Motus Mentis

I’ve written before (see here, here and here) about my mother-in-law, Lily Renée Willheim Phillips, who was born in Vienna, fled the Nazis in the Kindertransport, and made her way first to England and then to New York. Once she got here, she took up a job drawing comic books, working at a company called Fiction House until 1948 or so — the latter part of an era that has become known to aficionados as the “Golden Age“.

Lily is now 92, and still living in New York. She had long ago put her comic-book years behind her; to her it had never been anything more than a way to make a living, and she’d always been a little embarrassed about it. In her mind it was undignified work for a serious artist. Meanwhile, as far as comic-book fans knew, she had simply vanished.

In 2007, my daughter was surprised to see her grandmother mentioned online as a long-lost legend of the Golden Age with a sizable fan base, and so she contacted the author of the article to tell her that the mysterious Lily Renée was in fact alive and well. This was, apparently, a bit of a bombshell in the (by now enormous) world of comic fans, and the next thing you know Lily was onstage at ComicCon, written up in Newsweek, and generally found herself the toast of the town.

Now the woman my daughter originally contacted, Trina Robbins, has put together an online book featuring scans of Lily’s comics. You can download it here.