Trina Robbins, How I Met Octobriana

I first met Octobriana the way many other people met her: in the 1971 Harper and Row book, Octobriana and the Russian Underground. As an underground cartoonist, I was fascinated to think that there might be an underground comics scene in Russia too, and as a woman who was drawing political heroines in my comics (which most of the guys were not doing), it was great to see another political heroine in underground comics from another part of the world. At the time, not knowing any better, I believed everything in the book.
Fast forward 13 years to 1984, a significant year. I was a guest at the comics convention in Lucca, Italy, and discovered that a group of animators from the Soviet Union were also staying in my hotel. Here was my chance to find out more about Octobriana! But when I asked them about her, they told me that she was a hoax, and had actually been drawn by a San Francisco woman cartoonist! That was pretty strange, since I was a San Francisco woman cartoonist, and knew every woman drawing comix in my city. (I wonder: had someone started the rumor that I created Octobriana? I’ll never know!) I began to doubt the truth of Petr Sadecký’s book. My boyfriend found a photo for me, in James Warren’s 1970s comic magazine, Vampirella. Credited to Petr Sadecký, it’s a portrait of Octobriana, except that instead of a Russian star, she has a bat on her forehead. I learned that punk star Billy Idol had her tattooed on his arm, I spotted her as a decal on a bike in London. Because she’s Public Domain — the only contemporary comic heroine not copyrighted — Brian Talbot put her into his Luther Arkwright comics. Others followed suit — she belongs to the world. Bits and pieces, a puzzle not quite finished. Someday I hope to learn the truth about Octobriana.

01.03.2002