When Trina Robbins was around 11 or 12 years old, her mother, a schoolteacher, would bring home reams of paper and lots of number-two pencils. After carefully folding the sheets in half (and diligently gnawing away at the pencils’ erasers) Robbins would draw herself four-page comics. She remembers one that was inspired by her fascination with the “goddess” behind green goddess dressing. “Why,” she remembers her heroine exclaiming upon discovering the goddess’s temple, “she’s green!”
But one fateful day in 1966, someone handed Robbins a copy of the Lower East Side’s underground paper, the East Village Other. “And it blew my mind, to use the expression of the time,” she says. “It had comics in it—hippie comics! These comics were about my lifestyle, not about guys in skintight underwear, big chins, and thick necks punching each other out.” She was particularly enamored with one psychedelic comic, Gentle’s Trip Out, signed by someone named “Panzika” (aka underground-comics artist Nancy Burton). “I saw that, and I thought, ‘This is what I want to do,’ ” Robbins says. “Two years later, I found out that Panzika was a woman. Cool, huh? My inspiration to finally draw comics was a woman!”
“My God, feminism is strong!” Robbins says. “We have Donald Trump to thank for that, don’t we? It’s because of you, Donald, that I have this cute little pussy hat.” Robbins went to the March on Washington, grinning in a sea of cute hats and Wonder Woman protest signs. “Only women would say, ‘Let’s have a big protest march and all wear cute, pink hats!’ ” she says. “All those women at the march were so wonderful. And we are: we’re all strong and wonderful and all over the country now, because of Donald Trump!” v
Wed 3/15, 5 PM School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Neiman Hall 37 S. Wabash 312-629-6100saic.edu Free
Thu 3/16, 6 PM Jane Addams Hull-House Museum 800 S. Halsted 312-413-5353hullhousemuseum.org Free
