Trina Robbins: Miss Fury
by Alex Dueben for SuicideGirls (http://suicidegirls.com/)

Trina Robbins is a legend among people who read and study comics. She’s a cartoonist who was active in the San Francisco underground in the '70s and '80s where she contributed to many publications including the East Village Other, It Ain’t Me Babe and Wimmen’s Comix. In recent decades she’s worked more as a writer on books including Go, Girl! and Chicagoland Detective Agency, in addition to working on Wonder Woman, Xena and The Spirit.

Robbins’ other claim to fame is that she is one of the great comics historians. In books like A Century of Women Cartoonists and From Girls to Grrrlz she writes not just thoughtfully and passionately about many cartoonists whose work has faded from consciousness, but she also reshapes our perception of comics past. In the book The Brinkley Girls, which she edited, the work of the artist Nell Brinkley was brought together, showing her incredible drafting skill and demonstrating why she was one of the most popular and important illustrators and cartoonists of her time.

This spring Robbins' multi-pronged careers move forward in earnest. Her latest graphic novel for kids, Chicagoland Detective Agency, is being released and she's contributed a short story to the anthology Chicks in Capes. In addition, Robbins is launching a comicbook starring the classic detective Honey West. However, her major historical and long-time passion project is Miss Fury, a collection of the comic strips written and drawn by Tarpe Mills from 1944 to 1949. A Hitchockian thriller set at the end and in the aftermath of World War II, the series follows the saga of a socialite who at times dons a panther suit to creep through the night to foil Nazis, smugglers, and gangsters. Marla Drake is the grandmother that Buffy Summers and Sidney Bristow didn’t know they had, and now she’s being reprinted for a public which is much more interested in, and open to, heroines who find themselves neck deep in intrigue, action and soap opera.

ALEX DUEBEN: Your new project is editing the Miss Fury collection of comics by Tarpe Mills, which I hadn’t heard of until it was announced. Could you talk a little about it just because it’s a comic that people don’t know.

TRINA ROBBINS: That’s the thing, she’s so obscure now. These are comics that no one has really seen for sixty years. We have five years worth of Miss Fury. Miss Fury started in 1941 but the ones that we’re running are from 1944-1949. She was so good. The story was just totally captivating. It’s very film noir. It just reads so well and she was an incredibly good artist.

There was a group of artists and they were all the school of [Milton] Caniff. I don’t mean that they studied under Caniff, but Caniff and Terry and the Pirates was their jumping off point. Romantic adventures. They didn’t draw the same, but there was a style that they all had. She was of that school. She was the only woman of that school. Everybody else was guys and all the others did great adventures, very rip-roaring, and all of them were inspired by movies, but they all had male heroes. She was the only one who had a female hero.

And the most interesting thing about Tarpe Mills is that the heroine looks like her. She basically put herself into this strip. She not only put herself into the strip but she put her cat into the strip. Tarpe Mills had a cat named Peri-Purr who actually was quite famous. During the war she actually donated her cat to the war effort as a mascot on a warship. We assume that she got the cat back and this was all done for publicity purposes, but she gave her heroine in the strip, Marla Drake, the same cat, a white persian cat named Peri-Purr. It’s her having adventures on the page. And of course was so cool is that you can do this. If you’re an artist and a writer you can create your own world, all you have to do is draw it on paper. And that’s what she did.

AD: The strip ran for a decade, but how hard is it to research and put something like this together?

TR: Well I was very lucky because I found the right people. The first person I owe a lot to is an unnamed male fan. I cannot remember what his name was because this was back in 1975 or maybe earlier. I don’t know. At a New York convention, he said to me, have you ever heard of Miss Fury? I said no and he said, you would love it. Shortly after that I found my first few copies of Miss Fury reprints. What they used to do in those days the comic books they would take the strip and recut and paste them and put them in comic book form and that’s what they did to Miss Fury at Timely Comics. That was how I first saw Miss Fury and I was totally hooked.

