The Complete Wimmen's Comix by Trina Robbins

But most everyone instantly gets the humor of illustrating such an infamously long and unread document.” (In a separate interview earlier this year, PW spoke to Sikoryak about Terms and Conditions on the More to Come Podcast.) “Some people thought it would somehow expose all the allegedly nefarious secrets buried in the text (I still haven’t found those secrets, myself). “I’d gotten a few anti-Apple remarks from when I was serializing the book online,” he says. Terms and Conditions takes Apple’s iTunes contract and illustrates it in every possible style of comics, with a Steve Jobs avatar guiding readers through endless legalese. Robert Sikoryak has made a career out of drawing in other people’s styles, and two of his current books take full advantage of that skill. Nowadays, I would just say, ‘That’s absolute bull!’” I swallowed and took it because I still hoped I might get some work. When I was younger and desperate for work, editors would tell me women don’t read comics. “I needed to write about the bad times, especially since so much of it had feminist meanings.

“I finally decided now was the time, so I stopped everything else and wrote it,” she says.Ĭomics have a mistaken reputation as a boys’ medium, and Robbins doesn’t avoid recounting the conflicts that came up in advocating for a broader role for women in comics. Her bibliography is full of comics and books on the history of pop culture (she’s profiled seminal cartoonists Lily Renee and Nell Brinkley, among others), but writing a memoir was something she always wanted to do.

From her time as an integral figure in the arts scenes of both New York and LA in the 1960s (including an affair with Jim Morrison) to her key role in editing Wimmen’s Comix, the pioneering female-focused underground comic, to her unstinting efforts on behalf of women cartoonists, Robbins’s down-to-earth viewpoint puts a memorable life into perspective. Famed cartoonist, feminist, and “herstorian” Trina Robbins has a life as colorful as anything she’s put on paper, and her new prose memoir Last Girl Standing is a lively look at her adventures.

The Complete Wimmen's Comix by Trina Robbins