I made a free mini-zine for the Santa Rosa Zine Fest this past weekend at the Northwest branch in Santa Rosa, California. This post basically includes all the contents of the zine for you. I gave them away when anyone asked about swaps, or if we just visited, or I bought a zine from them. The selection of comic panels are what I used for interior pages, and if you unfolded the whole thing, you’d see the full-color Sunday strip, like a mini poster. I had a blast seeing everyone, enjoying a little sunshine, and swapping with everyone, too.
A few favorite panels from F. Opper’s Maud the Mirthful Mule, from 1907. Frederick Burr Opper created an entire Opper-verse on newspaper comics pages in the early 20th Century. Different strips with characters as popular then as any pop culture favorite today, like Happy Hooligan, Alphonse and Gaston, Maud, and more. The dynamic drawing found in his comic strips inspires artists today.
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See below for the full strip for this panel.
About the Author: Benjamin L. Clark writes and works as a museum curator.
Trina Robbins speaking at the 2023 WonderCon in Anaheim, California. Photo by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia
I did not know Trina Robbins very well, but she has impacted my thinking and my work. She was the kind of person that, after hearing her stories and reading her work, I have a deep appreciation for what she accomplished, and I wish I could have gotten to know her more and talked with her about something we share — a passion for the work of comics history.
I had the pleasure of meeting her a couple of times in the past few years. The first time I met Trina was when I joined her on a panel at FanExpo in San Francisco in November 2022. I remember it as the Sunday after Thanksgiving, and our panel topic was the centennial of the birth of Peanuts cartoonist Charles M. Schulz. Cartoonist and maze master Joe Wos, who organized the panel, invited Lex Fajardo, the editorial director for Schulz Creative Associates, and me (as curator of the Schulz Museum) to join him and Trina in a wide-ranging discussion of Schulz and his impact on cartooning. Trina was the only one of us to have really known Charles Schulz, bringing not only her stories of meeting Sparky (as he was known to those who knew him) but also her perspective as a Bay Area cartoonist and younger contemporary to him. It was fascinating and, of course, a lot of fun. Few people can tell the story about getting Charles Schulz to contribute a piece to a collection of cartoonists’ nude portraits.
Trina was in high demand that weekend, rushing from panel to table, signings, and other events that day. She joined us a few minutes late and had to leave the panel early for her next commitment, so I didn’t really get a chance to visit with her in that first meeting, though I got to basically sit next to her and hear her tell stories for an hour or so.
I’m so glad I remembered to bring my tape recorder with me, so I at least got audio of the panel—most of it, at least. The brand-new batteries I installed died, and I had to switch to my phone, but something went wrong—don’t try to talk on a panel and record yourself simultaneously if you can help it. At least I got a good chunk of our talk, which is now in the Schulz Museum’s archives.
The next time I saw her was at San Diego Comic-Con in July 2023, when we both had books nominated for an Eisner Award in the same category: Best Comics-Related Book. Attending the Eisner Awards is another story, but there’s a little time as people arrive and get settled in to say a few hellos. I saw her and said hello, and wished her good luck. I’m not confident she remembered me or even knew I was one of the other authors in her category, but she was very gracious. I was so overwhelmed just being in the room, so I don’t remember any other details, especially after Nat Gertler and I were announced as winning the category.
Though she was not awarded an Eisner that night (I thought she would win), her book about Gladys Parker is fabulous. Just as all of her historical work is not only well done but groundbreaking and essential reading. Comics is a rich field for study and enjoyment, enriching our lives as readers, thinkers, artists, and whole people. Trina brought that home, especially preserving, sharing, valuing, promoting, and shouting about women in comics from the rooftops.
After meeting Trina, hearing about her work, and finding her books, I looked at my own writing, my own thinking, and my own historical work and asked myself, “Where are the women?” In one project in particular that I’ve been slowly working on for a couple of years, a collection of short historical essays about the working methods of cartoonists, there were very few women initially. Now, it’s better, but there’s always room to improve. Thank you, Trina, for your work, for being wholly you.
“We set our stupidities in dignity when we set them in print.” —Montaigne, 1592
I like Michel de Montaigne — I’ve written about him before. For a guy whose life is pretty drastically different from mine, he made observations from his life that I find eerily applicable to my own. And I’m not the only one. HisEssays have been in print more or less since they were first published in 1580.
Writer-who-draws (and thinker) Austin Kleon shared the quote I copied above (and into my journal) the other day, and I didn’t understand it right away. What does Montaigne mean? The more I think about it, the more it confuses me.
Portrait of Michel de Montaigne, 1570s
Does Montaigne mean that setting our stupidities in print improves them? My stupidities remain pretty stupid no matter what I do with them. Setting them in print sure doesn’t dignify them.
Or does it change the nature of stupidity at all? Is Montaigne saying that printing them merely dignifies them and does not correct them? In fact, whatever dignity is gained, the stupidity is all the worse now that it’s in print? Folly upon folly.
I don’t know.
About the Author: Benjamin L. Clark writes and works as a museum curator.
