Lily Renée, Escape Artist by Margaret Oh

She found work as an artist’s model and as an artist, drawing pictures for catalogs, before being hired to work on comics.

Life wasn’t easy there either, and she went on to work as a nurse, was suspected of being a spy and then finally moved to New York City, where she finally reunited with her parents. Life gets gradually tougher for her Jewish family, and, after Kristallnacht, which the teenaged Renée heard from her bedroom, thinking it all a bad dream, she relocates to England, under an agreement in which Germany allowed Jewish children under 17 to move to England if they had a sponsor. The story begins in Vienna in 1938, and tells of the thrilling (from our historical remove, of course) danger of the time, as young Lily’s idyllic life is interrupted by the arrival of the Nazi regime. Only seven pages are devoted to that time though, and the story ends with a Renée getting the Señorita Rio assignment, and then a one-page summary of the rest of her life, with a drawing of her as a grandmother and the highlighting of a Nazi-fighting hero as a sort of wish-fulfillment for the artist who was so horribly persecuted by the Nazis herself. The Golden Age comics industry is a pretty fascinating subject for a lot of reasons, from its big city, Great Depression-to-WWII setting to the colorful, often crooked characters that ran it to the the amazing men and women who worked in it, often reluctantly, or until something better came about, eventually falling into a new, all-American medium and founding a deep well of fantasy that American pop culture goes to with greater and greater frequency for its imagery and entertainment.Īnd Renee was one of the first ladies in it? The sub-title notes her entry into the field as the climax of her story, the end of her story as it’s being told here. John, where she worked on Abbott and Costello and romance comics. Renée,” many readers at the time didn’t even realize she was a woman. She drew comics for Fiction House in the 1940s, her most famous strip she worked on being Señorita Rio, a Brazilian nightclub singer who fought Nazi and retired from the industry in 1949. You’ll be forgiven if you don’t know who Renée is. But it was the second type of disappointment I felt most strongly while making my way through the book-which actually got to be a bit of a struggle after a while-and that type of disappointment only increased as I kept reading.Īs this very comic explains, Lily Renée was a remarkable woman who lead a fascinating life, one worthy of being told in a great example of the medium she was one of the first women to work in. I felt a bit of the first type of disappointment, as this was written by Trina Robbins, a talented cartoonist and skilled and incisive writer of and about comic.

Lily Renée, Escape Artist by Margaret Oh