LDCOMICS ONLINE COMICS FAIR 2025! Jenny Robins has applied the subtitle ‘Imagined Conversations with Great Women Artists’ to her LDComics Online Comics Fair offering A Woman’s (Art) Work is Never Done. In her introduction to the comic Robins implores the reader to search out the work of the artists she fantasy chats with in these pages, and reflects on both the current state of art in culture in the wake of the AI plagiarism machine, and the suppression and/or erasure of the output of women practitioners throughout history. It’s deep stuff but Robins has always had a deftness of touch to her work that ensures such profound meditations are accessible in delivery.
Those familiar with Robins’ work will be aware of her effective use of collage in her comics to communicate on a very instinctive level with her readers, as seen in these pages. “Art bubbles out of us. Even in the darkest of times” Robins begins as her on-page self drifts off into a dream scenario that ponders on the nature of art, its power, purpose and position. It’s a meta affair as, in a stream-of-consciousness style approach, Robins meets great female figures from the history of arts culture, with an aside that events are only occurring because this is what she promised her Arts Council England funders.
To a degree it’s more brief encounters with artists than conversations here. Celebrated names pop in and out with pithy comments as Robins encounters such familiar faces as Georgia O’Keeffe, Yayoi Kusama, Virginia Woolf, Faith Ringgold, Judy Chicago, Lana Wachowski, Zaha Hadid, Frida Kahlo, Ruth Carter, Beatrix Potter and many more. But this constantly shifting cast of characters give these near 40 pages that requisite dreamscape feel Robins is angling for. Their constantly interweaving presences underlining the breadth of their contributions to the art world for the rapidity of their appearances.
A Woman’s (Art) Work is Never Done is a startling explosion of colour and imagery that ensures we’re all the more invested in the points that Robins is making by their dizzying and sometimes abstract presentation. There’s so much to absorb here in terms of commentary on the creative process, the artistic life and the uneasiness around the probably futile attempt to define what art is; all of it circling back to the role and place of women creatives.
Robins backs this up with a bibliography for readers to make their own further explorations of the showcased themes of A Woman’s (Art) Work is Never Done. This inaugural LDComics Online Comics Fair has given us gem after gem in terms of experimental comics excellence. This is another fine example of that.
Jenny Robins (W/A) • LDComics Online Fair, £4.50
Review by Andy Oliver
The LDComics Online Comics Fair runs across the month of July. Read all our coverage of the comics on offer here at BF.