The next person I owe a lot to is Bill Blackbeard. He used to have the San Francisco Academy of Comic Art. The San Francisco Academy was basically his two story house that was crammed from bottom to top with mostly newspaper strips and you could do research there. If he liked you, he would really help you with your research. If he didn’t like you, you probably couldn’t even get an appointment because he would never answer the phone. I was very lucky that Bill liked me. He liked me and he liked what I was doing and he wound up giving me a huge amount of Miss Fury strips which were doubles. He had a lot of doubles. I was able to really read it and not just the cut and paste versions, but really read it, and it was just incredible.

AD: What did Tarpe Mills do after the comic finished?

TR: She did some commercial art until she retired.

AD: She wasn’t that old when the strip ended?

TR: No she wasn’t that old. I think she was born in 1912 so she wasn’t even forty when the strip ended. And she wasn’t very old when she died either.

AD: Do we know what led her to retire from comics?

TR: She had great difficulty meeting her deadlines. And she had emphysema. She died of emphysema. She smoked and never stopped smoking. It occasionally put her in the hospital. She was just not well. She stopped drawing [the strip] for the last year. She would be in the hospital and couldn’t meet her deadlines and they’d ghost it. The last year the strip is completely done by somebody else and you can tell. It’s awful. The writing is terrible. Everything about it is awful. And of course it lost papers. And they finally retired it.

AD: So is this volume a selection of strips or is it the complete run of that period?

TR: The book starts in ‘44 and ends in ‘49. It’s five years worth. The reason we didn’t do the first few years is because it has been reprinted in those Timely Comics comicbooks. Somebody got ahold of them in 1979 and put out a Miss Fury reprint book reprinting the Timely Comics proofs, not the newspaper strips. The newspaper strips were recut and pasted. And since then that particular issue has been reprinted from those same proofs at least three times. Very small press and none that easy to find, but findable on amazon or ebay. That stuff has been seen and I wanted to start it later with the stuff that no one has seen for sixty years.

AD: If you’re only get to publish one book, include the best stuff.

TR: The fact is that she got better. I mean, her early stuff is great, but she simply became a better artist. All that work just makes you better and by ’44, she was at her peak.

AD: Shifting gears, you recently wrote a few issues of Honey West for Moonstone Comics.

TR: I did. Only two have been published, but I wrote two more that are being illustrated. It’s another two parter and the first book is inked and book two is still being pencilled and that’s being done by a really really nice guy in Argentina. Then I’m about to start a third Honey West but I haven’t started that yet because I’m working on another project.

AD: She’s one of those characters that’s fallen through the cracks a little.

TR: Not as much, because she’s more recent. A lot of people remember watching Honey West on TV. An awful lot of women of a certain age who were young then absolutely adored her, because there were all these guys on TV, but she was a woman private eye. Plus Anne Francis was great. I love her.

AD: I think you commented that the characters’ appeal was that it was a pulpy Mickey Spillane kind of story without the obnoxious misogyny.

TR: That’s right. And it was never as violent as Mickey Spillane. He was very violent, though by today’s standards it might seem tame. That was really her creator. G.G. Fickling was a pseudonym of Gloria and Forest Fickling, a married couple who wrote the Honey West books starting in 1959. They intended her as an answer to the popularity of Mickey Spillane at the time. They said, let’s do a female Mickey Spillane.

AD: So what can we look forward to in the new issues?

TR: Well I’m keeping it in the period because it would just be totally wrong to bring it up to date to now. It’s 1965 and 1966 forever in my world of Honey West. (laughs) In this next one she goes undercover at a Renaissance Fair. It’s not really a renaissance fair, so I’m calling it a medieval fair. The title is Murder Forsooth. And the one after that which I haven’t even started writing yet takes place in 1965 and it’s a team-up. Do you know much about old tv of the sixties? There was another short-lived black and white TV series that was really quite good called T.H.E. Cat.

AD: I’ve never heard of it.

