Pretty In Ink: Women Cartoonists 1896-2013

by Trina Robbins

With the 1896 publication of Rose O'Neill's comic strip The Old Subscriber Calls, in Truth Magazine, American women entered the field of comics, and they never left it. But, you might not know that reading most of the comics histories out there. Trina Robbins has spent the last thirty years recording the accomplishments of a century of women cartoonists, and Pretty in Ink is her ultimate book, a revised, updated and rewritten history of women cartoonists, with more color illustrations than ever before, and with some startling new discoveries (such as a Native American woman cartoonist from the 1940s who was also a Corporal in the women's army, and the revelation that a cartoonist included in all of Robbins's previous histories was a man!) In the pages of Pretty in Ink you'll find new photos and correspondence from cartoonists Ethel Hays and Edwina Dumm, and the true story of Golden Age comic book star Lily Renee, as intriguing as the comics she drew. Although the comics profession was dominated by men, there were far more women working in the profession throughout the 20th century than other histories indicate, and they have flourished in the 21st. Robbins not only documents the increasing relevance of women throughout the 20th century, with mainstream creators such as Ramona Fradon and Dale Messick and alternative cartoonists such as Lynda Barry, Carol Tyler, and Phoebe Gloeckner, but the latest generation of women cartoonists--Megan Kelso, Cathy Malkasian, Linda Medley, and Lilli Carre, among many others. Robbins is the preeminent historian of women comic artists; forget her previous histories: Pretty in Ink is her most comprehensive volume to date.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Comics, Art, Graphic Novels, Feminism, Biography

180 pages, Paperback

First published August 30, 2013

About the author

Trina Robbins is an American comics artist and writer. She was an early and influential participant in the underground comix movement, and one of the few female artists in underground comix when she started. Her first comics were printed in the East Village Other. She later joined the staff of a feminist underground newspaper It Ain't Me, Babe, with whom she produced the first all-woman comic book titled It Ain't Me Babe. She became increasingly involved in creating outlets for and promoting female comics artists, through projects such as the comics anthology Wimmen's Comix. She was also the penciller on Wonder Woman for a time in the '80s.

Trina has worked on an adaptation of Sax Rohmer's Dope for Eclipse Comics and GoGirl with artist Anne Timmons for Image Comics.

Trina designed Vampirella's costume for Forrest Ackerman and Jim Warren.

In addition to her comics work, Robbins is an author of non-fiction books, including several with an emphasis on the history of women in cartooning.

She is the first of the three "Ladies of the Canyon" in Joni Mitchell's classic song from the album of the same name.

Trina Robbins won a Special Achievement Award from the San Diego Comic Con in 1989 for her work on Strip AIDS U.S.A., a benefit book that she co-edited with Bill Sienkiewicz and Robert Triptow.

Reviews

[Dave Schaafsma · Rating 4 out of 5]

In less than 200 pages Robbins glosses more than a century of women's comics. An archivist, she has been collecting and sharing and writing about this work for decades. This collection gives you a sense of the range of work done in various periods. It's like an introductory history, to give scholars and enthusiasts some keys for where to dig deeper, but it is still pretty special in revealing how much was in play all the time. And it's invaluable as an artifact for the historical record. I knew some of the work from the sixties Wimmens Comix and after that, but knew very little prior to that. Brenda Starr I knew, growing up with that. But the early stuff is interesting. And overall this is just great to have for the history.

Robbins organizes the work into various chapters so you can see what women drew: The Queens of Cute, Flappers, Babes (but as drawn by women, not men!), Blonde Bombers (again , not as men see "blonde bombers".), superheroes, and so on. There's feminist comics, lesbian comics, and answers to the testosterone-driven comics that dominated and still dominate the industry.

For instance, I just read Cannon by Wallace Wood which is a good example of the variety of adult war comics with naked women on every page supposedly for the soldiers. Not drawn FOR any women, obviously. Uh, the women, even in flapper or "cute" versions, never look like the fantasies men cartoonists draw. Just sayin' the obvious. This is fun and enlightening.

