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Trina Robbins




Title Creator Publisher Series Price
Someday Funnies Jack Kirby, Will Eisner, C.C. Beck, Wallace Wood and more ... Abrams ComicArts $45.00
($55.00 list)
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Read more and comment... 		edited by Michel Choquette  Well, here's something you don't see everyday:  a comics anthology that has been completed but unable to find a publisher for nearly forty years, finally being published!  As readers of The Comics Journal #299 – the cover feature of which was an in-depth article on the history of this volume – already know, this volume had reached a legendary/mythical status.  Robert Greenfield's introduction squarely situates the work contained in this volume as a document of "The Sixties," While comics critic/historian Jeet Heer's foreword provides ample context and background for the comics work the book contains as well as a chronology of its epic 40-year journey from inception to publication.  We've barely dipped out toes in this majorly oversize – 11" x 17" – 216 page, full color hardcover volume containing 120 comic strips by 169 creators, so we're not going to say much about the contents at this time, but we will provide you with some of the contributors, and let you do the math:  Jack Kirby, Will Eisner, C.C. Beck, Wallace Wood, Harvey Kurtzman, Arnold Roth, Don Martin, Gahan Wilson, Bobby London, Trina Robbins, Vaughn Bodé, Steve Englehart, Archie Goodwin, Denny O'Neil, Ralph Reese, Alan Weiss, Herb Trimpe, Frank Zappa, Harlan Ellison, William S. Burroughs, Roy Thomas, Barry Smith (before he added Windsor) Guido Crepax, Ralph Steadman, Leo & Diane Dillon, Walter & Louise Simonson, Justin Green, Bill Griffith, Red Grooms, Russ Heath, Jay Kinney, Denis Kitchen, (a very young) Art Spiegelman, (also very young) Stan Mack, Ever Meulen,  Joost Swarte, Tom Wolfe,  Federico Fellini, and many, many more!  Also included is a "92-drawing take on Choquette's travels by Michael Fog" that parallels and brackets the comics the volumes contains.  Surprisingly (at least to us), the intent to create an interweaving bracketing tale was a component of the original volume's conception, and blank spaces were deliberately left in many of the pages at Choquette's instruction. 
Miss Fury Tarpe Mills, Trina Robbins IDW Publishing Library of American Comics $44.44
($49.99 list)
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Read more and comment... 		Yes, it's one classic after another here at The Copacetic Comics Company!  Miss Fury – the Golden Age comics work that ran in full color in the Sunday comics pages for 351 consecutive weeks from 1942 through 1949, and was also collected in comic book form by Timely Comics (the precursor company to Marvel), and which provided (and continues to provide!) a uniquely female perspective to the heroic fantasy genre that simultaneously provided (ditto!) a solid proto-feminist critique of the genre's conventions, all the while delivering finely crafted, solid entertainment –  gets the mega-deluxe Library of American Comics treatment in this massive, oversize 232 page hardcover volume edited and introduced by Trina Robbins.  At least in part due to the fact that the earliest Miss Fury strips have previously been collected – albeit in black & white – by Pure Imagination in their now-out-of-print volume (note to Greg Theakston:  now would be a good time to reprint it!) which helped to get the Miss Fury revival rolling, the powers that be (i.e., Dean Mullaney) have decided to present the "never before reprinted" strips that comprise roughly the second half of the Miss Fury run: strips #159 - #351 which originally ran from April 1944 through August 1949.  As Mullaney's brief preface makes clear, it was no mean feat to assemble this complete, high quality, full color run.  Get ready to be wowed!
A Drunken Dream and Other Stores Moto Hagio, Trina Robbins, Matt Thorn Fantagraphics $22.22
($24.99 list)
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Read more and comment... 		Founding mother of shojo manga, Moto Hagio finally gets an English language collection!  This hardcover volume contains ten tales spanning three decades, and contains some of her very best work, including the novella, "Iguana Girl," which Trina Robbins, in her tubthumping forward, calls a "brilliant tour de force."  A Drunken Dream also includes an introductory essay by shojo evangelist Matt Thorn on "The Magnificent Forty-Niners," the generation of female manga artists who revolutionized girls comics in the 1970s, as well as a quite substantial interview with Hagio, also conducted by Thorn.  Anyone interested in the history of shojo manga pretty much has no choice but to check this one out, and we think that anyone looking for emotionally powerful yet delicately nuanced comics will find their time spent here rewarded.  Fantagraphics has made this easy, by providing this massive 31-page preview.   Be sure to take advantage of this, we're confident that you'll find it worth your while.
The Brinkley Girls Trina Robbins, Nell Brinkley Fantagraphics $25.00
($29.95 list)
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Read more and comment... 		  •  edited by Trina Robbins  •  While they might seem to be located on the other end of the spectrum of femininity from the aforementioned Tank Girl, this is simply a lack of historical perspective. "The Brinkley Girls"  are actually the daring cartoon precursors to today's freaky females.  In fact, much of the work contained in this volume is a formally daring combination of prose and illustration, with the illustrations admittedly quite dominant.  As Brinkley's work evolved, some of it took on more of a sequential, comics-oriented approach, but it remained unique both its style and flavor throughout is nearly thirty year run. The Brinkley Girls were the creation of one Nell Brinkley, a fabulously talented artist – and a glamour girl in her own right – who plied her trade in the rough and tumble masculine world of Hearst Publications, specifically The American Weekly, during the years 1913 through 1940.  Editor Robbins has done an equally fabulous job of assembling the material for this fine volume (which, by the way, is an elegantly proportioned 10" x 13" hardcover volume, printed in full color – from high resolultion scans of original materials – throughout its 136 pages), and her fine introductory essay puts it all in context.  The artwork here simply has to be seen to be believed. Brinkley, rather than create a continuity based on a single character or set of characters, after the fashion of practically all other cartoonists, instead created an series of discrete self-contained continuity adventures featuring non-recurring characters that ran a set number weeks and then ended, to be followed by a new adventure.  What connected them all, is that, figuratively speaking, they all "starred" a set of Brinkley's gorgeous – and gorgeously rendered – golden girls,and this is what ensured their lasting fame.  Brinkley's work influenced a host of classic newspaper cartoonists, most notably Dale Messick, the creator of Brenda Starr, and its inffluence continues to be felt, both directly and indirectly, today:  The work of Dame D'Arcey will appear in a whole new light after you've spent some time with this volume.  Opening this book will open your eyes to an era and an artist.