>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. >> Michael Cavna: Well, I just want to -- this is a thank you, again. For some of you who are new this is act two of this evening, our three hours of programming for graphic novel night. This is -- I'm Michael Cavna, Washington Post. I do the Comic Riffs blog. You can find it at WashingtonPost.com/comicriffs. I am so happy that all three of these women are here because they all three are amazing storytellers. Their work is layered. It's deep. It can be sometimes very personal. And it's just -- I've been moved by all their work, and I'm just so glad they're here and moderating this from the Library of Congress. Someone who can tell you -- you know, can guide you through the cartoon history. I could spend basically months and months with Ms. Martha Kennedy who will be moderating. And she's just brilliant. So this is part two, and please stay and -- after this for Stephan Pastis, and we'll continue the fun. Thank you. Martha, please take it away. ^M00:01:04 [ Applause ] ^M00:01:10 >> Martha Kennedy: Thank you very much, Michael. Can all of you hear me all right? >> Yes. >> Martha Kennedy: Great. Good evening and welcome. I'm so happy to see so many of you here. My name is Martha Kennedy. I am a curator of popular graphic art. I work with collections of original cartoon and illustration art in the Library of Congress' Prints and Photographs Division, which is also known as the nation's picture collection. It is a big honor for me to introduce these three really impressive women graphic novelists this evening. But first I am bound to mention to you that this event is being videotaped for broadcast on the Library's website and other media. And we will encourage you in the audience to offer comments and ask questions during the question-and-answer period. But please realize that in participating in the Q-and-A period you are consenting to the Library possibly reproducing and transmitting your remarks. Our three women graphic novelists, Miss Lasko-Gross -- and I'm doing them in order here -- Diane Noomin, and Trina Robbins have been included in a recent really excellent book called "Graphic Details, Confessional Comics" and -- well, "Jewish Women's Confessional Comics." So of course this means that each of them comes from a Jewish background and has written autobiographical or semi-autobiographical comments. But what is also interesting to me is how very distinct and individual their voices are in their work and how different their career paths have been. Each has created strong women characters that show the downsides of being female, but also the funny, crazy, and inspirational sides of being a woman. Miss Lasko-Gross was born in Boston, Massachusetts, grew up in Southern California, earned a BFA at the Pratt Institute, and now lives in New York, New York. She's published three graphic novels, including two semi-autobiographical books, "Escape from Special," in 2006. It was nominated for a YELSA, that is Young Adult Library Services Association, Great Graphic Novel Award. And "A Mess of Everything" from 2009, which is a wonderful coming-of-age graphic novel named one of the top 10 in 2009 by Booklist. She has created other comics and contributed to "Womanthology, Heroic" in 2009, "Awesome to Awesomer" in 2009 also, and many more. Her newest graphic novel "Henni" relates the adventures of a young hybrid girl cat, and she will tell us more about her in a few minutes. Diane Noomin was born in Brooklyn, grew up in Long Island, and completed a BA at the Pratt Institute. She moved to San Francisco during the Underground Comix movement, and was an original contributor to "Wimmen's Comix," a major title of that time. In 1973 she created Didi Glitz, an alter ego, and one of the most riveting women characters in comics I've encountered. Diane has chronicled Didi's striving for glamour and fulfillment in exquisitely-drawn stories that often dazzle with over-the-top drama, décor, and fashion. Didi came onstage in 1980 when a San Francisco-based theater group produced "I'd Rather Be Doing Something Else, the Didi Glitz Story." Diane has edited two outstanding comics anthologies, "Twisted Sisters, a Collection of Bad Girl Art," in 1991 and "Twisted Sister 2, Drawing the Line" in 1995. Diane's work has appeared in books, magazines, underground publications that include "Weirdo," "Young Lust," "Arcade," "The New Comics Anthology," "The Nation," and more. She received an Inkpot Award, San Diego Comic-Con in 1992 and has been nominated for Harvey and Eisner Awards. She will tell us about her recent book, "Glitz-2-Go" very shortly. Trina Robbins was also born in Brooklyn, attended Cooper Union and Queens College. She came to San Francisco also during the Underground Comix movement in which she took part as a founding editor of "Wimmen's Comix." Over Trina's 40-plus year career she has authored 60 comic books, contributed to magazines and anthologies including "Womanthology, Heroic" in 2011 and collaborated with artists such as Ann Timmons on graphic novels that include very