In the sixties, in the middle sixties, suddenly comics became this hip thing, and college students and hippies were reading them. So I was one of them, and I started reading, basically it was the Marvel Renaissance at that point. It was all their new characters, Spiderman and the X-Men and the Fantastic Four.

Trina Robbins

Categorized in : Character Hippie Reading

Today, although as a whole, the industry is still male-dominated, more women are drawing comics than ever before, and there are more venues for them to see their work in print. In the 1950s, when the comic industry hit an all-time low, there was no place for women to go. Today, because of graphic novels, there's no place for aspiring women cartoonists to go but forward.

all-time-low males drawing

It's really sad that Wonder Woman is, she's really a slave. She belongs to DC. She's not a living person. And so she's at their mercy, and she's at the mercy of whoever writes her and whoever draws her.

wonder-woman slave writing

I am proud of having drawn the first comic about a lesbian - and it didn't even occur to me that I was drawing a first. I just wanted to tell the story of my roommate.

drawing proud stories

I went to art school, but I didn't last because in those days you couldn't take comics as a course. And they weren't even teaching you to draw real things, they were really into abstracts, and I was not into abstracts, so art school and I did not work out.

real teaching art

I entered high school she[ my mother] said, "Well, you're a teenager now, and comics are for kids, so you shouldn't read them anymore," and I went, "Oh, okay," and I gave away what, of course, would now be thousands of dollars worth of comics to the neighborhood kids.

teenager mother school

There's a difference between sexy and hyper-sexy. The way I have drawn Vampirella, she's definitely sexy, I designed the costume. But her costume, through the years, has gotten briefer and briefer. She has been hypersexualized, but not by me. I mean, I see drawings in which she's got the 'brokeback pose'. I would never do that.

sexy mean years

I object to the hypersexualization of all the superheroines. Most of them have been hypersexualized, but especially to Wonder Woman, because she is an icon. She is up there with Superman and Batman. And she is the one who is the big influence on women. Women who don't read comics still know who Wonder Woman is.

wonder-woman icons influence

I started drawing comics, and at first I was very influenced by the whole pop art movement, you know, Batman was on TV and all that pop art stuff? But then my next influence was in 1966, or maybe it was '65, I don't know. Somebody showed me a copy of the "East Village Other", which was an underground newspaper. And... it had comics in it! And they weren't superhero comics.

superhero drawing art

Disney has a bible for their characters, so that people who draw Disney characters have to make them look correct.

character people looks

I saw the comics in the East Village Other, and they weren't superhero comics, they were all about hippies and all about things hippies were interested in. And there was one page in particular, a full page strip called "Gentle's Trip Out" signed "Panzika", and it was totally, totally psychedelic, and really, I don't know if it made any sense at all but it looked so great, and I thought, "This is what I want to do, this is my big influence," and it was.

superhero east hippie

I had tried to come up with a superhero comic, but it didn't work 'cause I wasn't a superhero artist, and I left it unfinished.

superhero causes artist

The most interesting to me were Doctor Strange, because he was so mystic, and Thor, because that was really cool. I mean, I had never been able to relate to the idea of a bearded guy in the sky, you know, and I'd always really liked mythology, and with Thor, it was like Stan Lee was actually saying, "Yeah, it's okay, there really is this Nordic god, there really is something besides the bearded guy in the sky". So I loved that!

doctors sky mean

I always drew. I don't remember a time when I didn't draw. And I actually drew comics from the age of maybe ten through twelve.

twelve age remember