E’ American designer and screenwriter Trina Robbins has died at the age of 84a pioneer in a male-dominated world of comics, a cartoonist who he relaunched Wonder Woman in a feminist way and designed Vampirella. He died in a hospital in San Francisco, California, at the age of 84 following complications from a stroke. The announcement of his passing was made today to the New York Times by his partner, superhero comics inker Steve Leialoha.
Feminist activist, in 1969, Robbins designed the costume for the character Vampirella of Warren Publishing for artist Frank Frazetta and in 1970 she was one of the creators of ‘It Ain’t Me Babe Comix’, the first comic made exclusively by women. In 1985 she was the first woman to draw Wonder Woman after four decades of male hegemony, and in 1994 she was one of the founders of Friends of Lulu, an advocacy group for female comic book artists. Considered among the best comics artists of all time, she was inducted into the Will Eisner Hall of Fame in 2013 and the Wizard World Hall of Legends in 2017. She was also a comics historian.
Born in New York City on August 17, 1938, Trina Robbins began collaborating with various fashion magazines in the mid-1960s and in 1966 published her first comic: an advertising panel for a new magazine. She is politically engaged and a standard-bearer of feminism in contemporary comics. In 1969 she created Panthea for Gothic Blimp Works, the first underground American tabloid. She later gave life, in various publications, to numerous ephemeral female heroines subsequently collected in a series of anthology volumes such as ‘Girl Fight Comics’ and ‘Trina Girls’. In the 1980s he collaborated with both Marvel and DC Comics (where he revisited the origins of Wonder Woman). In the mid-1990s Robbins criticized the bad girl portrayal in artist Mike Deodato’s art of Wonder Woman and At the end of the same decade he collaborated with Colleen Doran on the DC Comics graphic novel ‘Wonder Woman: The Once and Future Story’, on the theme of spousal abuse.
In the sixties, before dedicating his life to comics, Robbins was an accomplished designer and seamstress who dressed rock stars like Donovan and David Crosby. She became a prominent figure in the hippie communities of New York and San Francisco and in Los Angeles attracted the attention of Joni Mitchell. The first verse of Mitchell’s song ‘Ladies of the Canyon’, from her 1970 album of the same name, is a portrait of 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’.