popular Go Girl. She received an Inkpot Award in 1977, a Parents' Choice Award in 1994 for "A Century of Women Cartoonists," and a Lulu Award in 1997 for the "Great Women Superheroes." Some of Trina's many other inspiring books on women cartoonists include "From Girls to Grrlz, a History of Women's Comics from Teens to Zines," "Nell Brinkley and the New Woman in the Early 20th Century," "The Brinkley Girls," and more. She'll tell us about her recent books, the graphic novel "Lily Renee, Escape Artist" and "Pretty in Ink, North American Women Cartoonists 1896 to 2013." She will -- she is publishing two additional books in the near future, "The Complete Wimmen's Comix" and "Babes in Arms, Women in the Comics During World War II." And she will tell us about both of those as well. Please welcome these amazing graphic novelists. Thank you. ^M00:07:59 [ Applause ] ^M00:08:06 So we will start with some work by Miss Lasko-Gross. >> Miss Lasko-Gross: Okay, I think what we're looking at is this is "Madame Pimely's Guide to Blossoming into Womanhood." And it's the progression of "The Life of Woman," and this is an exercise in Socratic irony. I'm making a case for how useless women are and how little value we have. And you can see this woman going from hot chick to wife and then finally mother, and being physically diminished as well as her role. And may be some crudeness here. If there's any kids maybe [inaudible] cover. This is page two of "Madame Pimely." "Cultivating a hot appearance is your logical first step toward happiness because personal achievement is for ugly chicks, cripples, and dykes. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. Okay, and this is "Girl Power Hour," and this is from the "Legal Action Anthology." And this is really a parody of the kind of comics that I found very alienating in the '90s when I was growing a little bit out of superheroes and becoming disillusioned and disappointed by the lack of actual female characters as opposed to, you know, meat sacks parading around in spandex, which is fine. There's a time and a place for that, but that's not really my thing. So this is an idea of these interchangeable female characters. They're all really the same woman, but they have different outfits. And as you can see, putting on glasses makes her the smart one. And holding up her fists and looking tough makes her empowered. And this is really about the false narrative of empowerment and the kind of bare midriff to go into battle because that's -- those were -- comics that I'm parodying are really about the male gaze more so than actual realized female characters. ^M00:10:08 This is some panels from "Aim" which was a self-published series that I did and distributed through mostly the zine channels in the '90s and through "Riot Girl." And this is my take on superhero parody. This is useless powers, so being able to read Ronald Reagan's mind at any given time was Sonic Girl's power, and no so helpful in fighting crime. But in this era for people who are a little bit younger, making comics involved a little bit of low-level crime because the computers that you needed to put together a book and get everything into post-production were not the kind of things that your average person, or even like one person you know, would have. So what I used to do is I used to sneak into the MIT labs -- I'm actually from Boston, not California. But -- and so we'd sneak into the MIT labs. We'd either pose as students or wait until the door was almost closing, or pretend we just lost our ID and sneak in, use all their computers, get everything ready for output, and then take it to Kinko's or wherever you could to put out your books, and it was self-distributed. This is the cover of "A Mess of Everything," which was my second autobiographical graphic novel. And what I was trying to do with the cover is -- of course, this is the prettiest I draw myself, so not -- and I think it's a statement, or it's indicative of my style of drawing, that I wouldn't go cute. And also to put an ugly face on the cover is -- you're already alienating what might be a sizeable audience because people really like women to be attractive and presented in less of a tangle. And this is the tangle of Suburbia. It looks like a cage -- or it's supposed to feel like a cage and evoke that sort of a dark and twisted mood. But at the same time there's nothing really holding the character down, and I do escape from Suburbia at the end of the book. These are some panels from "A Mess of Everything," and what this is is I tried to do a physical representation of what a panic attack feels like. So it's like this world closing in on you, and this completely secret struggle going on in your own head. And I used the lines, and the shape, and the framing to give you the feeling of being inside that alternate head space of a reality that's very different from what other people see. But it's like going in -- down a rabbit hole into your own miserable world. >> Martha Kennedy: That's a really powerful point in that book, too. >> Miss Lasko-Gross: And this is