Trina Robbins has died at age 85

If you’re saying “Who?” you should know that I feel pretty much the same way. I never heard of her until this morning, when I read about her in Keefknight’s The K Chronicles

This is somebody I ought to have known more about. She was active not only in underground comics but in “legit” comics,m too. She wrote issues of Wonder Woman! She designed Vampirella’s costume!

She was pals with lots of rock and folk musicians and was a big SF fan and illustrator. She co-produced the first comic entirely by women and founded the Wimmen’s Comic Collective.

She actually died last week, on April 10.

I remember her largely from the four issue limited series, The Legend of Wonder Woman, that she drew in 1986. It came out between the cancellation of the original Wonder Woman series, and the post-Crisis reboot by George Perez, and it was deliberately planned as the final pre-Crisis Wonder Woman story.

Robbins had a quirky, but nevertheless attractive, style that was quite different from anything else going on in mainstream comics at that time. I was vaguely aware that she had enjoyed a very long career, but unfortunately that was the only work of hers that I took much interest in at the time. More’s the pity for me, it sounds like.

She was, apparently, the first female artist to draw Wonder Woman.

I don’t know about her other work, but IIRC the style used for that limited series was deliberately done i9n imitation of the older style used for Wonder Woman. I have a WW comic from the 1950s, and the art looks weird compared to the 1960s run.