Product Description

Phoebe Gloeckner's first book collects her highly praised autobiographical accounts of a teenage girl's loss of innocence through sex, drugs, rape, and AIDS. This edition includes eight pages of new material.

Long respected as one of the finest and most original of today's underground comics artists, Gloeckner shows both technical artistry and tremendous range—from her sly, lurid, and brilliantly colored posters for rock groups to her textbook-quality medical illustrations; from her sharp naturalistic juxtapositions for The Atrocity Exhibition (J.G. Ballard) to the signature comics for which she is best known.

Pages include both black and white and color comics, some that were published before in obscure comic books, and some of her classics in addition to new stories. In detailed, nuanced panels, these strips depict the isolation, horror, and disappointment—but also the revolutionary, transformative power—of young women trapped in circumstances ringed with drugs and sexual abuse. Gloeckner continues as a major literary and visual artist.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #325606 in Books
• Published on: 2000-07-25
• Released on: 2000-07-25
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 11.00" h x .30" w x 8.45" l, .95 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 152 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Gloeckner is a legendary figure in underground comics. Her short, powerfully candid and visually explicit autobiographical graphic narratives vividly re-create the sexual victimization of her childhood and adolescence. Her first full-length book combines new work in color and in black-and-white, including the title story, along with older, shorter narrative comics dating back to 1976. (An appendix reprints her disturbing medical illustrations for J.G. Ballard's avant-SF classic The Atrocity Exhibition.) Abandoned by her father and sexually victimized by her alcoholic mother's lovers, the teenage heroine of "Minnie's 3rd Love" endures a "week-long nightmare of sex and drug-taking" among the hustlers and addicts of 1974 San Francisco. In the ruefully humorous "Quaker School Q-Ties," girls team up to embarrass, and disgust, boys in their grade school. Gloeckner's drawings combine a labored precision with a wild, often satirical expressiveness; her protagonists can resemble sad, angry toy dolls. Undergound comics master R. Crumb's introduction combines glowing praise and a typically embarrassing confession: "I, too, lusted after the young, budding artist-cartoonist."
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
"I thought that Phoebe Gloeckner's story, 'Minnie's Third Love,' was one of the best comic stories I ever read in my life ... a masterpiece. She is one of the best, which is interesting, seeing as: A.) She's a cute girl, B.) She's not a very prolific artist ... two factors which, one would assume, would be a hindrance to great art. But it's always a mystery, what makes great art ... there, I said it ... she's a great artist."
—R. Crumb, cartoonist

"Phoebe Gloeckner's illustrations for The Atrocity Exhibition were superb—wonderful line and shading of which Durer would have approved—several were absolute tours de force."
—J.G. Ballard, author of Crash and The Atrocity Exhibition

"Many cartoonists today mine their personal lives for subject matter. Phoebe Gloeckner achieves what few of them can; she makes the autobiographical universal. Her finely crafted drawings and emotionally powerful story-telling ability combine in this terrific collection to tell us painful, sympathetic, and hilariously human truths. Read this book. Find out why comics are art."
—Bill Griffith, creator of Zippy the Pinhead

Andi Zeisler and Lisa Miya-Jervis, Bitch, Vol. 3 No. 3, Winter 1998
Gloeckner's unsparing memory and painstakingly detailed pen-and ink drawings of family dysfunction, childhood cruelty, and queasy sex make for seriously disquieting reading. The book takes us through the years with Gloeckner's alter ego Minnie, whose childhood is dominated by her overbearing, ogling stepfather and whose adolescence is spent on the streets of San Francisco in a morass of unsavory drugs and even less savory men. The unwelcome sexualization of young girls forms the center of every story in A Child's Life, not to mention the very introduction, in which cartoonist R. Crumb slobbers over the artist ("I'm just like all the other despicable males that appear in these comic stories...I, too, desired to subject the beautiful, intense young girl to all sorts of degrading and perverse sexual acts...") In Gloeckner's hands, the disturbing subject matter translates into absorbing art that's hard to wrap your eyes around, but unforgettable once you do.