about my escape to New York, leaving Suburbia and moving to New York to be an artist. And the idea is the reason I felt so at home in New York was because -- you can see there's a clown playing a banjo on the subway. And that would actually not be seen as weird. That would just be another day, and I liked living in a place where no one is startled by strange and where everything is okay. This is the cover of "Henni" which is the book I'm -- I'm currently working on the sequel to "Henni," but I would say this is on its surface an adventure story. However, it's actually an allegory about the dangers of fundamentalist thinking and -- which is sadly always relevant, not just with Charlie Hebdo, but there's always going to be people who try to shut up something that makes them uncomfortable or challenges their beliefs. I know that recently there was Duke students who refused to read "Fun Home," which was a suggested, not mandatory piece of reading. And for those of you who don't know, "Fun Home" is Alison Bechdel's wonderful graphic novel. And there happen to be gay characters, which someone decided ahead of time is just too much for them to handle, because you don't go to college to experience new things, or learn anything, or [laughter] -- so. These are four panels -- I think you can read them -- from "Henni." The bottom two panels are -- it's actually taken from a Chinese -- from a real, sadly, Chinese proverb. As the proverb goes, "Raising daughters is like tending your neighbor's garden. May God grant you a son next time." >> Trina Robbins: Wow. >> Miss Lasko-Gross: And I've used "Henni" as a vehicle to talk about things that I feel like I otherwise would have no forum to, things that really trouble me in the world. I'd say recently in Afghanistan, Farkhunda, that poor woman who was just murdered viciously by a crowd of people all on the -- all because a man had said she burned the Koran, and her word meant nothing. And no one did anything to stop it, and she was just destroyed. And so when I think about stuff like that I want to have a place to express how deeply disturbing that is to me. And comics is my medium to do that. This is the ALA poster for "Henni." And although it is kind of a chaotic and adventurous book I decided that since thematically it's knowledge and information that sets her free from the forces of superstition and religious intolerance that I would go with a quiet moment of her reading, since that's really so important to her. Oops. And I'm done. >> Martha Kennedy: Thank you very much. ^M00:15:50 [ Applause ] ^M00:15:57 And Diane, we look forward -- >> Diane Noomin: Hi. Well, this is the front and back cover of a comic that I did with Aline Kominsky-Crumb in 1976, and we just decided we wanted to do whatever we wanted. And so we [laughter] -- that's what we did. And Aline put herself on the toilet, and I gave you Didi's priority pie where fascinating, devastating love affairs is much more important than politics, and vibrators are more important than the love affairs. This is an anthology of "Twisted Sisters, a Collection of Bad Girl Art," and the different artists -- the artists that are in it are listed. I was very excited because I got a regular publisher to do it, and it got -- the book was sold in shopping malls, and I thought, "Oh, wow. Now we'll be not underground." But that didn't really happen. And I was very proud of this, but it was all work that had been printed before. And these are all self-portraits; the top one is Phoebe Gloeckner looking like Edward G. Robinson, and Dori Seda, Aline Kominsky-Crumb, Carel Moiseiwitsch, myself, Krystine Kryttre, Leslie Sternbergh, M.K. Brown, Mary Fleener, Carol Lay, Penny MoranVan Horn, Caryn Leschen, Carol Tyler, and Julie Doucet. Like I said before, a lot of this work was previously published in comics like "Wimmen's Comix," and "Weirdo," and some sort of esoteric magazines. >> Martha Kennedy: Did they create these self-portraits specifically for your -- >> Diane Noomin: Yes. >> Martha Kennedy: Great. >> Diane Noomin: Yeah. Anyway, it's out of print, but you can get it on Amazon. And if you've never seen it I recommend it. It came out in the '90s, and a lot of current women cartoonists have not a clue that it ever existed, so I would like to tell you it exists. This is a comic I did in 1990. It has a long fake autobiographical story, which is the life of Didi. And it shows her mother, and at that time I thought I was going to make her real old, and I made her 39 [laughter]. So she lived through World War II. Oops, go back. This is a comic I did for the second anthology of women cartoonists that I edited, "Twisted Sisters, Drawing the Line." And that was all original art for the book. And this is a story that I started out actually thinking I could do using Didi's sister Glenda as a substitute for myself. And just starts out kind of happy, and they're looking through, trying to choose names for a baby. And well, this is the end, so it's not -- what happens is I have many miscarriages along the way, and I decide that I need to force myself