A Child's Life and Other Stories [Paperback]

Phoebe Gloeckner (Author, Illustrator)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 25, 2000

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.

Editorial Reviews

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. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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

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Product Details

• Paperback: 152 pages
• Publisher: Frog Books; Revised edition (July 25, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1583940286
• ISBN-13: 978-1583940280
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 0.3 x 11 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #625,511 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A frightening and beautiful book, August 5, 1998

By 

Consuma "Consuma" (San Francisco) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Child's Life and Other Stories (Paperback)

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. W! arning: 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.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Brutal and Beautiful, January 17, 2003

By 

Laura N Stoland (New York, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Child's Life and Other Stories (Paperback)

A Child's Life is hard to read but even harder to turn your eyes away from. Her child-like drawings combined with adult events and content perfectly express the difficult adolescent limbo between girl and woman.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Graphic, harrowing, and touching--worth a try., April 7, 2003

By 

Booked4Life "booked4life" (middle america) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: A Child's Life and Other Stories (Paperback)

This collection of Phoebe Gloeckner's comics is definitely not for the faint of heart, but it's worth a reading. If you haven't read her novel, Diary of a Teenage Girl, I think you will find this book a better introduction to her work. The themes are much the same and the comic art is very well done.
The subject matter is pretty bleak.