Gabrielle Bell
| Gabrielle Bell | |
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Bell photographed at the 2004 Small Press Expo (SPX) in Bethesda, Maryland
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| Born | Gabrielle Bell March 24, 1976 London, England |
| Nationality | British, American |
| Area(s) | Cartoonist |
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Notable works
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Lucky, The Books of... |
| Awards | Ignatz Award, 2004 |
| http://gabriellebell.com | |
Gabrielle Bell (born March 24, 1976 in London, England) is a British-American alternative cartoonist known for her surrealist, melancholy semi-autobiographical stories.
When Bell was two, her American mother divorced her British father and took Gabrielle and her brother back to the United States. Ending up in a relatively isolated rural town in Mendocino County, Bell writes that she "grew up . . . spending a lot of time reading, walking in the woods, and making up stories." As a teenager Bell attended a college program for low-income and at-risk students hosted by Humboldt State University, where she took classes in Shakespeare and composition. When Bell was 17 she traveled in Europe, including England, where she met her British relatives. Later moving to San Francisco, Bell took art classes at the City College of San Francisco, worked in a series of dead-end retail jobs, and began self-publishing her comics. She currently lives in Brooklyn, NY.
From about 1998 to 2002, Bell annually self-published a 32-page minicomic, each of whose titles began with "Book of...", including Book of Insomnia, Book of Sleep, Book of Black, Book of Lies, and Book of Ordinary Things. Many of the stories from those comics were collected in When I'm Old and Other Stories, published by Alternative Comics in 2003.
In 2003, Bell began the self-published semi-autobiographical Lucky series, of which the third won a 2003 Ignatz Award for Most Outstanding Minicomic. Lucky details Bell's day-to-day existence in a frank and good-humored manner, as she navigates a world of dilapidated rental apartments, low-paying jobs, yoga classes, roommate misadventures, and artistic frustration. These snippets of daily life in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, New York, are comforting in their familiarity; by settling into the rhythm of the artist's daily life, the reader experiences the heft of small victories and simple pleasures. Lucky tells of the anguish of nude modeling; sex-obsessed, adolescent art students; and Bell's own foibles.
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Wikipedia