to come out -- actually Didi pulls me out from behind the page of the comic and forces me to draw in my own experience, but she's kind of like the Greek chorus all along, except basically she wants pedicures. And so she's the comic relief as well, and there's great need for the comic relief. It was a very painful story. This is the story that's in "Graphic Details," and I am very glad that it's traveled all over the world and gotten a lot of response. And I hadn't done a lot of autobiographical stuff until then. ^M00:20:15 I've used Didi to hide behind. Sometimes I used her to tell my stories, and sometimes I made up stories that were just fun and, you know, having sex in shopping malls. Anyway, this is the end, and I'm saying the irony was we never found out if we could have a baby after all the fertility -- I can't quite read it, but it's basically saying I had a lot of fertility treatments, and I just couldn't get pregnant again. And Didi is drooling and bored. And then we're in the shower, and I'm saying, "It's gone. The fetal attraction is gone. It's like a cancer was removed. Suddenly I feel lighter." Didi says, "Lighter? Don't kid yourself." This -- I'm not sure if this is the right -- let me see -- the right order. >> Martha Kennedy: Order. >> Diane Noomin: No, it is. >> Martha Kennedy: Okay. >> Diane Noomin: I think there's one missing. I did an autobiographical story for -- Fantagraphics Publishers was doing like sort of a coffee-table book that had a theme, and the theme of this one was politics. And I grew up on Long Island in the '50s, and my parents were communists. And they basically were operating a safe house for people who were trying to escape the country, running from McCarthy, didn't want to testify, didn't want to go to jail. And my sister and I knew nothing of this, you know. We were just like going to Republican Party picnics and trying to fit in. We moved into Hempstead, Long Island which was actually a community that was experiencing white flight. And my parents moved in and thought, you know, they were going to organize everybody and turn them communist, and we were going to integrate. It was not a wise move for them to just blend in. We were Jewish, and everybody else wasn't. And I think there were two Jewish kids in my entire class in public school. And I had the same kids in my class grades one through eight. And I got to sit with my hands flat on the desk. That was what I was allowed to do, but we still had to say the Lord's Prayer. And at one point there was a boy named Julius Gephardt who refused to sit next to me because I was Jewish. And there were a lot of kind of things like that that happened to my sister and her friends. And still we had no idea that we were different, beyond being different for being Jewish and all that. Well, we moved back to Brooklyn and my mother got a job with the Social Security Administration. My father worked on 47th Street. And I was busy trying to learn how to be a teenager in -- you know, overnight. And my mother was harassed by the FBI, and they went and interviewed all our neighbors. And it seems that she had signed a loyalty oath to get a job in the Social Security Administration. And she had signed a -- I guess there was some kind of petition going around when we were living in Hempstead, and she was tired of signing herself as Nessa Rosenblatt, Democrat, so she wrote Nessa Rosenblatt, Communist. And the FBI had a copy of that, and they had her fingerprints. I used the Freedom of Information Act and sent away for their files. My father's file was not available. The entire building, apparently, that stored his stuff had burned down. And my mother's -- I only got the stuff that I already knew about, the early '60s, and they had her fingerprints. And they wanted to arrest her for perjury. And she got off, but she had to quit the Social Security. The end of this story -- there's something about -- you don't know that something's going on as a kid, but you really -- underneath it you've got it. And you don't know why there's this tension. And my parents didn't really start talking about it to me until I was in my 40s. And my father said that what he and my mother did was worse than what the Rosenbergs did. And I didn't ask him what he did. I just like stood there with my mouth open thinking, "Well, he thought they were innocent, right? What could he have done?" And my parents are now dead, and there's no way I will know that. A lot of their file -- my mom's file was redacted. You know, I got it, but -- anyway, I am planning to do a graphic novel based on this. >> Martha Kennedy: Great, that's great. >> Diane Noomin: And -- called "Back to Abnormal." This is my anthology of basically everything I've done with a few things left out. And I'm very proud of it, and very happy to have it all in one place. And it's divided into chapters, like Didi Only or Behind the Fishnet Curtain, things like that. And it -- there's also pictures of this play that this San Francisco-based theater group did called "Les Nicolettes." And they were an all-women theater