Conversations with Trina Robbins

Trina Robbins (1938–2024) was a pioneering cartoonist, feminist activist, and self-described "herstorian." This volume gathers, for the first time, a wide-ranging collection of interviews allowing her to narrate her own extraordinary life and career era by era. Spanning more than five decades—from her early days in the 1960s underground press to her late-career recognition as an award-winning historian of women cartoonists—these conversations chart the evolution of an artist who helped transform the comics industry. Best known for producing the first all-woman-created comic book, It Ain’t Me Babe, and for becoming the first woman to draw a complete Wonder Woman series for DC Comics, Robbins was also a relentless advocate for women and girls as readers, creators, and professionals. Across interviews from mainstream newspapers, fanzines, scholarly journals, and comics magazines, she reflects on the underground comix movement, her clashes with sexism in the field, her activism during the AIDS crisis and the fight for reproductive rights, and her later turn toward writing and historical recovery. Central to the collection is Robbins’s lifelong commitment to "herstory," her effort to rediscover and canonize forgotten women cartoonists such as Nell Brinkley, Tarpé Mills, Lily Renée, and Gladys Parker. These interviews illuminate the research, passion, and occasional controversy behind landmark works like Pretty in Ink, The Flapper Queens, and Dauntless Dames.