Interview with Trina Robbins on Last Girl Standing

This interview aired on March 2nd, 2018 from KBOO Portland during A Radio Geekly.

Trina Robbins is one of the original underground cartoonists. The underground comix movement lasted during the late sixties and early seventies, depicting counterculture in underground newspapers and self-published comics. In 2017, Fantagraphics released her autobiography, Last Girl Standing. The book depicts her childhood in World War II era New York, though her shenanigans in sixties counterculture, and onward into her storied comics career.

Kyle Kerezsi: Last Girl Standing opens with your first publication in East Village Other, so I’m wondering why you made that the intro to the book.

Trina Robbins: It was something important. It started my so-called career, didn’t it?

Kyle: What I liked about it was that that moment in your life seemed like a blend of a lot of things in your life. Like seeing the person at EVO as a rabbi and being through bohemia. And the rabbi thing is a reference to your upbringing. And it’s your first comic publication, and also being in East Village at its peak, so I think it was a great introduction.

Trina: And taking bad acid trips. We mustn’t forget that.

Kyle: Of course. So I guess when you were in EVO, what did it feel like when you were in those offices, what kind of conversations would happen there?

Trina: They were really nice people, I mean they were all my friends. I felt really good at EVO. Conversations, I don’t know. Nothing earth-shaking.

Kyle: What would you say the priorities were for those underground newspapers at East Village at that time?

Trina: Getting out the news and getting it out so that it looked good. It was very creatively put together. And of course getting out the news meant our news, the counterculture news. So much is counterculture, of course a lot of it was anti, naturally. A lot of it was also anti-war, anti-the war in Vietnam, anti-poor Lyndon Johnson who when I look back was saddled with the war, he inherited it from Kennedy, but we sure hated poor Lyndon Johnson.

And demonstrations, but also stuff about pot, about acid, about abortion which was still illegal in those days. Even to the point to where for at least a year I was actually writing a counterculture fashion column, in which I talked about not what’s in vogue or what’s in the big department stores, but small boutiques and what they made. People who specialized in face-painting, someone else who made her own lotions and perfumes and sold them on the street. Stuff like that.

Kyle: How did your comics and writing contributions to EVO help you develop as a cartoonist and writer?

Trina: Well the more you draw the better you get, of course. In every field not necessarily drawing. The more you sing if you’re a singer the better you get. If you’re a dancer, the more you dance the better you get.

Kyle: Early on, you got heavy into science-fiction writing. I’m wondering what it was like at those early science-fiction conventions.

Trina: They were so small. We’re talking now about when I was a teenager, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen. You’d get maybe a hundred people in some hotel, or some meeting hall, and that would be it. There were so few people, so few active science-fiction fans in those days. Science-fiction was still such a new media.

Kyle: What about the early ren faires as well? You went to the second one?

Trina: Yes, I missed the first one, but I got the second one, and the third. They were small too, really. Now they’re humongous. I haven’t been to one recently but a couple of years ago I went to a Dickens fair and they’re just gigantic. They were very small. We had a grove in the forest and we put up our own stuff.

Kyle: What similarities do you see between science-fiction culture at the time and comics culture?

Trina: Well science-fiction started fandom. Fandom as we know it originated with science-fiction. And even terms like fandom, that’s a science-fiction term, or a science-fiction fandom term. So they really did start it. And even costume contests, they started that.

Kyle: Speaking of science-fiction terms, you use the term karass a lot, which is the Kurt Vonnegut term.

Trina: Karass is how I pronounced it. You call it karass?

Kyle: I’ve never read too much Kurt Vonnegut, but —

Trina: Oh my God. He’s wonderful.

Kyle: That’s what I’ve been told. I’ll get around to it one of these days, probably.

Trina: He’s one of the greatest contemporary writers in the English language. By contemporary meaning 20th century on, or mid-twentieth century on.

Kyle: Do you have a book you can recommend for me?

Trina: The very first one I read was Cat’s Cradle, that’s where the term karass comes from. It’s a good one to start with.

Kyle: Alright, I’ll look into it. The term [karass] refers to people who keep coming back into your life. I’m wondering, what’s the importance of it in terms of the development of an artist?

Trina: I would say in terms of the development of being a person rather than an artist. It’s kind of magical, really, it’s a kind of a strange magical magnetism. That you keep winding up, the little group of you, you karass, keep winding up together, no matter where you go.

Kyle: Can you talk a little bit about when you would go to the EC and Marvel offices a little bit?

Trina: Oh gosh, I was fifteen with my friends Marty and David who were around my age, give or take six months, and we were Mad [Magazine] fans. I wasn’t much of an EC horror fan, but I did love their science-fiction books, their Weird Fantasy and Weird Science. We were definite Mad fans. We just went to the office, we didn’t ask permission, we didn’t phone ahead, we didn’t write ahead, we just walked in. And they were so nice to us. And again, it was small. In those days everything was small. Bill Gaines took us around. And I remember Al Williamson coming in with some work. And I think Wally Wood came in with some work too. It was incredible. And like I say, it wasn’t like, “go away you have to have an appointment,” or “what are you doing here kids?” He was lovely to us.