And a lot of these women could draw, in the early years! Clearly we know, women everywhere drawing now. But you have to believe access to publication was denied many of them just because they were women in a male-dominated profession.

[Diz · Rating 3 out of 5]

The quality of this book is a bit uneven. The sections on the women comic strip artists of the first half of the 20th century and the women working in comic books in the golden age of comics were very good. I learned a lot about some really talented artists that I had not heard of before. The weak section is the one covering modern comics (since 2000). It pretty much reads as a list of comics available by women creators without much commentary or analysis. In fact, there is not a lot of transitioning from one age of comics to the next, so it's difficult to see the big picture. In the end, I would recommend this if you want to learn more about early 20th century artists. However, if you want to read about the role of women in post-golden age comics, there are better books to read.

[Kim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Must-read for anyone interested in comics. especially who loves comics!

[luna · Rating 3 out of 5]

*2.5 stars

It was interesting to read, but the writing was a bit too dry.

[Robert · Rating 4 out of 5]

My review of this fine book can be found on Panel Patter: http://bit.ly/1gBplrF

[Mackenzie Walton · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a fascinating subject and should have had me on the edge of my seat, but frankly the dry writing made it a bit of a slog. The book itself is oversized, which left me wondering why they bothered with using some of the images, which were too small to really admire the art therein. A lot of the more recent images just consisted of book covers, which aren't really the best example of an artist's work in many cases. Example: Does the cover for Hark! A Vagrant give you a sense of Kate Beaton's unique style? Not really.

Having read some of Robbins' previous books, I know that a lot of the images used were also recycled from those books—it would have been nice to see more fresh content.

On the editorial front, there were some glaring mistakes. At one point the copy referred to a strip called The Boyfriend when a sample image, immediately next to the copy, showed that the title was really The Boy Friend. A little thing, but something a halfway decent copyeditor/proofer should have caught. There were also quite a few instances of misattributions in captions, probably due to images getting rearranged at the last minute.

Basically, the book itself is a bit boring when it shouldn't be (Trina has done better work on this subject), and the workmanship was pretty shoddy. I expect better from Fantagraphics.

[Catherine · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not my favorite of her histories to date, I must admit. There are too many panels that really needed context and commentary that they didn't get from the author. I recommend Robbins' "A Century of Women Cartoonists" and "Great Female Superheroes" as better intros than this one. That said, I have a list of interesting female creators to check out at the end of this and that's never a bad thing.

[Miss Lasko-Gross · Rating 4 out of 5]

Solid overview of the early years but the book really takes off when Trina begins discussing her contemporaries and the modern era.

[a ☕︎ · Rating 3 out of 5]

i expected this to be a bit more riveting, given how much i loved trina robbin’s other (more decadent) historical comic overviews, brinkley girls and flapper queens. this collection covers everything from cherubic kewpies (need to find a biography on rose o’neill) to art deco beach girls (marianne by virginia kraussman), depression-era toddlers w terriers (edwina dunn’s adorable tippie) to purrfectly-cute royalty (pussycat princess by grace drayton and ruth carroll), beauteous secret agent baronesses (the monastery of the blue god by cecilia paddock munson) to a hundred different girl fridays, all before the 50s. womyn-and-chix-styled underground comics took over in the 70s, boasting feminist or flower power themes (especially in sf, lol); by the 90s, DC/marvel became powerhouses and centered superheroes. come the 2000s, graphic novels finally made a comeback. so much! an entire century of information. you’d think it would be unputdownable, but trina robbins’ writing style tends to be dry and she occasionally veers into simply making lists. that one qualm aside, still a totally wonderful and much-needed archive. (and i loved the inclusion of a brief memory on sailor moon in the final chapter, which was very sweet).

[Nolan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sheer chance to find this in the small comics section of the school library around the time The Complete Wimmen's Comix came in through interloan. Also high strangeness to dive so deep into this world about a week before Trina Robbins passed. It provides so much context when you read it along with the Wimmen's Comix, seeing influences, what these artists were both embracing and rejecting, and the industry they were both a part of and excluded from. The last chapter on new comics is so overwhelmingly full and disjointed and that's a good thing. RIP Trina. Thanks for making this alternative history available. It's needed.

