Trina Robbins, "GoGirl!" graphic novelist: Mr. Media Interview, Pt. 1

When my daughter was born a little over ten years ago, I was plunged into a world I never knew growing up as the oldest of three children. There was just enough difference in our ages, five years, that I never experienced much of my sister's interests as a child or teen.

So here I am, a decade later, finding my way through girl stuff that was beyond my radar when I was a kid. Fortunately, my daughter’s interests are broad. She’s an aggressive soccer and softball player, but she also likes pretty clothes and playing the piano, and -- like her dad -- she’s got the comic book gene.

Still, I was surprised this week when I asked her what she thought of Trina Robbins’ latest GoGirl! book, Robots Gone Wild.

She eyed it suspiciously, not sure she wanted to read a comic book that wasn’t in color. There aren’t many comics titles specifically geared for girls, so the hesitation remained as she plumbed the pages, but pretty soon, she was deep into the book. In fact, it’s the first book for which she’s put aside re-reading the “Harry Potter” series for the umpteenth time. That alone ought to tell you how much she liked it.

Trina Robbins, the author of the GoGirl! series of comics from Dark Horse, joins us today as our guest.



BOB ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Trina, is the pre-teen and the teen girl, is that a new reader of comics? I just don’t remember any girls when I was that age being interested in comics.

TRINA ROBBINS: Well, you don’t remember because you are not old enough, but no, it is not a new reader of comics. There used to be tons of comics for pre-teens and teen girls all through the 1940s and ’50s and well into at least the middle to late ’60s, and then they all disappeared in favor of superheroes, which girls basically are not interested in. The average girl is not interested in superheroes, so suddenly, girls weren’t reading comics any more because there were no comics they wanted to read.

ANDELMAN: What were they reading in the ’40s and ’50s and ’60s? What were some titles?

ROBBINS: They were reading comics about teenagers, usually about teenage girls, although they read Archie. You talk to a lot of women of a certain age and ask them what they read when they were a kid, and they read Archie comics, but they won’t call it that, they’ll say, "I read Betty & Veronica," because that’s who they related to. And there were other titles. Stan Lee, the editor of Marvel who has given us Spider-man and The X-Men and the Fantastic Four in the ’60s gave us so many teen titles in the ‘40s. The biggest two were Patsy Walker, which was about a teenage girl, and Millie the Model, which lasted a long time. You’ll find a lot of people who remember Millie the Model because it lasted through the mid-’70s. Archie Comics also gave us Katy Keene, who was a model, and the girls just loved Katy Keene and used to send in drawings and designs for her clothes, and again, you find women past a certain age, and they’ll all tell you they loved Katy Keene when they were little girls.



ANDELMAN: And didn’t Marvel eventually bring Patsy Walker back, but like as a superhero or something?

ROBBINS: No. The less said about that, the better.

ANDELMAN: I am actually old enough to remember the comics in the ’60s that you are talking about. There were those things, and there was another one I remember. I guess it was into the early ’70s. There was a Marvel comic, I think Night Nurse or something like that.

ROBBINS: Oh, Night Nurse! Yes, that was part of kind of their desperate attempt to regain the girl audience, but at that point, it was too little too late.

ANDELMAN: Why has it taken thirty years for comics publishers to rediscover women? Does it have something to do with the Japanese influence?

ROBBINS: It has everything to do with the Japanese influence.

Up until Manga arrived on our shores, American comic editors and publishers suffered from a kind of collective amnesia and used to say, well, girls don’t read comics. I mean, I have some unbelievable quotes from them. They actually said, “Girls’ brains are wired in a different way, so they just don’t get comics.” Somehow, it never, ever, occurred to them that girls weren’t reading comics because girls are not interested in overly muscled guys with square jaws punching each other out.

Somehow, they just didn’t see that at all, they just saw girls don’t read comics. But now we have all these incredible Manga, Shojo Manga, which is the Japanese term for girls Manga, and the girls are eating them up. You go into any chain bookstore like Borders or Barnes and Noble, you go to the graphic novel section, you see these teenage and pre-teen girls sitting on the floor surrounded by Manga, reading them.