Kyle: That’s truly amazing to me, I feel like you wouldn’t have that type of leigh way now. It’s hard to waltz into places like that.

Trina: You couldn’t. You simply couldn’t. Or even visiting the Marvel office in 1966. I just walked in. You could never do that now. I never made an appointment, I just walked in and said to the woman at the desk that I was here to write about Marvel Comics for the L.A. Free Press, because I had just come from L.A. and L.A. Free Press was their underground newspaper.

Kyle: Being in the heart of the sixties through East Village and Los Angeles, I’m wondering what the beat writers represented at the time. You did mention your friendship with Jack Micheline. What did they represent? Since they seemed so influential during that time.

Trina: They were the generation one up from us, the older generation. And we had enormous respect for them, I was in awe of them. And really before the term hippie even existed I was a baby beatnik, that’s what I wanted to be. I was still in my late teens. I wanted to be like them.

Kyle: To me they truly are remarkable and I have a chronic fascination with them.

Trina: Jack Micheline, of course as you know, was in my karass. Here I was from New York to San Francisco and there he was living in San Francisco. And we would see each other. He would do readings and I would come. I owned some of his art, I’m very happy to say.

Kyle: I also love the Moondog story, just the way he appeared.

Trina: I thought it was an opium dream, because he did look so bizarre and I’d never seen him before. He’s a person of note. You can google him and find out a lot about him.

Kyle: Did you encounter him other times? Besides that one experience?

Trina: Yeah, gosh. He was still in New York. I was backstage at something. I wish I could remember what I was backstage at. It was probably a rock performance. It was probably friends of mine who were playing. And he was backstage too. And at that point I knew who he was, it was like, “Whoa, that’s moondog.”

Kyle: Can you talk a little bit about how Broccoli [Boutique] was a staple of the community. It seemed like you making clothes for other people was a great way to bond with others.

Trina: I think it might have been the other way around, that when I bonded with people I made clothes for them. When I look back I realize that all of my female friends, I made at least one outfit for them. Usually one. That was enough. Broccoli, at that point there were all of these little boutiques in the Lower East Side and East Village. And they were all run by women on the other side of twenty-five. We were still very young, but we were over twenty-five. And grown and could take care of ourselves and take care of our stores. And our prices were incredibly reasonable when I think of it now. They weren’t super cheap cause we did make them by hand. They were handmade clothes. And Broccoli became a little social scene. It was really fun. Because my prices were decent and because I was friendly, all of the good-looking hippie women, young hippie women would come and even if they didn’t buy anything they would try on my clothes and they would hang out. And because all the beautiful young hippie women came to my store, all the good-looking, long-haired young hippie guys started hanging out in the store. So it was a social scene and I loved it. I was never stressed or rushed. I made enough money, I didn’t have to get rich, I made enough money to keep myself going and it was fun.

Kyle: If I had a time machine I would like to go to the Broccoli Boutique, personally.

Trina: You’d love it.

Kyle: Oh, thank you. Being a bohemian during that time you knew a lot of people who have mythicized public identities. So I’m wondering, why do you think people tend to mythicize the sixties and bohemia in general?

Trina: Well the sixties, it was a revolution. The fifties, that had been the beat generation, that was pretty revolutionary, but I don’t think they affected the entire culture the way the sixties did. Maybe what the beats did was affect us hippies. It was a revolution, in everything, certainly in clothes, and I really do still adore clothes. They’re so much fun. And the way we dressed expressed the way we felt, the kind of lives we led. It was a revolution in so many ways. Gosh, guys with their long hair, it was almost like the way we looked was a sign, telling people who we were.

Kyle: You list some of the ways the sixties started to sour, toward ’69 and ‘70.

Trina: Oh, yes, it was very sad. The wolves moved in. These kids, so many of them that were kids. It’s amazing when I think back how many of them were like seventeen years old. And they left home. They’d run away from home. A whole bunch of them living together in some apartment, curled up like puppies to keep warm. And they were so innocent. They were so innocent. So in come the wolves with their hard drugs. And these kids were like, poor things, they were like sheep. It was very sad.

Kyle: What do you think led the so-called wolves to that scene?

Trina: It was almost a sign. These kids were just practically wearing these signs saying, “I’m young and innocent, please exploit me.” I remember this one, this seventeen year-old girl, who I had met early on when I opened the boutique. And she would come by just to visit and she was really nice. And I liked her and her mother, in fact, was a teacher and very permissive. Then I didn’t see her for a while and when she came back, she had this horrible story to tell me about how she and her boyfriend had gotten into hard drugs and she showed me her arm and it was awful. It was all these sores from shooting up. I felt so bad for her.

Kyle: I do want to talk about R. Crumb for a hot second.

Trina: Sure.

Kyle: When you and the other underground cartoonists were in San Francisco and you found out about his work, when he came to San Francisco and hit that scene, did it affect everyone else’s sensibilities?

