Since the 1960s, the cartoonist and pop historian Trina Robbins has been a central figure in the women’s comics scene in the US. She plays numerous roles: artist, producer, active networker and, in recent years, also a chronicler of the women’s comics movement. The exhibition that she has put together for the Secession, She Draws Comics, displays the diversity of women’s comics production in the USA with a broad selection of both historical and contemporary original drawings, comics and zines. The exhibition conveys historical and biographical backgrounds, but without leveling the diversity of individual approaches, and it illuminates aspects of production and distribution within the framework of emancipatory do-it-yourself strategies, the emphatic formulation of individual positions, and the industrial comic market.

Although comics are a medium frequently used in art, the collection shown here was created outside the art context. Nevertheless, various threads and connections may be identified in the exhibition, which also tie into current discourses in the field of art. Different stations of a feminist language are evident in the exploration of topics of production and situatedness in the sense of a counter-public sphere.

The spectrum of approaches ranges from science fiction and fantasy (Donna Barr), soap opera (Dale Messick), bitingly humorous newspaper strips (Nina Paley) to the genre of autobiographical comics, whereby the latter seems to dominate at the present. The author’s stories deal just as much with conventional circumstances as with the unrelenting disclosure of psychological encroachment (Debbie Drechsler, Phoebe Gloeckner, Penny Van Horn). The picture-text stories are an ideal medium for discussing social and political commitment and expressing personal experiences at the same time (Jessica Abel, Julie Doucet, Leanne Franson). In their diversity, the ways of living presented in the comics reflect changes in the self-awareness of women and the changing ways of dealing with the politics of identity in recent decades. Even the titles, Tits & Clitsin the 1970s or Girlhero, Actiongirl and Slutburger in the 1990s reflect the goal of defining the depiction and representation of women beyond stereotypes in the way concepts and terminology are taken over and reinterpreted.

The exhibition offers a glimpse into women’s production of comics in the USA, and Trina Robbins stands for this emancipatory intention with her entire life story. She is one of the protagonists of the underground comix movement. She published her first comics in the early 1960s in New York (East Village Other). In 1968 she moved to San Francisco, the birthplace of underground comix, where she continuously collaborated in creating networks and platforms for women’s production of comics, for example as founder of the Wimmen’s Comic Collective and as editor of the anthology It Aint Me Baby. Women’s Liberation. These collectives provided the framework for the first comics series that dealt with feminist topics like abortion, coming out, and sexuality.

In order to prove that even comics that do not reduce their female characters to full-breasted sex wonders can be commercially successful, Trina Robbins drew and authored stories like Meet Misty, GoGirl and contributed stories to Barbie, which provided especially young girls with an alternative to the supermen and superheroes and their female appendages spawned by the male fantasies of power so favored by the industry. For instance, the mother and daughter team of the Go-Girl comics drawn by Ann Timmons not only battles against evil, but also with the problem that super powers and the ability to fly neither make them rich nor help them to win a relatively commonplace flame.

Trina Robbins has published a large number of books and magazines, including From Girls to Grrrlz – A History of American Women’s Comics from Teens to Zines (1999), an extensive documentation of the women cartoonist scene that she co-founded and strongly influenced. This book became the basis for Robbins’ first presentations in Europe, which took place in 2001 at the Künstlerhaus Stuttgart and in conjunction with the exhibition First Story – Women Building/New Narratives for the 21st Century in Porto. Her most recent publication, The Great Women Cartoonists (2001), forms the point of departure for the exhibition at the Secession.