| Creator Lily Renee (1921-2022) |
| Profession Penciller, Inker |
| Total Entries 8 |
| Articles Happy 100th birthday to Lily Renée – In My Not So Humble Opinion Lily Renée Phillips, 1921–2022 Robbins Salutes “Babes in Arms,” World War II’s Female Cartoonists – CBR |
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Lily Renée Wilheim was the first woman to work as a full-time comic book artist during the Golden Age of comics. Wilheim was born into a well-to-do Viennese Jewish family, but when the Anschluss happened in 1938 and the majority of Austrians welcomed the Nazis with open arms, her parents arranged to send their fourteeen-year-old daughter to the safety of England. After a few false starts she would eventually reconnect with her parents in New York, although several of her relatives died in concentration camps… Her mother showed her a newspaper ad placed by Fiction House, known for publishing Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, seeking new comic book artists, as many of its regular artists had left to serve in the war. Wilheim reluctantly answered the ad and got the job, at first erasing other artists’ stray pencil lines and learning the ropes of drawing for comic books. Eventually she was penciling her own work. Soon (signing her work “L. Renée,” keeping it unknown to readers that she was actually a woman) she was drawing the adventures of the female pilot Jane Martin and the beautiful Nazi-fighting spy Señorita Rio for Flight Comics. ~ Drew Friedman’s Heroes of the Comics: Portraits of the Legends of Comic Books – Fantagraphics (2014)
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