TR: It’s very obscure, but I’ve seen the videos and they’re great. It’s very evocative and moody and noir. He owns a club called Del Gato in San Francisco and he’s not really a private eye but he just gets involved in all these adventures and solves crimes. They said, how would you feel about teaming up Honey West with T.H.E. Cat and I thought, that’s really cool.

It just so happened that around that time, my partner and I did a three day Vegas trip to get away from it all. We do Vegas every six years, and it’s fun every six years. Then I was thinking of old Vegas, this tiny strip in the desert. When we got home, the first thing I did was I rented Oceans 11, the original one, to get the feel for what it was like. The one that really inspired me was Elvis Presley’s Viva Las Vegas. They both take place around the same time in the original mob-ridden Vegas. But I haven’t even written that one yet so I don’t want to give anything away.

AD: How did you get involved with Moonstone?

TR: A few years ago they approached me to do a story. They do these anthologies where people write short stories based on old characters that just aren’t being done anymore, like The Phantom. They got in touch with me to do a Phantom story and they sent me a couple of their books as examples and I loved the idea. So I did a Phantom story and I thought in terms of old pulp magazines so I wrote this really great pulpy jungle story and then I did a Captain Midnight story for them too which was a lot of fun. Then Lori Gentile approached me about Chicks in Capes, which was just a brilliant idea. What happens when you get a bunch of women to create superheroines which is so different from what happens when men create superheroines. And that was great because I’d had this superheroine concept in my head anyway and here was my chance. Then she approached me about Honey West and I was thrilled. So I’m happy as a clam working with them.

AD: Did you want to talk about your story in the new anthology, Chicks in Capes?

TR: Absolutely. This is something I’ve wanted to do for a really long time and someone has already sent me a very nice email about it saying that they think there are at least two novels that could spin out of it and I think they’re right. She called it a superhero Handmaid’s Tale. It takes place in a future dystopia, in what could frighteningly easily be America today or tomorrow. There was some unnamed war, I called it the six day war, and out of the ashes of that arises a right wing Christian dictatorship. He’s just called the President and people pledge allegiance to the United Church of America and the cops are the church police. It’s not like The Handmaid’s Tale, it’s not quite that bad for women, but everyone’s become extremely conservative and proper and they burn witches and stone adulterers and, well, you have to read it.

AD: Your other big project is for younger readers, The Chicagoland Detective Agency.

TR: Yes Tyler Page is working on the third book right now. He draws the pencils and I get to see them and comment on them, which is really so important to me. I have had really bad experiences where I’ve done graphic novels, mostly educational graphic novels for use in classrooms for companies like Scholastic. I really enjoy doing that but they pick the artist, I have no say on the artist, and I don’t get to see what the artist has done and the results are sometimes horrendous. It was really important to me that I see all the pencils for everything that I’ve been doing since then I have insisted on seeing the pencils so that I can make changes and corrections and they’re usually so minor but they’re important.

But yeah, I’m having a really good time with Chicagoland. It’s a lot of fun. These are things that I never had a chance to do before until graphic novels. Thank god for graphic novels. I wanted to tell stories, but if you couldn’t write about or draw overly muscled superheroes viciously and violently beating each other to shreds, there was nothing else there. You couldn’t do stories for kids. You couldn’t do adventures like I’m doing now. I’ve never been happier. I’m able to write adventure stories, mystery stories with women detectives. I’m doing everything I’ve always wanted to do. And there was never a venue for me to do these things before.

AD: Which is sad because it’s not as if you’re not trying to do something out there and experimental.

TR: No. I just want to tell a good story. I want to tell a good story for kids, I want to tell a good story for women and for open-minded male readers who think that there’s more to comics than overly muscled guys with thick chins and women with breasts that are so big that if they were real they would fall face forward.

AD: Now you used to draw and you may draw for yourself, but you haven’t drawn professionally in a long time. Why is that?

