Queen of Cosmos Comix Trilogy brings together five decades of cosmogony, autobiography, and Orthodox Jewish visual practice

The nickname came from a musician. Barbara Mendes’ first husband, guitarist Rick Kunstler of Group Image, gave her the name “Willy” in honour of Latin jazz percussionist Willie Bobo — and it was under that name that she entered the East Village underground in the late 1960s, collaborating with Trina Robbins and Nancy Kalish on Gothic Blimp Works, the comix supplement of The East Village Other, before co-producing It Ain’t Me Babe with Robbins in 1970, published by Last Gasp — the first comic book produced entirely by women. The solo Illuminations followed in 1971, and then the underground scene largely lost her: she began exhibiting paintings in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles from 1973 onward, eventually gravitating toward large-scale canvas work and, after completing a mural at the Pinto Torah Center in Los Angeles in 1992, deepening her engagement with her Sephardic Jewish heritage. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of California, Riverside, in 1980, runs her own gallery in downtown Los Angeles, and returned to comics in 2016.

What Fantagraphics Underground now publishes as the Queen of Cosmos Comix Trilogy — edited by Kristy Valenti, designed by Justin Allan-Spencer — pulls the thread of that entire trajectory into a single sequence. The core of Realm of Karma Komix (1971) sits at its centre, flanked by two subsequent chapters, the third of which has not appeared in print before. The formal distance between the opening pages and the closing ones is considerable: the dense cross-hatching of newsprint underground gives way to flat colour fields and sharp outlines with no traditional shading — a technique arriving directly from the monumental mural work, where colour, in Mendes’ own formulation, is the light of God.

The interview conducted by Brian Doherty — drawn from a five-hour conversation held in January 2020 at Mendes’ Ivan Gallery in Los Angeles, and supplemented by a follow-up at San Diego Comic-Con in July 2025 — is where the volume earns its density. Doherty, whose 2022 book Dirty Pictures (Abrams Press) documented the underground comix network, spent the session probing the theological and technical logic behind a body of work that refuses to stay in any single category. What emerges is a portrait of someone entirely aware of her own position: Mendes describes herself as a genius, a prophetess, a bridge between Torah scholarship and an audience that would never enter a yeshiva, and she makes these claims without defensiveness or irony. The rabbis who first called her a prophetess were Israeli, Hebrew-speaking, and looking at a 1977 painting — dated — depicting a plane flying into the Twin Towers.

The biographical material threaded through the interview complicates the cosmological ambitions of the comics themselves. The story of naming her daughter Oma — three monumental letters needed for a splash-panel title page, chosen while already pregnant, the girl then named after the story — and the subsequent 33 years of her daughter’s decline from radiation poisoning, paralysis, and brain tumour, sits at the centre of the volume’s emotional architecture. The cosmic positivity of the page-making, Mendes explains, is the output of someone who spent three decades fighting the Angel of Death in a California care facility and is still standing.

The technical account of the Vayikra Mural — every verse of Leviticus, painted seven times over through successive stages of drawing, underdrawing, and colouring, each of God’s speech rendered in word balloons with dots to distinguish divine from mortal speech — clarifies why the shift from black-and-white cross-hatching to flat chromatic fields was not a stylistic evolution but a theological one. Colour, in her formulation, is the light of God. The crosshatching that remains in the later work — visible around the scapegoat in Vayikra — functions as a negative marker, signifying contamination. Comics technique repurposed as liturgical grammar.

The 2025 addendum records a different register. Mendes had a brain aneurysm surgically removed in May 2024, recovered fast enough to drive to San Francisco three weeks later for Trina Robbins‘ memorial, quit smoking on July 12 of that year, and had by the time of the Comic-Con conversation produced a series of psychedelic horse paintings — diamonds of flat colour on canvas — because, she explains, she had no inspiration after surgery and everyone likes a horse. She is 77, runs the Ivan Gallery four days a week from a building on a corner officially designated Barbara Mendes Square by the City of Los Angeles.

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