About Jin Wicked

Jin Wicked is a 40 year-old visual and performance artist, illustrator, podcaster, and writer who works with the guiding philosophy that "Life is art." She is primarily a self-taught artist and creative, having attended only a few art classes through her basic schooling and never seriously pursued any secondary education. Though she occasionally collaborates with other creators, she is primarily a one-woman show, producing almost all of her art, comics, podcasts, videos, publications, promotional materials, and websites on her own.

Having come-of-age alongside the Internet, Jin first began learning to build websites in 1997, and began marketing and sharing her artwork online in 2001. A seventeen-year veteran of the webcomics community, she is most well-known for her slice-of-life journal comics "Crap I Drew on My Lunch Break" launched in 2003, and "A Dollar Late and A Day Short" launched in 2008. Her latest work, "Queen," launched in 2018, contains more private stories, delving into the details of her past and personal journey.

Her autobiographical work explores the complexity of identity and self-image in this modern age, and bridges the gap between colourful humour and darker subject matter such as anxiety, depression, and other mental illness.

From the period of 2008 through 2014, she was largely inactive online, and produced very little work while suffering from an extensive stretch of anxiety and depression. Much of "A Dollar Late and A Day Short" was created while she was a caregiver for her mother, who passed away from cancer in 2010. The experience of intimately watching her mother's decline and death at only age 59 affected Jin deeply, giving her a lasting appreciation for the fragility, unpredictability, and finite nature of life. In 2014, she picked up where she had left off, rebooting both her personal life and her work. Over the next three years she would leave her relationship of twelve years, lose seventy pounds, focus on her physical and mental health, and begin creating artwork and comics again. She also began to unravel the emotional baggage that would eventually become "Queen." Her father's death by suicide in 2016 only strengthened her commitment to the importance of mental health, and helping others by openly sharing her own struggles, setbacks, and successes.

In early 2019 she was diagnosed with ADHD, and began medication which, combined with a better understanding of how her attention span and focus operate, has helped her to conquer many of the frustrations and obstacles that have plagued her for most of my life beginning in childhood. She is a vocal advocate against abuse, promoter of equality, and a passionate supporter of environmental, political, and social justice issues.

In addition to comics, Jin produces studio art, crafts, her multimedia personal blog series "Obsessively Ambitious," the "Jin About Town" and "COMIC BROS" podcasts, photography, and experimental videos for her YouTube channel. She enjoys dabbling in acting, dance, and music when the opportunity arises. Her most well-known non-comics work, "The Universal Turing Machine," a fanciful illustration of the tragic figure Alan Turing incorporating his ideas and creations, has been published in many academic and scientific publications. Two of these publications include "Alan Turing: Life and Legacy of a Great Thinker" by Christof Teuscher in 2005, and the Japan Times newspaper in 2003.

Jin is also known throughout the pet rats community for her loving and humourous depictions of the pet rats she kept for about a decade, and for her contributions to pet-related charities and rescue efforts. A Texas native, Jin moved across the country to the Saint Paul, Minnesota, area in 2015. She can be seen at a limited number of public events in the Twin Cities metro and beyond. Original artwork, books, T-shirts, and more can be purchased online through her Etsy store. Her work can also be supported through Patreon.