Early Years

Born into a prosperous, assimilated Viennese Jewish family in 1921, Lily grew up attending opera and ballet performances. From an early age, she started to draw and paint. While still in school, she attended the Academy of Visual Arts as a guest student. Hitler’s annexation of Austria in 1939 dramatically changed Lily’s sheltered life. In April, she was able to leave on a Kindertransport to England. A few months later, her parents were able to flee to the United States, where their arrival was registered in November 1939. Lily was reunited with her family in New York shortly after, in January 1940. They lived in a crowded tenement building, often going hungry and desperately poor. Lily found work drawing publicity material for Woolworth catalogues, painting Tyrolean designs on small wooden boxes, and modeling.

Career Beginnings

In New York, Lily looked for possibilities for her own further education. While attending night classes at the Arts Students League and the School of Visual Arts, she responded to an ad looking for experienced illustrators at Fiction House, an established publisher of comic books. In the middle of a boom in the American comic book industry, they were hiring women to replace the male artists who had been drafted into the armed forces.

She began working as a penciler and inker. Fiction House comic books were unusual in that they often featured female heroes – beautiful girl detectives and spies who didn’t need men to save them. This gave Lily the opportunity to draw, and later invent, dashing, daring female characters.

In her first series, Jane Martin, which ran in Wings Comics, the fearless and hard-nosed wartime nurse heroine has no problem dressing like a gypsy and singing to a roomful of Nazis, then freeing captured American soldiers. Lily also drew beautiful decorative splash panels.

Fighting Nazis With Pen and Ink

Her next series, The Werewolf Hunter, which ran in Rangers Comics, gave Lily the opportunity to make the stories less about werewolves and more about fantasy. She developed the plots and added a German Expressionist style to the visuals. For example, the layout from an October 1947 story is full of jagged angles, reflecting the madness and anxiety of the main character.

By far her most famous character was Señorita Rio, a female spy, secret agent, and, as a cover, a Hollywood starlet and dancer. The adventures of the South-of-the-border adventuress doing wartime espionage for the U.S. government appeared in Fiction House’s Fight Comics. Thanks to the Señorita stories, Lily became a star of the publishing company. Señorita Rio was a perfect fantasy for the shy artist and bore a strong resemblance to her. Lily could not afford leopard coats and high heeled shoes, but she wanted her heroine to be as chic as possible. As late as 1947, Rio was still fighting Nazis in Latin America.  As one story says, “The Nazi war is over, but the struggle for a Fourth Reich begins.”

Even The Lost World, Lily’s fourth series, has villains who are thinly disguised Nazis and offers a warning that they could return at any time.

Other Creative Pursuits

Lily continued to write and draw comics for other publishers and audiences until the 1970s. She also wrote and drew children’s books, wrote plays, designed textiles for Lanz of California and jewelry for Willy Woo. In 2018, when she was 97 years old, Lily received the Decoration of Honor in Gold for services to the Republic of Austria from the Austrian Consulate General in New York, and in 2019 returned to Vienna to be honored as one of three artists in the exhibition “Three with a Pen. Lily Renée, Bis Spira & Paul Peter Porges” at the Vienna Jewish Museum. She lives in Manhattan.