Artist Lily Renée Phillips, a refugee from Austria after the Nazi takeover who "started a new life in New York drawing powerful, glamorous heroines and broke barriers in a male-dominated field," died August 24, the New York Times reported. She was 101. "In the 1940s, few people reading the comic book adventures of Señorita Rio, a stylish spy working for U.S. intelligence in South America, appreciated just how much the artist drawing her was putting into those vivid images. Few even knew that the artist was a woman."
"Señorita Rio got clothes that I couldn't have," Phillips told comic book artist and historian Trina Robbins in 2006. "She had a leopard coat, and she wore these high-end shoes and all of this, and had adventures and was very daring and beautiful and sexy and glamorous." In 2011, Robbins published the biography Lily Renée: Escape Artist as a graphic novel.
Phillips "earned respect in a largely male field--she was one of the few women to draw comic book covers in the 1940s--despite a harrowing early life and on-the-job harassment," the Times noted, but her work went largely unrecognized until being rediscovered in the last two decades, largely through the efforts of Robbins. "She did not stay in the comics business long, but her work has come to be recognized for its inventive variations on the traditional grid format, and for its strong women."
In 1942, her mother had seen a want ad for cartoonists placed by the publisher Fiction House and encouraged her to apply. She started out drawing backgrounds and cleaning up the work of more experienced artists. Phillips described the job to Jim Amash, a comic book artist and historian, as "erasing other people's pages, drawing the backgrounds, and being totally miserable because the men thought of nothing but sex, and they were always making innuendos, and they just stared at me, which made me very uncomfortable."
Eventually she was given feature work, which ultimately led to drawing Señorita Rio, a feature that had first been drawn by Nick Viscardi but was turned over to her. Amash said Phillips "added an elegance, charm and anatomical fluidity that eluded many of those workmanlike house artists. As her pictorial approach to human anatomy improved with experience, so did a glamorous sheen that helped refine the 'good girl' style of the time period with more natural, feminine women."
She had left Fiction House by the end of the 1940s and began drawing with her first husband, artist Eric Peters, working on Abbott and Costello comics, romances, even an Elsie the Borden Cow comic. She later moved on to other professions, including working in textile design and writing and illustrating children's books.