Trina Robbins, Creator and Historian of Comic Books, Dies at 84

After one yr at Queens School, she moved to Los Angeles, the place she posed nude for pinup magazines within the misguided perception that doing so would result in a film profession. In 1962, she married Paul Jay Robbins, {a magazine} editor; they divorced in 1966. Throughout that point, she “locked herself in a room with an electrical stitching machine,” she was quoted as saying in “Soiled Photos,” Brian Doherty’s 2022 e book about underground comics; she was quickly making clothes, which she bought at craft and Renaissance gala’s.

Ms. Robbins befriended members of the Byrds and the Doorways and moved between the coasts. In New York Metropolis, she opened a clothes boutique on East Fourth Road referred to as Broccoli, a reputation impressed by a declare she had made, whereas excessive, that she may talk with greens.

When she learn the choice newspaper The East Village Different, she was captivated by its surreal comedian strips and realized that the doodles she had been making might be comics too. As a lark, she illustrated, in Aubrey Beardsley fashion, a one-panel cartoon a few teenage hippie named Suzi Slumgoddess and slipped it beneath the door of the paper’s workplace. To her shock, it was printed, launching her profession as an underground cartoonist.

Ms. Robbins turned an everyday contributor to The Different, making comedian strips that doubled as commercials for Broccoli. She typically rendered her characters just like the paper dolls that had captivated her when she was a toddler, and her strips mined the distinction between that harmless fashion and taboo-breaking subject material. When The Different revealed a comics tabloid referred to as Gothic Blimp Works in 1969, she contributed a strip about having intercourse with a lion.

Her comics about intercourse had been typically playful — the two-page strip “One Man’s Fantasy,” for instance, was a few man captured by a gaggle of enticing ladies who drive him to make a tuna fish sandwich. However she discovered that many male cartoonists had been threatened by any trace of feminism.

And Ms. Robbins was repulsed by the darkish materials in Robert Crumb’s comics and the best way the underground scene adopted his lead. “Rape and humiliation — and later, torturing and murdering ladies — didn’t appear humorous to me,” she wrote in her memoir. “The fellows informed me I had no humorousness.”