| Phoebe Louise Adams
Gloeckner is an
American cartoonist, illustrator, painter, and novelist.
Born in Philadelphia,
Gloeckner moved to San Francisco in the 1970s and attended San Francisco
State University, where she studied art and pre-medical courses. She was
interested in cartooning from an early age; her father was a commercial
illustrator, and through her mother she met several San Francisco underground
comics figures, including Robert Crumb. However, she did not regard this
as a serious career option, and instead chose to study medical illustration
at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas.
Gloeckner has lived
mainly in San Francisco and Long Island, and currently teaches at the
University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. She is married and has two children.
Gloeckner has worked prolifically as a medical illustrator since 1988,
and her training is evident in her paintings and comics art, which are
highly detailed and often prominently feature the human body. Her first
prominent work in fiction publishing, a series of illustrations for the
RE/Search edition of J. G. Ballard's novel The Atrocity Exhibition, used
clinical images of internal anatomy, sex, and physical trauma in ambiguous
and evocative combinations.
Her comics work, in
the form of short stories published in a variety of underground anthologies
including Wimmen's Comix, Weirdo, Young Lust and Twisted Sisters, was
sporadic and rarely seen until the 1998 release of the collection A Child's
Life and Other Stories. This was followed by her 2002 novel The Diary
of a Teenage Girl, which revisited the troubled life of the young character
previously featured in some of her comics, this time in an unusual combination
of prose, illustration, and short comics scenes.
Her novel and many
of her short stories are semi-autobiographical, a frequent cause of comment
due to their depiction of sex, drug use, and childhood traumas; however,
Gloeckner has stated that she regards them as fiction. Sexual content
led to A Child's Life being banned from the public library in Stockton,
California after it was checked out by an 11-year-old reader; the mayor
of Stockton called the book "a how-to manual for pedophiles".
Less controversial,
and actually intended for children, are the books in the series beginning
with Tales too Funny to be True published by HarperCollins, for which
she did the illustrations.
From
Wikipedia.com
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