The One-Sided Admiration Society Part 2

The time for female comix characters to tread the boards is apparently at hand! A week after posting about the play in the works for Alison Bechdel's Fun Home, another one is drumming up support for producing the autobiography The Diary of a Teenage Girl: An Account in Words and Pictures by acclaimed illustrator Phoebe Gloeckner. Born in Philadelphia and raised in San Francisco, Gloeckner studied medical illustration at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas and currently teaches at the University of Michigan in the School of Art and Design. And as far as I'm concerned, one of the most talented cartoonists I've come across in all my years.

At a very young age, Gloeckner was drawing comics, and through her mother met some of the most noted underground comic artists in the San Francisco area, like Robert Crumb, Bill Griffith, Aline Kominsky, and Diane Noomin, who published her early works -- most of which were semi-autobiographical -- in the pages of of Weirdo and Twisted Sisters, just to name a few. These comics were later compiled in the collection A Child's Life And Other Stories, which I finally bought about two years ago after seeing bits in other zines and being wildly intrigued. Although "intrigued" is probably not the word the mayor of Stockton, California would have used when he had it banned from the city's public libraries, citing it as "a how-to manual for pedophiles".

An undeserved reputation, I believe. Gloeckner's adolescence was fraught with drama. In her mid-teens she seduced her mother's thirty-five year old boyfriend, having a secret sexual relationship with him. Having received very little attention from her own emotionally distant, alcoholic mother, little Phoebe longed for love and acceptance, yet was torn with jealousy every night knowing that the man she slept with during the day was sleeping with her mother every night. Distraught, Phoebe prowled the San Francisco streets at night, seeking drugs, alcohol, anonymous sex, and anything that she could get her hands on to dull the pain of her existence. And although Gloeckner claims that the events in A Child's Life were works of fiction, her main character "Minnie", who sleeps with her mother's boyfriend by day and haunts the pavements of 1970's Polk Street at night with her junkie pals, could easily be mistaken as a proxy for the author herself.

But my first real introduction to Phoebe Gloeckner was her remarkably vibrant and detailed medical illustrations for RE/Search Publications' release of the late sci-fi novelist J.G. Ballard's collection The Atrocity Exhibition. Gloeckner's training in physical anatomy drawing literally and figuratively fleshed out the text of Ballard's work, with everything to diagrams of bodily traumas to the anatomy of a woman's mouth giving a man oral sex. To be honest, as much as I love Ballard and for all the years that I have owned this book, I still couldn't recall a single line from the prose because I was so enraptured by Gloeckner's illustrations. Of course that could just be the illustrator in me, to be certain.

Anyway, for more information, check out the website for "Diary Of A Teenage Girl: The Play" currently in the funding process, or so it seems. Recently on Phoebe's Facebook page she posted a photo of her at a recent benefit for the play with Saturday Night Live cast member Andy Samberg, who seems to be a supporter (although Gloeckner's response to him seemed to be along the lines of "Oh, you're that guy who wrote that song about being on a boat that my daughter runs around the house singing to herself!"). And by all means, check out A Child's Life when you can. Gloeckner's work is few and far between. But when she produces, it's always a distinct and original pleasure.