group. And I guess I took off a couple of years from drawing comics and just got involved in the theater part of it, and doing the backdrops, and helping write the script, and coaching the actresses in how to talk with a Brooklyn accent. Anyway, I think that's probably the last one. Oh, no. This is what I'm doing now. I've been sculpting all along, and I've gotten obsessed with doing these bar reliefs of the comic characters. This is Didi and her best friend Loretta. And for years I've been -- probably 20 years I've been sculpting, and I've been very careful about keeping the cartoon me and the sculpting separate. And then suddenly I don't -- I stopped thinking that way. It was like this year, and I thought, "Oh, I can do three-dimensional comics. I have these interchangeable balloon panels that I can do, and write things in, and have a whole cast of characters. And I'm not quite sure where it's going, but I'm really enjoying it. >> Martha Kennedy: That's great. >> Diane Noomin: Oops. >> Martha Kennedy: Thank you, very much, Diane. >> Diane Noomin: Thank you. That was fascinating. That's great. ^M00:27:25 [ Applause ] ^M00:27:30 >> Trina Robbins: Okay, this is from 1970. I started in underground newspapers. Some of you are old enough to know what underground newspapers were. For those who are not, they were the precursors to the free weeklies that every college town has and that most big cities have, except they were very political, and they were hippie. I started in a newspaper -- underground newspaper called the East Village Other in New York in 1966. I came to San Francisco in 1970. I had become a feminist. They called it Women's Lib in those days. I had become a feminist after reading a really powerful article from the Berkley Barb in the spring of 1969. There were not a whole lot of people doing underground comics yet, and they were all guys except me. And they did not like feminism. They did not like Women's Lib. They were very threatened by it. They didn't like me, and they were very threatened by me. And so basically they kind of hoped I would just go away. And -- although they used to include each other in each other's books, they never invited me into their books. So I had to do something. Then there I was in San Francisco. I discovered It Ain't Me, Babe, which was the first feminist underground newspaper in the country. Well, underground -- that's like an oxymoron. Of course it was a feminine newspaper, it was underground. So I got in there around the second issue, and I became kind of their unofficial art director and artist. Unofficial because nobody had labels. We didn't even use our last names because the last names were slave names. But this is a cover I did for It Ain't Me, Babe showing the Women's Liberation Movement as signified or symbolized by the Bride of Frankenstein, and she's really scaring all these 1970 hippie political types. And this was a back cover I did. I'm hoping that this is an intelligent audience that knows your history so you know about Angela Davis. At the time she was wanted by the police for supplying weapons for a prison break. ^M00:30:04 Does everyone here know about Angela Davis? I can't really see you, so [applause]. Yeah, good. Okay, great. So this was -- I was very romantic, and I still am. And this was like -- the notion was you put this up in your window, and there she is, you know, collar of her coat turned up against the fog, you know. I think chased by the cops. And she sees the poster, and she knocks on your door, and you offer her sanctuary. That was the idea. And people did -- women did, they put it up in their window. It was really nice. I put it up in my window. I kept hoping, but she never showed up. Okay, so because I was working with the newspaper It Ain't Me, Babe these women standing up with me, they kind of gave me the moral support to do the very first -- to produce the very first all-woman comic book, and that was "It Ain't Me, Babe Comics." It's my cover. It's kind of a great story about this, really. And it means a lot to me. I had already been talking with Don Shinker [assumed spelling] and Bob Reeder who published at Printland Comics, and they were kind of the big publisher of Underground Comix. And I told them I wanted to do a Women's Liberation comic, and they were all for it. And so I was putting it together, then I found out this new guy named Ron Turner had just formed his own comic publishing company. It was called Last Gasp Comics, and the first thing that he put out was an ecology comic, and I heard that he was specifically looking for a Women's Lib comic. So I phoned him. I said, "This is Trina Robbins. I hear you want to do a Women's Liberation comic. I have a whole comic put together." And he came right over. He came right over, and I had, you know, work by all these women that I had gathered together. And he gave me a check for the book for $1000 -- which in 1970 was an enormous amount of money -- took the book, and the next thing he did was he drove me to a pharmacy to pick up a prescription for tranquilizers [laughter]. So