Conceived on September 29th, 1965, in celebration of my mother’s promotion to first lieutenant, I was born the following June. I was hastily baptized Jennifer Ann, as there was some trouble synching up my heart and lungs. (I guess they didn’t want to take the risk of my being trapped in Limbo) I survived and soon after my parents left the base at Clovis, New Mexico for Anderson, Indiana. My arrival had provided my parents with a graceful exit from the United States Air Force Service, excusing them from participation in the Vietnam War.

But a fluid stream of consciousness didn’t begin until I was four. At that time I found myself with a two-year-old brother, living in Long Branch, New Jersey, with my father back in Indiana. My mother, then Assistant Head Nurse of Cardiac Care, would come home exhausted with her stethoscope still around her neck, sometimes spattered with blood, her pockets full of swabs, packets of iodine and those rubber tourniquets my brother and I used to snap at each other. She still had the time and energy to instill in me a love of ’50s and ’60s pop music, Warner Bros. Cartoons and the movie musical—with a special appreciation for Gene Kelly and Cyd Charisse.

And there were always comics. I would, and still do, obsessively read any comic put in front of me. (Even, God help me, “Cathy.”) Besides the newspaper dailies there was Cricket Magazine and Trina Schart Hyman with her marginalia escapades of Cricket, Ladybug and other assorted critters. Then there were the black and white reprints of Tintin, serialized in Children’s Digest (Discovering the color collections in high school was a revelation).

Of course there was the traditional drug store comic book—my brother and I were given an allowance for them for the plane ride every summer to visit our father. Daredevil, Spiderman, the Fantastic Four—the only girly comic I can remember ever buying for myself was Sabrina, the Teen-Age Witch, but even then I was more into the aunts dressed in their purple pilgrim outfits than Sabrina herself. It was on one of these forays into Indiana that an older cousin introduced me to Mad Magazine. Which more significantly led to my picking up a National Lampoon when I was ten or so; it was right next to the Mads. It contained a “Trots and Bonnie” cartoon by Shary Flenniken, with Bonnie saying “Old enough to know better…” and Trots responding “… too young to care.” I don’t remember much else about that issue, which disappeared soon after I shared my find with some startled adult. And though I had forgotten where I had seen them, that glimpse of Trots and Bonnie would flash through my mind frustratingly ever since. Thankfully, a year and a half ago, the strip was described to me by Chris Baldwin and I was able to track it down.

For all this love of comics—including a collector geek phase in high school—I never experienced the urge to create comics until sometime in college as I was pursuing my BFA at Carnegie-Mellon. My goal was book illustration, still holding Trina Schart Hyman as a model (among others), as well book design, sparked by Barry Moser. That is, until Amy Sacks embarked on what she now claims as her revenge for my introducing her to the X-men, which had sparked her own comics obsession. She introduced me to the concept of Small Press Comics and nagged me to do something until I wearily relented. And something went ‘click.’

It was a slow-growing obsession, constantly interfered with by outside forces such as college, its aftermath and the need for a job. I found myself back in New Jersey pursuing the path of a graphic designer. It started by my taking the paste-up job out of college. Then, as one of the few unafraid of turning on a computer in 1990 and willing to learn arcane programs such as Quark and Photoshop, I was able to indulge my interest in layout and type. I soon found my graphic design informing my comics and vice versa. They are both, in the end, stories involving text, pictures and judgment of visual emphasis.

As for my comics, the small press work I did in college no longer held my interest. In exploring what I did want to do, I soon realized that I had no passion to create the four-panel strip or the one page installment that Allison Bechdel is the master of. It was the long sprawling story for me, spanning many issues, or rather chapters, each installment with room enough to go forward, back, sideways and forward again. In the early ’90s I had begun sketching out the beginnings of the story that would become Dicebox.

But first I moved to the Pioneer Valley in Massachusetts to be closer to a group of friends—actually, to share a house with them. Two years later, six of us headed to Portland, Oregon, including Barry Deutsch and my future husband, Kip Manley. I was able to take some time to re-explore comics in Portland, until I inexplicably found myself the Art Director of a free monthly publication called Anodyne. It was a fun if exhausting experience that would have been more rewarding if we’d more than a week to layout and design the issue every month (and I didn’t also have to work a day job).

My production staff at Anodyne was whoever was willing to donate time, which meant I had to train a few people in the wonders of desktop publishing, Kevin Moore among them. It was some ungodly hour while we were wrapping up the loose ends of the magazine that Kevin and I talked about the possibility of publishing our respective comics together. Dicebox had been named, its characters redefined, outlined across 36 chapters. Kevin had just begun revamping and expanding what was Louie the Lizard and is now Big Glitch.

It took the collapse of Anodyne to free up time and energy for me to begin pursuing the idea of actually doing Dicebox. Kevin and I flirted with, then abandoned, the idea of traditional printing, realizing that the internet supplied a more flexible and satisfying venue. And then Kevin decided to put Big Glitch aside to pursue other things, such as In Contempt.

To complete all 36 chapters of Dicebox is one of my life goals and I am grateful that I currently work a job that I only go to four days a week. This allows me not only to devote a significant time to Dicebox, but have an active social life, work on a fixer-upper home in SE Portland, indulge in stories in various media, develop my artistic skills and still spend plenty of quality time with my husband and cats.