[Debra Golden · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was a good read, and it look much longer as I tired to read all the featured comics. Some were too small, but wow such a wealth images and info on the women who drew and inked them.
There were so many new to me strips, artist, etc.
I was interesting and not too surprising to learn how heavily male dominated the field is.
Writing this the comic strip Cathy by Cathy Guisewhite (sp?) came to mind. Perhaps she was/is to contemporary for this, but is was nice to see Brenda Starr again.

[Kelly Funk · Rating 3 out of 5]

Entertaining, though it read more like a list of women cartoonists with reproductions of their comic strips acting as illustration. As much as I loved the comic strips and the fact that they were printed large enough to read thought and speech bubbles, I would have foregone them for the sake of more on the women themselves.

[dejah_thoris · Rating 5 out of 5]

So good I may have to purchase my own copy to ensure I read most of its references. It is oversized, but the format works for the large visual reproductions. A must-read for any woman interested in our contributions to cartoons and comics.

[Luke · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great exploration of women cartoonists and comics artists since the beginning of mainstream comics. Seeing all the amazing art just made me wish there were collections of almost all of the early comics.

[Camila Gutiérrez · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent history of women authors in United States comics. Trina Robbins is the hero we needed. ❤️

[Phil · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pretty in Ink is a history book about women who have drawn comics and comic strips. The content is well researched, and there are a lot of great examples for each of the eight time periods covered. It was nice to see how the drawings progressed over time, and in some cases how things have stayed the same.

The book took me a couple chapters to get into it though. This is because a lot of the early works are comic strips and the subject matter in them doesn't particularly appeal to me. Plus, I got a couple of the artists mixed up. That wasn't a huge problem though. As the book progressed through the different time periods, it was clear how events shaped the creators and their pieces.

The later chapters presented a different problem for me: the writer brought in her own works and experiences. This isn't necessarily an issue, but it signaled a change in objectivity to me. I think that could have been handled better. The chapter covering the most recent time period felt stunted to me. There are so many female artists working in comics now that it is difficult for all of them to be included, but the last chapter felt lacking on artists and really important works. Even a listing at the back of the book covering some of these items would have been great.

Despite the few things that didn't work for me, I enjoyed this book. It gives another perspective on the development of comics. There are a wide range of creators included, most of whom have at least one example of their art included. I was impressed by the skill of the artists and some of the content they were able to get away with.

[Samuel · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a hard one for me to review. It's extremely valuable for all of the sample panels, illustration examples, and rare photos that it contains, and the information for the 1896-1950 time period is pretty solid.

However, I found the organization of the information to be hard to follow and ill-defined; there was no shortage of content, but the job of a literary historian (or as Robbins would put it, ~herstorian~) is to arrange the information in a logical way so that the reader can make sense of it. I rarely felt like this was done adequately. Additionally, it's natural that, given her background in underground comics, this would be the style and subject matter that appeals most to Robbins, and indeed, the section on the underground comics of the '60s and '70s is one of the book's stronger parts. However, the idiosyncrasy of Robbins' tastes sometimes leads to strange elisions; she spends 2+ full pages on the strip Six Chix, while the entire careers of Cathy Guisewite (Cathy) and Lynn Johnston (For Better or For Worse) get half a sentence each. It's certainly possible to argue that Robbins spends more time on women drawing and writing cartoons and comics with more literary merit -- I'm not much of a Cathy or FBoFW fan myself -- but in a history of North American Women Cartoonists, I'm not sure it's a good idea to spend that little time on the only two women to win the Reuben award at the time of the book's publication.

Be that as it may, this book is worth it for the treasure trove of material from the first part of the 20th century. I think the definitive history of North American women in cartoons and comics remains to be written, however.

[reveurdart · Rating 5 out of 5]

An essential work if you're interested in the history of women cartoonists.