ANDELMAN: I did not know that that’s what Shojo meant. See, I’ve learned something already today.

ROBBINS: And the boys’ are called Shonen Manga. And there is definitely crossover. Girls read Shonen and boys read Shoujo.

ANDELMAN: I feel like a giant light bulb just went on over my head now that I understand that. It’s the generation I’m in, I guess. I never stopped to understand what those two meant.

ROBBINS: Now you know!



ANDELMAN: I feel greatly enlightened. Now, let’s talk about GoGirl, which I mentioned before we actually started the interview that my daughter really, really enjoyed. For those who may be scratching their head who don’t know GoGirl like they know Betty and Veronica, could you tell us a little bit about who GoGirl is and a little about the adventures?

ROBBINS: Sure. I’ll start by saying that it’s published by Dark Horse so you can know where to look for it. GoGirl is a fifteen-year-old girl whose mother was a super heroine, and her mother’s name was GoGoGirl, and she wore a little white go-go mini-dress and white go-go boots, and she could fly. Then she stopped. She got divorced. She had to be a single mother and support her daughter. She had stopped even before that, because her husband felt threatened by being married to a woman who could fly, which will tell you why the marriage didn’t last. But anyway, she doesn’t know, in the beginning, anyway, she didn’t know that her daughter had inherited her ability to fly and was flying in secret because she kind of knew that her mother had bad feelings about it. Then our heroine had to put on her mom’s old costume, which fit her perfectly, and go out and rescue her best friend when her friend got kidnapped, and that was when the world finally learned that they had another super heroine, a flying girl. And her mother has been very supportive and sometimes jumps in on the action wearing the extra outfit because she had to have two costumes so that when one was at the cleaner’s, she could wear the other. But that’s all she can do. That’s all she can do; she can fly. Otherwise, she is a perfectly normal teenage girl. She doesn’t have X-ray vision, she doesn’t have fists of steel, she can fly.

ANDELMAN: And Trina, which parts of this are autobiographical?

ROBBINS: None, except for the fact, of course, that I’m a mother, and I have a daughter, and I love my daughter. And we have a good relationship as do GoGirl and her mother.

ANDELMAN: I see. All right, so there’s no flying going on in your house?

ROBBINS: Oh, how I wish.



ANDELMAN: Why did you start this series? Is it because there was all this Japanese Manga that was going on, or did you…

ROBBINS: No. We did this pre-Manga. This goes back to 1999. Anne Timmons is the artist, by the way, and she is just such a fabulous artist, and we work together as a writer/artist team so well that I have called us the Stan Lee and Jack Kirby of girls’ comics. We first met at a convention in the late ’90s and kind of became email pen pals, and then one day, she said, “Let’s do a comic together. You write, and I draw.” And I thought, “Fat chance we’ll have of selling this,” because in those days, Manga had not really gotten its hold on the United States yet, and there was really very little out there for girls, but I thought, what do I have to lose? I have a file cabinet in my head of all these comics ideas that I want to do, and I pulled out of the file cabinet the file on the flying teenager and created GoGirl! In the beginning, Image was publishing us in comic book form, but you may or may not know that the problem of comic books if you’re aimed at girls, not so much any more, because of Manga, but in those days, if you were aiming your comic book at girls, you had a terrible time getting it distributed. There were comic book stores that simply didn’t want to carry girls’ comics, and all they had was superhero comics for boys.

ANDELMAN: Well, they probably didn’t see many girls in their stores, so why would they think to carry them?

ROBBINS: Well, you see, it’s this vicious cycle. The girls didn’t go in the stores because there was nothing there for them. Plus, the stores were wall-to-wall teenage boys, which is very intimidating if you are a young girl. So, of course, the girls didn’t go into stores. So then everybody could say, “Oh, girls don’t read comics,” right? But anyway, we had five issues of the comic book, and then we went over to Dark Horse, and Dark Horse published the first five issues as a collection, a graphic novel collection, and it was about that time that Manga started hitting, especially Shojo Manga started hitting. Girls who had been starved for comics for twenty years finally found comics they liked, and we could get graphic novels in bookstores, so we have since then done two more graphic novels, and we hope to produce another one next year.