I owe everything to Ron Turner. And really, if you figure that women's -- all comics by women kind of evolved from It Ain't Me, Babe, we all owe a lot to Ron Turner. ^E00:32:46 ^B00:32:55 Okay, "Wimmen's Comix." Two years later Patty Moudian called nine other women to her little cozy bungalow in San Francisco to do -- to put out the next Women's Liberation comic. Ron Turner also -- same publisher -- "It Ain't Me, Babe" had done well enough to be reprinted three times, and he wanted to do something else. So we met, and we produced "Wimmen's Comix," which is still the longest-running all-woman comic anthology. It ran for -- excuse me -- ran for 20 years, from 1972 to 1992. This is the comic I did for the first issue. It's -- "Sandy Comes Out" is the first -- I didn't know it at the time -- the first comic about a lesbian ever. And it's a true story. It's about my roommate Sandy. Like I say, I didn't know that it was the first comic about a lesbian. I gave Sandy the original. She wrote it with me. I mean, she kind of approved of everything I did, so that was nice. Unfortunately, sadly, many years later after I lost touch with her I found out she had died of cancer, and I have no idea what happened to the originals. I just hope that whoever got them didn't just consign them to the trash. Okay, many years go by, and at a certain point I noticed that the guys -- the guys when they write their histories of comics never talk about women. They just want to talk about Jack Kirby and the Hulk, you know. And I noticed that if you bring up the subject to them they say, "Oh, women didn't draw comics," or, "Oh, women don't read comics." This was really common -- when I would try to sell comics in the '70s, '80s, and '90s the editors would say, "Well, this is very nice, but it's for girls, and girls don't read comics." And I knew this was not true. And I knew that women -- even though I didn't have physical proof when I started out, I knew that women had done comics. So all it took was research, and I found all these fantastic women, talented, brilliant women who had been drawing comics -- the first comic by a woman that I found was from 1896. So you know, all along there were these women drawing comics. And it's not like they -- nobody noticed them. It's not like, you know, I found maybe a couple of women and they drew a comic. These women were famous. These women were nationally famous. These women were collected. These women made headlines in the newspapers. There were articles about them. But my big discovery when researching these women is that if you're not written about you're forgotten. So these women were forgotten. But they're not forgotten anymore, because this is what I do. I write about women cartoonists. I'm a historian as well as a writer of graphic novels. Oh, is that it [applause]? No, no, no. There's more. No, no, no, no, no. Don't -- >> Martha Kennedy: There's more. >> Trina Robbins: Don't applaud yet [laughter]. I said writer of graphic novels, and voila. This one got a couple of very nice awards, the Sydney Taylor Jewish Library Award, and another one that I forget what it was, but two very nice awards. You didn't mention all of my awards, by the way. >> Martha Kennedy: I couldn't. >> Trina Robbins: No. >> Martha Kennedy: I couldn't -- if I tried to do that for all of you none of you would have gotten to talk. >> Trina Robbins: Okay, I forgive you, Martha. Anyway, this one did get a lot of nice awards. And it's the story -- it's a graphic novel that I wrote and that another woman drew, Ann Timmons, who I've worked with a lot. We work together a lot. It's the story of a real woman who was a Jewish teenager in Vienna in 1938 when the Nazis marched in, and how she escaped to England, and lived there during the Blitz, and eventually escaped to America where her parents had gone first, not before losing touch with each other completely and not knowing if the other is alive or dead. And when she got to America they were -- they had been very well-off in Vienna, but they were refugees living hand to mouth. But she was an artist, and her mother saw an ad in the paper that a comic book company was looking for artists. And she applied and got the job. And she became a cartoonist, a Golden Age woman cartoonist. And the exquisite, exquisite irony or the justice is that during the war she was drawing these beautiful women fighting the Nazis. So this woman who had been oppressed by the Nazis got to beat them. She got to fight them on paper. Lily is still with us. She's 94. She is -- she's an elegant, intelligent, gracious woman. Okay, this is my collection -- I do a lot of collections. I edit collections because I want these women -- I want people to know how good they were. Miss Fury was drawn by Tarpe Mills during the -- mostly during the '40s. I think from '41 to maybe 1950. Great character. The first -- really the first costumed action heroine. This is not typical of her strip. This is a pinup that she did for the troops when they would send her fan letters. She had this printed up and would send them to the