Comics are full of superheroes, extraordinary beings gifted with amazing powers who can save the world from all sorts of menaces, from assorted criminals and villains to aliens and monsters. Yet, at times, life unexpectedly turns us into unlikely heroes and heroines as it happened to comic book artist Lily Renée.
Born in 1921, in Vienna, Austria, Lily Renée Phillips (née Willheim) came from a well-off Viennese Jewish family. As a child she was surrounded by art and culture from an early age: her parents would take her to ballet and opera performances and she would often visit art museums, drawing as a hobby.
Her life dramatically changed, though, in 1938, when the Nazi army invaded Austria. When Germany and Austria formed a union, Willheim's family, like all the other Jews living in the country, found themselves in great danger. Her parents managed to put her on the Kindertransport and, at 14, Willheim left behind her parents in Nazi-occupied Austria, arriving in Leeds, England.
Things were hard as the young girl had to work as a servant, nanny, caretaker and candy striper (taking newborn babies down the shelter during the Blitz). When she was 16, she received a letter from her parents explaining they had emigrated to America and sending for her. Accused of being a spy and put on the list of "enemy aliens," which meant she was forbidden to leave England, she eventually managed to board a ship. She joined her parents in New York, living in one room under the roof in a building on 72nd Street on the West Side.
Lily started doing all sorts of odd jobs, from painting Tyrolean designs on wooden boxes to drawing catalogs for Woolworth's for 50 cents an hour and posing as a model for fashion illustrator Jane Turner. In the meantime, she also took night classes at the Art Students League and the School of Visual Arts.
In 1942 her mother spotted an ad in the paper for comic artists: Fiction House was looking for women to replace its male artists drafted into World War II. Unsure as she didn't know anything about comics, young Lily applied and was hired on a trial basis.
She first started with basic and dull jobs like erasing mistakes and notes in pencil on other illustrators' drawings, then became a penciler and inker, working alongside other female comic illustrators and writers including Nina Albright and Fran Hopper. Her first pencilling job was for the comic book "Jane Martin", about a clever and beautiful female pilot (she was actually first a nurse, then a pilot and a spy) in the male-dominated aviation industry.
Then she got a full strip, "The Werewolf Hunter", and became the illustrator of the series. The strip, about a professor and monster hunter, featured a lot of animals and costuming and allowed Lily Renée to integrate in it her passion for Viennese art and German fairy tales.
Other work included the science-fiction feature "The Lost World", but her big break came in 1944 when she took over "Señorita Rio", created by artist Nick Viscardi (later Nick Cardy) in 1942.
Renée soon became associated with the character, a glamorous and athletic actress called Rita Farrar who becomes a spy for the US government. The protagonist of the story, who fights the Nazis in Central and South America to revenge the death of her boyfriend, suited Renée, and her life as a Jewish war refugee in England and probably informed in some way this character. Renée couldn’t beat the Nazis in Austria, but, through Señorita Rio, she fought them on the page, using the pencil as a weapon that was mightier than a sword.
Renée then worked with her artist husband Eric Peters at St. John Publications, penciling and inking Abbott & Costello Comics, while she also drew romance stories in issues of St. John's Teen-Age Diary Secrets and Teen-Age Romances.
While working as a comic book artist she often signed herself L. Renée using her first and middle names as a pen name, so people thought she was a man, but Lily is actually one of the earliest women in the comic-book industry.
Renée also wrote two children's books, "Red is the Heart" and "Magic Next Door", illustrated the book "Battle of the Bees" by Carl Ewald and a version of Aesop's Fables and wrote five plays.
There is a component of fashion in Lily Renée's comics: at times Señorita Rio donned clothes inspired by Mexican and Latin-American cultures; in other cases she was transformed into a femme fatale with a high fashion wardrobe. In both cases she looked fierce and indomitable (Señorita Rio looked simply stunning in red...) and was portrayed in sets that were at times reminiscent of German expressionist films.
"Señorita Rio was a fantasy for me. She got clothes that I couldn't have, she had a leopard coat and she wore high-end shoes and had grand adventures and was very daring and beautiful and glamorous," Lily Renée states about this heroine at the end of "Lily Renée, Escape Artist: From Holocaust Survivor to Comic Book Pioneer" (Graphic Universe, 2011), a graphic novel about her life
There is also a component of fashion in Lily Renée's life as she designed textiles for Lanz of California, and jewelry for Willie Woo, also known as "the enfant terrible of the costume jewelry world". Her life is worthy of a film and let's hope that at some point there will be one about her.
In the meantime, you can read the graphic novel about her, "Lily Renée, Escape Artist: From Holocaust Survivor to Comic Book Pioneer" (Graphic Universe, 2011). The story was written by comic artist and historian Trina Robbins, and illustrated by Anne Timmons and Mo Oh. It chronicles Phillips' escape from the Nazis and her early years at Fiction House and has some fashion references when we see Lily posing for Jane Turner in elegant outfits, but then going home in her outmoded dress as she couldn't afford anything else; or when she gets a bonus at the publishing house and can finally buy some new clothes for her and for her mother.
Today it is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and we commemorate the killing of six million Jews and millions of others by the Nazi regime and its collaborators, so this is a perfect volume to read and ponder about this human tragedy and also learn more about the life of an extraordinary woman (please note, there is a mistake in the history section at the end of the book - the name of the boat sunk by the U-Boat is Arandora Star and some people survived the disaster).
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