Trina: Yes. Not everyone but an awful lot of people. You have to understand that his early work that I was familiar with from Yellow Dog, that’s the first place he was published, was very sweet. It was, of course, super-duper nostalgic. So reminiscent of the cartoons of the thirties, really. And it was sweet. It was charming and sweet. And somewhere along the way it turned a corner, and got mean and especially misogynist towards women. It got, I can’t even think of the word. It turned dark. And he started drawing, specifically women being humiliated, women being raped, women even being killed, and the whole thing is shown as being very funny. He was really kind of the king of the counterculture. He was the god to a lot of these guys. It was like he was giving them the flag of permission to say you can do this too. This is really cool. And because he was such a god to these people, when I criticized those kinds of comics, I was just persona non grata. You can’t criticize God.

Kyle: Do you think his misogynistic sensibilities affected your relationship with him? Did it make it more awkward at all?

Trina: Well, in the beginning we were friends. We were very good friends, but somewhere along the way, it took quite a few years for us not to be friends anymore. And it was really on his part, not mine. I continued to criticize him, but I was always friendly to him as a person. You can criticize people you know, you can criticize friends, but somewhere along the way he started really not liking me at all.

Kyle: What I find remarkable about your work, is even though your peers had these misogynistic sensibilities, you managed to have a very feminist and women’s liberation drive to your work. It seemed like an uphill battle so I’m wondering if you can speak about that drive a little bit.

Trina: Well of course it was an uphill battle. You draw what you feel, don’t you? You write what you feel. And that was what I felt. When I look back on some of the stuff, I’m actually quite embarrassed because I was so angry. I was very angry. And a lot of those comics really do reflect how I felt. And of course that’s another reason why the guys didn’t want to publish me, because they just felt if they asked me to contribute, I’d be doing yet another feminist rant, but I couldn’t help it.

Kyle: Now, when did the public start identifying you and these other cartoonists as underground comics? When did that become a term?

Trina: Almost immediately. They appeared in underground newspapers, that’s how they got the name underground comics. But pretty soon, and Crumb was the pioneer for this, publishing your comics not in a newspaper but in a comic book just like mainstream comics. And that was revolutionary. that was amazing. Somehow it had never occurred to me to do that. Crumb was the first one to do it. And once they were in comic books and sold in head shops, people took notice of them. Everyone took notice of them.

Kyle: Where did the idea for Wimmen’s Comix come from?

Trina: Well in 1970, with the moral support of the staff of It Ain’t Me Babe, which was the first women’s liberation newspaper in the country and I was working with them. So with their moral support I produced the first all-woman comic book, and that was called it It Ain’t Me Babe Comix. So that sold well enough that by 1972 Ron Turner, who was the publisher of Last Gasp Comics, he wanted to do another feminist book. So at this point, when I put together in 1970 It Ain’t Me Babe, I had to find women that I knew who drew, and asked them to draw a comic, women who had never drawn a comic before. But by two years later, 1972 there were enough women who wanted to do comics, that we could get ten women together and I was one of them, at the house of Pattie Moodian, who really was the person who formed it all, who called us all together and edited the first issue and put together an all-woman comic book. An ongoing all-woman comic book that lasted twenty years until 1992.

Kyle: And can you tell me more about the process of reaching out for contributors?

Trina: We didn’t have to reach far, really. The first issue came out and in it, we called for submissions. We said send us submissions, send us your work. And immediately people were sending us stuff. It was really very exciting. And we would meet once a month, with all these manila envelopes, of course we asked for photocopies, with all these comics women had submitted to us. And we would sit on the floor surrounded by these things and read them all. The editor made the final choice but really it was a group decision. I think I can really call it a collective, which is what we called ourselves.

Kyle: So Wimmen’s Comix lasted for seventeen issues. And what evolution did you see throughout those years?

Trina: Well, they got better. The earliest women contributors who’d never done a comic before, a lot of them really were quite crude. We published it because we wanted their voices to be heard. And because it was an exciting thing, no matter how crude the comic. It was exciting that women were speaking up in comics, because they never had before. But as the years went by, remember what I said about how if you keep doing something you get better? So they got better. There were a lot who dropped out after one comic or two but then we were getting women who were so good, they got better and better.

Kyle: There definitely seems to be an artistic lineage between those older Wimmen’s Comix and the later ones. And it kind of leads to cartoonists like Julie Doucet and Krystine Kryttre and Dori Seda coming up.

Trina: Exactly. A lot of women who are now well known names in comics got their start in Wimmen’s Comix.

Kyle: You kind of paved the way for more diversity in comics now.

Trina: There are more women drawing comics now than ever before. There are more women of color drawing comics now than ever before. There are more out lesbians and out transgender people drawing comics now than ever before.

Kyle: This might be the last question I have, but why did you write Last Girl Standing?

Trina: I wanted to tell my story. The internet is really a mixed blessing. I love the internet and I love the instant communication, but there’s also a lot of bizarre misstatements about me. Untruths running around the internet, because of that kind of communication. And I wanted to clear everything up. In certain cases where things that have been said about me that are very negative. I wanted to tell the truth. I wanted people to know exactly how it happened. And I wanted to tell my story.

The full episode where this interview aired can be found here.