Comic (Book) Genius Phoebe Gloeckner Gets A Guggenheim Fellowship

When the “graphic memoir” genre showed its potential for mainstream success with the publication of Alison Bechdel‘s ‘Fun Home,’ some comics fans thought of Phoebe Gloeckner‘s brilliant, ill-published ‘Diary of A Teenage Girl’ and wondered what the pioneering artist was working on these days. Well, besides teaching at the University of Michigan and giving snappy rebuttals to her ‘Rate My Professor’ critics, she’s also recently nabbed a prestigious fellowship that will help her finish up the awesome-sounding new book she’s been working on. “Gloeckner will use her fellowship to create a graphic narrative about a Mexican girl murdered at the turn of this century in Ciudad Juarez, a major U.S.-Mexico border crossing adjacent to El Paso, Texas. The project represents a radical change in her work, she says. Rather than draw images, Gloeckner developed a three-dimensional technique, teaching herself to use tools and to construct nearly everything she would normally draw.”