TR: Sometimes I say it got beaten out of me. This is a better explanation, because I wasn’t physically beaten or anything like that. It’s like Pavlov and Pavlov’s dog. We react. When you’re praised and treated well for something you do, when you get recognition, then you feel good about it and you want to do more. When you’re treated badly, when you’re slapped down when you try to do things, when nobody wants to publish you anyway, soon you don’t want to do it anymore. Drawing comics was such an uphill battle, but no one wanted me. They didn’t want me in the underground. They didn’t want me in the mainstream. For a while I had Wimmen’s Comix, which was like a safe house for me. I didn’t even do that much in Wimmen’s Comix, but it was a place where I was accepted and then it folded in ’92 and I had no place to draw.

I just couldn’t draw anymore. You react by not being able to do it. I couldn’t do it. If I wanted to do a comic, I would get so stressed and have such feelings of depression, I just couldn’t do it. But as a writer, I’m treated so well. I can do things I want. Editors are nice to me. I mean I don’t have to do the underground. I never really belonged in the underground. That’s not what I want to do. I don’t want to do graphic sex. I have nothing against it. I just don’t want to write it. And obviously I don’t want to write superheroes so I didn’t belong anywhere. Now I’ve found a place where I belong. I can do Honey West. I can do the Chicagoland Detective Agency. I can do my books on rediscovering these great women. I can do the stuff I’ve always wanted to do.

AD: Is there anything else you’re working on?

TR: I’m working on something else for Lerner’s, the ones who publish my Chicagoland series. Do you know who Lily Renee is?

AD: The name sounds familiar, but I can’t place her.

TR: I hope to do a collection of her work. Lily Renee is the most amazing woman. She was a young Jewish girl in Vienna in 1938 when the Nazis marched in. In 1939 she escaped from Vienna via kindertransport. She escaped to Leeds, England and like apparently a number of the young Jewish refugees who found families to take them in, it turned out that the woman was expecting an unpaid servant. She left in the middle of the night with her one suitcase and not even enough money for bus fare and walked into Leeds and went to an employment agency and found work, finally in Leeds Maternity Hospital. This was during the blitz when she’s ferrying babies down to the shelters during the air raids. But eventually, happy ending thank goodness, her parents had escaped to America and they found her and she came to America.

At this point she’s eighteen. They’re just getting by. They had been very well off in Vienna, but they had to leave everything. Her father found work as an elevator operator. He had been a manager of the Holland America steamship line. Lily was an artist and they see an ad in the paper that said a comicbook company is looking for cartoonists. She has never drawn a comic in her life. She goes to the newsstand, buys a couple comics, studies them, draws some sample panels, and brings them in. At this point she’s nineteen, and by the way, she was beautiful. She got the job. She wound up drawing comics for Fiction House, which was just about my favorite golden age publisher. During the war, when a lot of women were working for comics because the men were off fighting, they hired more women than any other company and the women drew these really great strong heroines. Fiction House is full of all these fabulous heroines, aviatrixes and girl reporters and girl detectives and jungle girls and spies. Lily drew a number of titles for them but the one that’s the most famous and most connected to her is Senorita Rio who was this beautiful nightclub entertainer who was also a spy. This is a graphic novel telling of her adventures ending with her finding work as a cartoonist. She’s still living in New York. This will come out in the fall. It’s currently being illustrated by Anne Timmons who I worked with before.

AD: What was her work like?

TR: She was good. Really really good. Very decorative. But also just beautiful women. Excuse me. I get really excited you probably noticed so I’m losing my voice because I’m getting so excited. I did 36 pages of Lily Renee in the Comics Journal. Issue 279 in 2006, so if you can find the back issue, there’s 36 pages of Lily Renee including a photo of the young incredibly beautiful Lily Renee. I would love to do a collection of her published comics the same way that I did the Nell Brinkley book and the Tarpe Mills book.

web address: http://suicidegirls.com/interviews/Trina+Robbins%3A++Miss+Fury/