Golden Age Artist Lily Renée Commences Second Century

With the  frequent and sometimes premature obituaries any news website has to write, it’s heartening to be able to celebrate a milestone.

Trina Robbins reports that Lily Willheim Peters Phillips, best known as ‘Lily Renée’, marked her 101st birthday on 12th May 2022.

Lily Renée is a celebrated comic-book illustrator of the Golden Age, and one of the first women in the field to use (an abbreviation of) her real name, at a time when women in the field still faced massive discrimination.

Born in Vienna, Lily fled the Nazi invasion, on the Kindertransport programme to England, having to leave her parents behind, and eventually wound up as a young adult in New York.

Lily Renée in 2019, as a mere ingénue of 98. (Photo by kind permission of Trina Robbins)

The sole support of her parents, she worked multiple jobs including commercial illustrator and clothing model, before her mother reporting seeing an ad asking for comic-book artists; a randomly-purchased issue of Jungle Comics led her to Fiction House, the only comics publisher which employed significant numbers of women and minorities as freelancers.

There, she illustrated, among others, Werewolf Hunter and the aviatrix Jane Martin, before being assigned her signature strip, Señorita Rio, about a Brazilian nightclub entertainer who doubled as a spy, wore sensational outfits, and regularly kicked Nazi ass with her stylish high-heeled pumps!

After the war and marriage, Renée moved on to other careers; jewellery and textile design, illustrating and writing children’s books, and the authorship of five plays. Today, she is in retirement in New York.

More about her life and work can be found in the educational graphic novel Lily Renée, Escape Artist: From Holocaust Survivor to Comic Book Pioneer, by Trina Robbins and Mo Oh, reviewed on this very website back in 2012.