In a new collection of work by Nell Brinkley from Fantagraphics, beautiful girls travel the world in fabulous dresses, rescue and then marry their men, and generally have a lot of gorgeous fun. Between 1913 and 1940, Nell Brinkley’s characters, a.k.a. the Brinkley Girls, were everything your average American girl wanted to be. Brinkley zestily described this every-girl as, “Frank and strong, and happy and good, just a girl—an American girl such as many of you know—a strange young combination of peacock and saint, little girl and sapient woman, athlete and romantic baby, changing as the winds—and as unchanging!"
The Brinkley Girls reliably graced the pages of the Hearst syndicate papers throughout the artist's career, but they also spawned hair-curling products and songs; made appearances in the Ziegfield Follies, where chorus girls staged living tableaux of Brinkley drawings that everyone in the audience could identify; and filled the scrapbooks of adoring fans. Despite her superstar status, Nell Brinkley—artist, cartoonist, writer, illustrator, commentator, and pop culture feminist—has largely fallen out of the history books. Trina Robbins, herself a renaissance woman—cartoonist, anthologist, curator, writer, and, as she puts it on her web site, "herstorian"—has put Nell Brinkley back where she belongs in the lineage of cartooning and illustrating, with a luscious coffee-table book that shows off the Brinkley Girls to their best advantage.
Brinkley's serial stories, with their tales of adventurous American girls roaming the earth in pursuit of justice and eternal love, appeared each week with a full-color page, and they stand out as the most fascinating work here. In "Golden Eyes and her Hero, Bill", "Kathleen and the Great Secret", and "Betty and Billy and their Love Through the Ages," Brinkley's romantic heroines are always the agents of their own destinies, forever making life happen, as when we see Kathleen, in a filmy art deco dress that clings and flows like a living thing, "stepping on the throttle of her roadster, sending it headlong through the night."
The girls were political, too, and not content to leave the fighting to their boyfriends during the War. Golden Eyes’ story starts off at home, where she remains after seeing her “soldier-lover” Billy off to Europe. When her dog, Uncle Sam, finds a Nazi in the bushes, Golden Eyes realizes that knitting socks for the soldiers isn't enough, and decides to “do her bit” by heading off to France with Uncle Sam. Once there, Golden Eyes wears fetching Red Cross uniforms, tricks her German kidnapper Mata Hari-style, and finally drags Bill to safety when he's injured in a raid. Marriage, of course, follows.
Robbins explains that the Brinkley Girls came directly on the heels of the Gibson Girls, drawn by Charles Dana Gibson in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. “The Gibson Girls are pretty,” says Robbins. “But they’re very still and the men move around them. They’re the pretty girls who attract the men.” When the Brinkley Girls supplanted them, they did so with energy and action. “Nell’s girls jump, and run, and dance, and surf, and laugh with their mouths open. They’re really alive,” says Robbins.
Robbins first came across Brinkley’s work in 1970, when she was a frequent visitor to Bill Blackbeard’s San Francisco Academy of Comic Art. Blackbeard, whose two-story house was filled with comics, allowed people to do research in his collection. “I was lucky because Bill liked me,” says Robbins. “And he had a couple of doubles of Nell Brinkley pages, which he gave to me because he knew I’d enjoy them. I knew nothing about her but I was really struck by the beauty of the pages.”
When Robbins put together her first history of women in comics in 1985, she included work by Brinkley, but it wasn’t until the mid-nineties that she got to see a larger quantity of Brinkley’s work. Through a series of connections, she received an email from a woman who was looking for someone “who knew about Nell Brinkley” to give her mother’s collection to. “The collection turned out to be huge and marvelously put together,” says Robbins. “There were large scrapbooks with plastic sleeves, and everything was in excellent condition. It was more Nell Brinkley than I’d ever seen.” Robbins’ real research into Brinkley’s life and work began then. She published a biography, Nell Brinkley and the New Woman in the Early 20th Century, in 2001 with McFarland & Company, and she sees The Brinkley Girls as a companion piece to that earlier book.
Considering the beauty of Brinkley's art and its fame during her life, it's more than a little surprising, that they she isn't better known today. "It's just fascinating to me that you can open your dictionary and go to G and find Gibson Girls but you can't find Brinkley Girls under B," says Robbins. "Why did he survive and why did she have to be reclaimed? The only answer I can think of is, gee whiz, he was a man and she was a woman and the men wrote the histories and they just didn't think that what women did was worthwhile."
Robbins dedicated the book to three female cartoonists, Hilda Terry, Marty Links, and Dale Messick, all of whom collected Brinkley Girls drawings in their youth. Messick, whose Brenda Starr was the first syndicated comic by a woman cartoonist, was perhaps the most indebted to Brinkley for the style and glamour of her characters. Having reclaimed and re-placed Nell Brinkley in the canon of illustrators and cartoonists, Trina Robbins says, "I really feel I've done her justice." Those in San Francisco this summer can see even more of Brinkley's work in an exhibit at the Cartoon Art Museum that runs through August 23rd.
