 |
||||||
|
2000 Recipient
Inkpot Award for outstanding achievement in the comic arts |
||||||
| Read a story from A Child's Life: | ||||||
 |
||||||
|
144 pages, including 16 color pages, 8 1/2" X 11"
Re-issued in a revised second edition with 8 new pages. What people have said about this book: "Gloeckner is a legendary figure in underground comics....Gloeckner's drawings combine a labored precision with a wild, often satirical expressiveness." -Roxane Farmanfarmanian, Publisher's Weekly, August 31, 1998 "Phoebe Gloeckner's A Child's Life and Other Stories is as perfect a publishing project as we're likely to see this calendar year: it collects short stories, both new and previously-published, from a period of over 20 years; the stories are consistently interesting and some are downright excellent; and the experience of reading all of the work in one place creates an artistic whole greater than the sum of its parts." -Tom Spurgeon, The Comics Journal, No. 207, September 1998 "How well do you we really know even our nearest and dearest? How do we project adult sexuality on children, and what are the consequences of this drive? How does an artist take the ugly and sordid materials of her early life and make of them something altogether beautiful, inspiring? These questions are all explored in this big book of Phoebe Gloeckner's "comic" art and writing, which I consider the book of the year. A legend in the world of underground cartooning, and in the avant-garde circles of San Francisco Bay Area high art and poetry, Gloeckner takes on a variety of charged social and sexual issues and, in one dazzling tour de force after another, treats them thoroughly, artistically, with the depth perception of a brilliant novelist, challenging our conceptions of experience, hope, debasement and youth like a modern-day Henry James. At the end, the author seems to have triumphed over her rough beginnings and to have found love and self-respect. Warning: I wouldn't give this book to kids, but what do I know? Its rough language and troubling sexuality may be just the mirror to their own lives that they need and want and can profit from. As Gloeckner shows us so vividly, we are all on a long journey, and the pain, fear and loneliness of childhood can only be transmuted into acceptance and wisdom through the crucible of expression." –Kevin Killian, Author of "Poet, Be Like God," "Shy," and "Arctic Summer" " 'Killing, you just get rid of the body,' wrote Andrei Codrescu. '[With writing] you can torture the spirit.' Gloeckner is living proof of this maxim, and her revenge– a macabre set of cartoons about her childhood sexual abuse by her stepfather– is brilliant. Her account of emotional terrorism, adult mind-games, rape, and other brutalities suffered by children are startilingly real. (For those without iron stomachs, too real.) By exposing her stepfather, she, by proxy, exposes all child abusers– a powerful achievement. And the black humor of this book, though gruesome, offers condolences to abuse survivors like no syrupy self-help book ever could. –Athena Douris, On Our Backs, Vol. 14, Issue 2, April/May 1999 "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." -Andi Zeisler and Lisa Miya-Jervis, Bitch, Vol. 3 No. 3, Winter 1998 "About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters," wrote Auden, lines that come to mind upon reading R. Crumb's introduction to Phoebe Gloeckner's largely autobiographical collection, A Child's Life; in it, he assesses her story "Minnie's Third Love" as "one of the comic-book masterpieces of all time." The old master is indeed right. Subtitled "Nightmare on Polk Street," the tale Chronicles Gloeckner's teenage persona (usually called Minnie, but also Mary, Penny, and other variations) on the run from home, where she has been psychologically and sexually abused by her mother's boyfriend. Combining observational precision with hallucinatory perspective, Gloeckner maps the emotional labyrinth of childhood trauma in such detail that she is somehow able to find her way out of it." -Eric Lorberer, Rain Taxi, Vol. 3, No. 3, Fall 1998 Purchasing information: |
||||||
All images, content, and
design copyright 2006
P.Gloeckner, unless
otherwise noted.