PAST HISTORY

I was born in Los Angeles in 1953 and I've been writing and drawing all my life. My father, Robert Gregory (who died in December 2003) used to write Donald Duck and other Disney comics while I was a small child at home. The house was always full of comic books and I learned to read before I got to kindergarten. From an early age I would draw dogs and cats and horses and write little dialogue balloons above their heads, and then staple little comic books together and sell them to my family members, bless them! My creativity escalated throughout my adolescent years, as I turned out countless pages of quirky stories that I thought were far too strange to interest anybody but myself. (Mercifully, very little remains of these badly-drawn pages!)

When I got into college (CSU Long Beach) in 1971, the feminist movement was in full swing, and I experimented with many different styles in the college humor paper, Uncle Jam (Published by Phil Yeh) until I created the "Feminist Funnies" strip in 1974. This was the year I sold my first story to the underground comic book, Wimmen's Comix (published by Last Gasp of San Francisco). I expanded the comic strip into the a comic book of my own, Dynamite Damsels. I think this officially made me the first woman to solo publish a regulation-sized comic book, but I don't think I knew it at the time. I was much inspired by (and had a lot of help from) Joyce Farmer and Lyn Chevli, of the Nanny Goat Productions collective, which had been publishing feminist comic books since 1972. My stories appeared in a few issues of their title, Tits and Clits, and a few more times in Wimmen's Comix through the rest of the 1970s. When Gay Comix appeared in 1980, my stories appeared in nearly all of the issues throughout the 1980s. These comic books have been long out of print, but I am working on reprinting these decades-old stories for the benefit of my newer readers.

During the late 1980s I started working on Winging It, a very ambitious project: a mythical-metaphysical graphic novel that incorporated themes from stories I have been writing all my creative life. I also created Sheila and the Unicorn, a lighter-in-tone comic strip-like story. I published the first volume of Winging It and the Sheila collection in 1988.

In 1989 I moved from California to Seattle and started working at Fantagraphics Books ("publishers of the world's greatest cartoonists") and the first issue of Naughty Bits, my long-running comic book series, appeared in 1991. I also began the short series, Artistic Licentiousness, three issues of which appeared in the 1990s. The first issue was published by Starhead Comix, and I published the last two issues myself. The second volume of Winging It was finally published in 1999.

Bitchy Bitch was born with the series, Naughty Bits, and has become my most well-known creation, and the character of mine that the most readers seem able to identify with! She has taken many incarnations, from appearing in the comic book, to stage productions, to a weekly strip, and even a cloth doll (which is, unfortunately, no longer available) and now she appears in the Life's a Bitch" animated cartoon. I never really made much money from my creative projects, and have had a stunning variety of semiskilled 'day jobs' from working in a grain elevator, working in a marine biology lab (and out in the field), marketing research, in a bookstore, and lots of pre-computer production art on everything from textbooks to car magazines to medical journals to Fantagraphics publications. But, I have also done a lot of traveling, thanks to the generosity of comics publishers all over the world. I have been to Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, France, (several times!), Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia.

It's been a very interesting life so far! And, I have gotten comics industry nominations and actual awards for my work: several Eisner nominations (humor, best short story, best writer, best writer/artist), an Inkpot Award from Comic Con International, Cartoonists Northwest's Toonie Award, and most recently, the Haxtur Award (for humor!) from the Salon Internacional del Principado de Asturias in Spain.

I always remember being very creative, drawing and writing all the time from the day I could start making intelligible marks on paper. I seem to create the stories that I myself would LOVE to read, if only someone else would create them… and since nobody else has, I guess it is up to me! Not everyone likes what I do, and some people have even seemed rather put off by my artwork or subject matter, but from the people I DO seem to be 'writing for' I have gotten nothing but the highest respect and gratitude! For these readers, and the ones who have not yet found out that I am 'writing for' them, I just want to create as much as possible and get it into print and available any way I can.

I am so grateful for the support shown me by my readers and others who appreciate what I am doing!

AND RECENTLY

Life continues to be interesting. I have finished studying hypnotherapy and have gotten certified by the State of Washington. I am perpetually busy (and usually behind schedule) on any number of creative projects. My current 'day job' is Technical Facilities Management (a fancy way of saying I do a lot of cleaning up after people!) at the Seattle Center (site of the 1962 Worlds Fair, home of the notorious Space Needle) but I would certainly like to have more of my income coming from my creative projects. For the time being, there is no more work for me on the "Life's a Bitch" animated cartoon. The Naughty Bits series is no longer being published, but Fantagraphics is coming out with a nice collection in July 2005, which will contain an all-new Bitchy story, and I see many more Bitchy tales in the future. I have been working on the Mother Mountain trilogy for years, and hope to begin publishing it soon. And there is probably some other project or two that have slipped my mind for the moment, but that is what the What's New page is for!