ANDELMAN: Trina -- and I say this with all due respect -- you have been around comics for quite a while now…

ROBBINS: Too long.

ANDELMAN: How did you get interested in the field?

ROBBINS:

I’m one of those people who’s old enough to have read those comics when she was a kid. I read Millie the Model, and I read Katy Keene, and I loved them, and so then when I grew up and I heard all these editors saying, "Girls don’t read comics," I knew it wasn’t true.

Simple as that, I knew it wasn’t true because I had read them, and my girlfriends had read them, and we used to read them and trade comics, just like kids do today.

ANDELMAN: But I mean, what would make you think, since there were not many women in the field, because you’ve done cartoons, you’ve done comics, you’ve done histories, I can’t imagine it was a very welcoming field as a professional.

ROBBINS: No. Absolutely not, and that was a shock, because it had somehow never occurred to me that comics was a boys’ club. I mean, it didn’t occur to me that people would think, “Oh, you are a girl, you can’t do comics,” and so it was really a shock when I discovered that. But by then, this other thing had kicked in, which is the “I’ll show them” syndrome.



ANDELMAN: Were there any women that did mentor you at all or that encouraged you that were in the field?

ROBBINS: Well, actually, when I saw my first underground comic in 1966 in a New York underground newspaper called The East Village Other, it was this very, very psychedelic full-page comic called “Gentle Trip Out,” and it was signed “Panzica.” I had no idea who Panzica was, but I looked at it, and I said, I want to do this. Not literally that comic, but I want to do comics, and two years later, at that point, I was living in New York, and I was contributing comics to the East Village Other, I found out that Panzica was a woman, so you could say that my first inspiration was a woman, and I didn’t even know it.

ANDELMAN: I’m glad you mentioned the East Village Other, which this will be the second time it’s mentioned in Mr. Media. What other kinds of things did you do in the ’70s, because you’ve had a very diverse career, I know?

ROBBINS: Well, I did lots of comics, because I still had that ‘I’ll show them’ syndrome. I did lots of comics. Actually in 1970, I produced the first all-woman comic book ever that was called It Ain’t Me, Babe, and it was named from the feminist newspaper I was working on, It Ain’t Me, Babe. Actually, in those days, we called it “Women’s Liberation.” It was the first women’s liberation newspaper on the west coast, and I was kind of the unofficial artist and art director, but everybody was very egalitarian, so we didn’t have titles.

ANDELMAN: It’s hard to believe that that term has in some ways become an antique. You don’t hear it very much any more.

ROBBINS: Women’s liberation?

ANDELMAN: Yeah.

ROBBINS: Of course not. It really dates you, doesn’t it?

ANDELMAN: Yeah, it really does.

ROBBINS: If some old guy says, oh, yes, I’m on the side of you women’s libbers, you know how old he is.

ANDELMAN: Oh you know, I’m hearing you say that, and I’m thinking of Archie Bunker making cracks about it.

ROBBINS: Exactly. He used to use that term, didn’t he?

ANDELMAN: Oh yeah, and kind of the way Rush Limbaugh would refer to….

ROBBINS: Feminazis.

ANDELMAN: Feminazis, thank you. Yeah. Generation apart, but same basic attitude. So were there any women over the years that helped you or that mentored you along?

ROBBINS: Not really. There weren’t any around to help me or mentor me, but I’ve been inspired by a lot of early women cartoonists whose work I’ve researched and whose stories I’ve looked up and researched. I’ve just been inspired by what they did. I’ve published really three books on women who worked in comics, two of them simply on the history of women cartoonists. Because the other thing that all those editors used to say besides “Girls don’t read comics,” is they used to say, “Women have never written or drawn comics.” Again, I knew this wasn’t true. So I researched, and I found hundreds of women over the 20th century who had done comics.

Back in the very early days of the 20th century, there were lots of women drawing comics for the newspapers, and nobody thought it was unusual.

They didn’t have to take male names, contrary to strange public belief that women had to take male names to get published. It wasn’t true, and nobody said, “Oh, this is weird. You can’t do a comic because you’re a woman.”

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© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.