Lily Renée

Imagine being an artist and one day finding your life’s adventures captured in a graphic novel almost seventy years later? That’s precisely what happened to Lily Renée in 2011 when Graphic Universe published her biography in Lily Renée, Escape Artist: From Holocaust Survivor to Comic Book Pioneer. 

When the Nazi forces moved in to occupy Vienna, Renée escaped to America by way of England. She went to work drawing catalogs for Woolworths before answering an ad to work for Fiction House, erasing the remaining pencil lines not covered over by the inker. At the time, many of the men who had worked there found themselves drafted and sent overseas to fight the very men Renée had escaped. She was able to work alongside other early pioneers such as Nina Albright and Fran Hopper.

One of her earliest features was her work on Jane Martin (Wings Comics #31-48). After that came Werewolf Hunter, a popular title, before she took over Senorita Rio (Fight Comics #34-44 & #47-51). 

By the end of the decade, after the war, she joined her husband Eric Peters, to work on Abbot & Costello Comics (#2-34). Not to shy away from ad work, Renée also worked on advertisements for Borden starring Elsie the Cow.

Lily Renée Phillips (May 12, 1921)