeal to the reluctant readers most prepubescent boys are.
Look, we have Roz Chast. What more could you want?
Fun fact: Gary Larson was secretly a woman… when he was drawing.
He knew if he came out, and told people his secret, people would not love his work.
I remember underground comix and I thought they were underground for a reason. Most weren't that good once you got past the sneer at and rage against society part.
As others have said, a big part of getting your comic strip out there is to find out what the audience is made up of, what that audience seeks, and craft your comic to meet an existing audience. As woke Hollywood and the woke game industry is learning the audience won't stick around if you don't produce what they want.
The last funny comic I read was The Fusco Brothers.
"What comics did she draw?"
She was part of the underground comics movement, like Crumb, but if you look for that stuff, the titles are "It Ain’t Me, Babe" and "Wimmen's Comix."
No great female cartoonists. No great female classical composers.
Coincidence? I think not.
Robert Cook writes, "From the baffled responses above, I gather most of the commenters have little or no familiarity with the underground comix and the "alternative comics" that followed."
Or they have matured past the self-aggrandized dope-smoking poltroon stage of extended adolescence that constitutes the market for "alternative comics."
"As others have said, a big part of getting your comic strip out there is to find out what the audience is made up of, what that audience seeks, and craft your comic to meet an existing audience. As woke Hollywood and the woke game industry is learning the audience won't stick around if you don't produce what they want."
That's sort of the motive of a hack. An artist produces what he or she feels compelled to produce, and he/she offers it to the world. (This is what Charles Schulz did, btw. For decades, many or most newspaper comics were driven by the personal interests and imaginations of their creators. It was later on that the syndicated newspaper comic strips became transformed into stale canned goods, mere page-fillers around which to fit the advertisements.)
Also, with regard to Trina in particular and underground comix in general, we're not referring to comic strips, which are syndicated and appear in newspapers, but to comic books, just like the Archie or Superman comic books one would see on drugstore racks, but dealing with sex, drugs, violence, politics, or whatever the underground cartoonists were inclined to produce. As grownups who had read commercial comic books as kids, they tended to produce comics that were often counter-cultural versions of the comic books they had grown up with, using the common comic book genres to tell stories about or with the outlook of the "counterculture," (that is, they were long-haired, smart-aleck baby boomers, influenced by rock n' roll, Viet Nam, and drugs).
Women telling men to shut up angry they didn't like her.
That's one hell of a headline.
Most comic fans are men.
Not surprised she wasn’t that popular.
Women buy 80% of fiction. So women giction authors are more popular than guys.
Is what it is.
Most guys don’t want to teach kindergarten or be a nurse.
Most women don’t want to drive a truck.
Misogyny is when a man hates women as much as women hate each other.
"Look, we have Roz Chast."
Yes, of course. But in Althouse comments the New Yorker bad, the cartoons are never funny, SNL hasn't been funny since the Coneheads, etc, etc blah blah.
Deep down, I loved Zap Comix. Stinko the Clown, Hippie Chick, Artsy Fartsy, Flakey Foont...Crumb actually loathed the counterculture.
Remember when Schumann the Human spent his life searching for God, but when he finally hears him his head shrinks and he runs away?
Good stuff.
Trots and Bonnie, a strip about a girl and her talking dog, by Shary Flenniken was good stuff. Ran in The National Lampoon for years.
A female version of Calvin & Hobbes, sort of, except with bawdy bits.
"For much of her 20s, she designed clothes in Los Angeles and New York, where she befriended Jim Morrison, dressed folk and rock musicians including Donovan, Cass Elliot and David Crosby"
Hope she was a better cartoonist than a clothing designer.
Joni Mitchell's "Big Yellow Taxi" provides soundtrack to Crumb's "Short History of America" here.
But the bottom line is still that she was a cartoonist who could not draw worth a damn
"Robert Cook writes, 'From the baffled responses above, I gather most of the commenters have little or no familiarity with the underground comix and the "alternative comics" that followed.'
"Or they have matured past the self-aggrandized dope-smoking poltroon stage of extended adolescence that constitutes the market for 'alternative comics.'"
That still assumes they once had a familiarity with the underground comix, which is belied by the comments of most who felt compelled to say something.
(BTW, I was a fan of underground comics, but I was not a dope or pot smoker. I was a fan of comics who had matured past the stage of extended adolescence that constitutes the market for super-hero comics.)
So she was "bored" by cartoons drawn by men.... Pretty judgemental, ain't it. How would she react to a reader who syas they don't read comics drawn by women because they are boring. REEEEEEeeeeeeeee!
Forty years of GUYS drawing Wonder Woman... One wonders (heh) how WW survived all those years before a woman drew her.
" An artist produces what he or she feels compelled to produce, and he/she offers it to the world."
Great. Then an "artist" has no reason to bitch about lack of a market.
"Great. Then an 'artist' has no reason to bitch about lack of a market."
They don't. They know what they're getting into.
"So she was 'bored' by cartoons drawn by men.... Pretty judgemental, ain't it."
She was "bored" by and angry at their (some of them) frequent and gratuitous depictions of violence and sex directed at women. Her remarks about being "bored by male cartoonists" might apply very generally to male-created comics of all kinds, but she was particularly agitated by the work of the male underground cartoonists, in most particular R. Crumb. But, she was also friendly with many of the male cartoonists, so there may have been personal factors involved, (envy or jealousy, perhaps). She was friendly with S. Clay Wilson, whose comics were far more pornographic, violent and grotesque than Crumb's. Some of the women cartoonists found her to be, let's say, a "Karen," to use a current term. Many other women cartoonists worked well and happily with her, so her attitude likely had to do with a mix of legitimate gripes at the men's work along with other personal resentments at her secondary status in the small, incestuous community of underground comix artists.
Oh no! A competitive and cliquish art form from decades back was peopled by competitive and cliquish artist people! And the ins and outs of their interpersonal soap opera lives is so much more important than their work itself, because by applying modern standards to the behavior of people from 50 years ago we can preen about how much better we are all than those lower forms of life from before our time!
Next, do women in the 1960s Sexual Revolution, who were dumbfounded that guys just wanted to get in their pants.
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