Phoebe Gloeckner
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
Phoebe Louise Adams Gloeckner [1] is an American comic artist, illustrator, painter, and novelist.
Works
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, is the book "Weird Things You Can Grow," published by Random House, and books in the series beginning with Tales too Funny to be True published by HarperCollins, for which she did the illustrations.