soldiers. But the strip was pretty sexy. I mean, it's very much like film noir, really. It reads like film noir. And if you love those movies, those black-and-white movies from the '40s you would love Miss Fury. That's the second edition. That's -- there's two. It's from -- first one's from '41 to '44; the other's from '44 to '50. Ah, now these are books that are coming out this fall, "Babes in Arms." These are all books that I've collected and edited. "Babes in Arms is a -- specifically collects the work of four women cartoonists -- Golden Age women cartoonists, including Lily Renee, who during the war drew beautiful, courageous women who fought the Nazis, and the fascists, and the Axis, and didn't need guys to rescue them. And you know, great stories because these women were -- it isn't just that they were women; it's that they were very talented and that their comics really are fun. And finally, "The Complete Wimmen's Comix," and here's cards. Anybody who wants a card can have a card because I brought it just for this. It's a collection of the entire run of "Wimmen's Comix" and the one-shot "It Ain't Me, Babe" as facsimile edition which means that it looks exactly like the comics. It's a two-volume boxed set coming out this fall. Please take cards. And I think that's it. Is that it? >> Martha Kennedy: I think so. Thank you, Trina. ^M00:40:18 [ Applause ] ^M00:40:28 Do we have time for a few questions? >> Trina Robbins: By the way, we can't see you. You should know that. >> Diane Noomin: I thought you said 10. >> Trina Robbins: Oh, we need 10 minutes. We need -- come on, those four guys ran over a half hour. We should have at least 10 minutes [laughter]. ^M00:40:46 [ Applause ] ^M00:40:49 >> Martha Kennedy: All right, please, whoever would like to ask a question, if you'd come up to the mic that would be great. Thank you. Go ahead. >> Hi, what advice would you have for someone that's looking to -- a woman who's looking to get into graphic novels today? Oh, it's on now. >> Trina Robbins: Isn't that funny? You know, earlier while we were signing our books there were like six whole people there to get their books signed because nobody knew where we were. Somebody asked -- they didn't just ask that very question, but for their blog they said, "What is the question that most people ask you?" And that's the question that most people ask me. And really I have a feeling we'll all say the same thing. Draw your comics, self-publish them, get them out there where people can see them. Go to one of -- like right here in Baltimore you have SPX which is the Small Press Expo. Take it to one of those places where you have people like you, not to where Marvel, and DC, and Spider-Man, you know, but where you have small press. And share your comics. Trade your comics. Show them to people. Show them to small press publishers. Get them out there, and then do more. >> Miss Lasko-Gross: I would just add to that -- I agree with what Trina said, for Small Press Expo, that was where I got my -- the start of my first book deal because I was bringing on -- I had done anthology work and self-published work for years. And I brought around the start of "Escape from Special," the graphic novel, and I took it. Again, important, only take it to publishers who do things that are kind of your wheelhouse. Like don't take it to, you know, a gun-toting babes -- unless you do gun-toting babes don't take it to a gun-toting-babes type of a publisher. And then they'll want to see a lot of the work most likely, not just a few pages and be like, "Oh, here's some character sketches, and this is a map of the world they live in." Like nobody needs that. Do -- they'll want to see a sizeable amount of the book, but do the work, bring the work, and don't get discouraged if like the first 50 people you show it to don't care at all. >> Martha Kennedy: Diane, would you like to say a word about teaching, or classes, or anything? Because you're going to be teaching a class. Do you think that would be beneficial also? >> Diane Noomin: Well, I'm teaching a class in personal comics at School of Visual Arts starting in September -- actually, starting next week. And I haven't really taught before. I've given talks -- lots of slide talks and things like that, but the -- I was very lucky. The guy who hired me wanted -- just said, "Choose the thing that you'd like to teach the most." And I realized that was what I cared about. I wanted the kids to learn emotional drawing. I wanted them to connect with -- you know, to learn the difference between how boring it is to watch -- draw somebody brushing their teeth, or how exciting it can be to look at their emotions in their face in the mirror and things like that, so. >> Martha Kennedy: Great, thanks. There's -- we have another. >> So the cover with the woman who was wife of Frankenstein and scaring all of the -- all the men with her feminism, that's something that I sort of encounter today as a young feminist. So I was wondering, you know, what other sort of issues were you tackling with comics that you still think are relevant