Melinda Gebbie

Melinda Gebbie
Melinda Gebbie at The Amazing Meeting in London in 2010
Born	San Francisco, California
Nationality	American
Area(s)	Writer, Penciller, Inker
Notable works	Lost Girls Cobweb

Melinda Gebbie in 1982

Melinda Gebbie is an American comics artist and writer, known for works such as "Cobweb" in writer (and now husband) Alan Moore's Tomorrow Stories anthology series, and for Lost Girls, the three-volume graphic novel she produced in collaboration with Moore, published by Top Shelf.

Early life

Melinda Gebbie was born in San Francisco. She became interested in comics in 1973, when she met writer/artist Lee Marrs at a publishers' fair.

Career

Gebbie began her career as a fine artist. She contributed her first comic strip to Wimmen's Comix #3, the seminal all-women anthology published by Last Gasp. She wrote and drew short stories for Wimmen's Comix and many other anthologies, including Tits & Clits Comix, Wet Satin, and Anarchy Comics. In 1977 she completed her own solo book, Fresca Zizis.

In 1984 she moved to England to work on the animated film adaptation of Raymond Briggs' When the Wind Blows. Following this, she worked in a variety of illustration and office jobs and continued making short stories for anthologies such as Strip AIDS and Heartbreak Hotel. During this time she was briefly involved in an obscenity trial when Knockabout Comics was prosecuted by the UK's customs agency over the importation of 'pornographic' comics, including her Fresca Zizis. The verdict was that all the comics should be confiscated and burned; Fresca Zizis was made illegal to possess in the UK.

In the early 1990s, Alan Moore and Gebbie began collaborating on Lost Girls, a story in which the female protagonists of Peter and Wendy, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz meet and share sexual stories and experiences. Moore wrote the story, and Gebbie illustrated it. The story was finished in 2006. Meanwhile, she and Moore created Cobweb, a mysterious heroine who appeared in twelve issues of the Moore-written anthology Tomorrow Stories between 1999 and 2002.

Personal life

Gebbie was briefly married to California poet Adam Cornford in 1984. Their relationship inspired Cornford's poetry collection Animations (San Francisco, City Lights, 1988). Gebbie married Alan Moore on 12 May 2007.

Bibliography

• Fresca Zizis (Last Gasp Publishing, 1977)
• Lost Girls (with writer Alan Moore, Top Shelf Productions, 2006, ISBN 1-891830-74-0)

Anthologies

• Cobweb (with writer Alan Moore, in Tomorrow Stories #1–8, America's Best Comics/Wildstorm, 1999–2002)
• Heartbreak Hotel
• Strip AIDS
• "The Cockpit" (in Wet Satin #1, Last Gasp Publishing)
• "My Three Swans", in Young Lust #6 (Last Gasp Publishing)
• Wimmen's Comix #4–7 (Last Gasp Publishing)
• Anarchy Comics (Last Gasp Publishing)

References

• Melinda Gebbie at the Grand Comics Database
• Melinda Gebbie at Lambiek's Comiclopedia

External links

• Melinda Gebbie official site
• Wimmen's Comix at Lambiek
• Melinda Gebbie at the Internet Movie Database
• Melinda Gebbie's Interview
• Melinda Gebbie at the Comic Book DB

Interviews

• Lost Girls artist Melinda Gebbie, SuicideGirls.com, June 6, 2006
• Melinda Gebbie Interview at ReadySteadyBook, September 11, 2006