If you passed Trina Robbins on the street, chances are you wouldn’t suspect she was the foremost pop historian of women in comics. Nor would you peg her as the author of Go Girl!, an offbeat superhero comic book aimed at adolescent girls. Today most comic books featuring female protagonists are written by men and depend heavily on the fetishized sex and violence that give television hits like Xena and Buffy a certain cross-gender appeal. But Robbins–whose last major mainstream effort was a Wonder Woman comic about domestic violence–is fighting to prove the commercial viability of comic books that neither burlesque nor hyper-sexualize their female characters. Continue reading “Pretty Persuasion: Going for the Girl Market”