today, or what new issues are you seeing arise being tackled in comics? >> Trina Robbins: Well, really I know that -- you know, a lot of people say that the comic book industry is still male-dominated, and I guess it is if you include mainstream comics and the superheroes, the muscular guys and the gun-toting babes. But if you look at graphic novels you'll see that women really -- you know, if anything -- if -- and I think it's more than 50% female at this point, graphic novels. But I know that there's still a lot of sexism, but you know, I want to say, babe, you ain't seen nothing. You know, you cannot imagine what it used to be like. And what is so nice now, and that's -- a big help is the Internet is that there's so many really great websites now, women's websites, websites for women who draw comics, websites by women who draw comics, or just from women who are fans. And when something really horrible and sexist comes up they speak out. They speak out, and everyone can read what they're saying. And they're not voices crying in the wilderness anymore, you know. They're a nice solid voice. And when something awful like that comes -- Gamergate is a good example. You know, everybody knows about Gamergate. They speak out about it, and they deal with it. And their -- women's voice is a strong voice these days in comics. >> Diane Noomin: I'd like to say that I -- my dream is that someday we'll lose the adjective. >> Martha Kennedy: Yeah. >> Diane Noomin: We'll all be cartoonists. ^M00:46:06 [ Applause ] ^M00:46:13 >> Hi. So you mentioned earlier that when you were like making your anthology that people told you, "Oh, women don't -- not only don't write comics, they also don't read them." And you said that you knew that wasn't true. So a lot of female readers do get backlash from other male readers and publishing houses like when they go to buy these books or these works. So how can we not only be more inclusive of women cartoonists but also women fans? >> Trina Robbins: I think that, again, I have to say -- you know, I feel like some kind of a war veteran, you know, the way I keep saying things were much worse, and you have no idea. I mean, women are so included these days. Yes, there are still places they're not included, and one of the places is still really mainstream comics, although Marvel comics has gotten much more aware of the female audience, and DC is very slowly getting aware. They're a little bit behind Marvel. But I think that there are so many publisher, book publishers -- book publishers know that girls read comics. And -- >> Martha Kennedy: They do. >> Miss Lasko-Gross: They do. >> Trina Robbins: -- book publishers want to publish graphic novels with strong girl characters. I know this. Librarians -- I know this because they've told me -- they want to carry in their libraries graphic novels with strong girl characters. >> Miss Lasko-Gross: Yeah, I think actually the perception may have -- not to say that people don't experience what they experience, but I think the perception has lagged behind reality because you look at -- the best-selling graphic novelist right now is a woman. And a lot of the best graphic novels coming out are by women, and not women hiding behind, you know, initials to write so that, you know, a sexist male won't buy her book, but out-front female authors. >> Martha Kennedy: Yes. >> Diane Noomin: Alison Bechdel won a Tony -- >> Miss Lasko-Gross: Yeah. >> Diane Noomin: -- for her play. >> Miss Lasko-Gross: And Raina Telgemeier is the best-selling graphic novelist. >> Martha Kennedy: At this moment, and has been -- you know, it's gone on for two weeks. >> Miss Lasko-Gross: She's dominated the best-seller list for years. >> Martha Kennedy: Years, actually. Yeah, yeah. >> Diane Noomin: Phoebe Gloeckner has a movie out now based on her graphic novel "The Diary of a Teenage Girl." And it's playing here; I saw it. >> Martha Kennedy: I don't think we have time for another question. I'm sorry. >> Trina Robbins: Oh, come on. One more [laughter]. >> Diane Noomin: Really, you know, girls are too obedient. >> Martha Kennedy: You're right, you're right. Okay. >> I at first was going to ask was their some key event in your life that cause you to have the courage to do what you're doing? But I'll skip the question and answer it for yourself -- for myself. I had several -- in the past three years I had several major life events, losing my mother, my husband died. I was removed -- I left a job that I didn't belong in, and all of a sudden I found myself wondering what was I going to do? And all my life I had drawn -- I really didn't understand about comics and graphic arts. And something told me I needed to rescue myself from what I had been denying myself all life long. So thank you. >> Martha Kennedy: Thank you. >> Trina Robbins: Thank you very, very much. ^M00:49:55 [ Applause ] ^M00:50:02 >> Martha Kennedy: And thank the three of you. You are brilliant and wonderful. Thanks so much. >> Trina Robbins: Thank you [applause]. >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov. ^E00:50:17