NEW YORK, NY.- Mary Wings didn’t know what “lesbian” meant until she was in her late teens — but as soon as she found out, she knew it described what she’d been feeling for years.

As a footloose illustrator who moved among creative scenes on both coasts and even in Europe in the late 1960s, she hoped to find fellow artists whose work represented her experience — especially in underground comics, with their boundary-bursting depictions of sexuality in all its many forms.

Except that she didn’t. Perusing the work of R. Crumb and other comic artists, she discovered page after page of violent misogyny and homophobia. She also encountered those characteristics in person when she met some of the artists in real life.

By then, she was living in Portland, Oregon, where she frequented a feminist bookshop. One day in 1973 she found a comic collection, “Wimmen’s Comix,” which included a stunning story called “Sandy Comes Out,” about a young woman who announces one day that she is gay.

But as she read it, her enthusiasm wilted. She felt the author, a straight woman named Trina Robbins, had failed to capture the texture of coming out.

“It seemed so superficial,” Wings said in the 2021 documentary “No Straight Lines: The Rise of Queer Comics,” directed by Vivian Kleiman. “I thought, this has nothing to do with what it really feels like.”

That night, back at home, she went to work with her pen and paper, and a week later she emerged with “Come Out Comix,” her own version of the sort of story Robbins had tried to tell. It was the first comic book about lesbians, by a lesbian and for lesbians.

A friend owned an offset printer in the basement of her karate studio, and after hours they churned out hundreds of copies, which Wings then advertised with flyers around the city. A publisher with national distribution soon picked it up, and within a year “Come Out Comix” was said to be on the bookshelf of every lesbian in the country.

Wings went on to write two more comic books in a similar vein — “Dyke Shorts” (1978) and “Are Your Highs Getting You Down?” (1980) — and contributing to a welter of gay comic collections that emerged in the 1980s, inspired by early writers like her.

“You can argue that ‘Come Out Comix’ jump-started the whole queer comics movement,” said Justin Hall, who runs the MFA in comics program at California College of the Arts and helped produce “No Straight Lines.”

Wings died July 3 at her home in San Francisco. She was 75. Kathleen Mullen, a close friend, said the cause was lung cancer.

Mary Wings was born Mary Lee Geller on April 14, 1949, in Chicago. She grew up in a household that nurtured her creative side, but that also gave her a reason to reject the heteronormative strictures of postwar America.

Both her parents were creative: Her father, John Geller, built furniture, and her mother, Mary (Lee) Geller, was a fashion sketch artist who would often pull Mary and her brother, John, out of school to accompany her at work.

She greatly admired her mother, and thought of her as a model for her life. But she also saw how her mother, despite holding down a full-time job, was expected to do the bulk of the housework, including having dinner ready every night. She died of cancer while Mary was attending Shimer College (now a part of North Central College) in Mount Carroll, Illinois, an early death that Mary felt gave her freedom to explore her newfound identity as a lesbian.

She left Shimer to travel and eventually settled in Portland, where she studied ceramics at the Museum Art School, a part of the Portland Museum of Art. She came out as gay, finding a small but supportive community among the feminists and artists centered in the city. And she legally changed her surname to Wings, inspired by the adage that “friendship is love with wings.”

She later lived in New York and Amsterdam before settling in San Francisco in the early 1980s.

Her brother is her only immediate survivor.

After publishing her three comics, Wings turned to novels: She wrote four books about a lesbian detective named Emma Victor, beginning with “She Came in a Flash” in 1988 and ending with “She Came Too Late” in 2000. A fifth book, “Divine Victim,” unrelated to the series, was published in 1992.

While she rarely returned to making comics, Wings spoke regularly at art schools, often on a panel with Lee Marrs, another pioneering queer artist, and Robbins, whose “Sandy Comes Out” had once angered Wings but who later became a close friend. (Robbins died in April.)

“It just felt like standing under the shadow of mountains,” Meggie Ramm, a nonbinary cartoonist who saw the trio speak at California College of the Arts and later developed their own series of queer comics about a character named Batcat, said in an interview. “I’m just writing a tiny little queer kids’ comic about Batcat now, but I wouldn’t be able to it if they hadn’t gone first.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.