Phoebe Louise Adams Gloeckner (born December 22, 1960), is an American cartoonist, illustrator, painter, and novelist. Early life Gloeckner was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her mother was a librarian and her father, David Gloeckner, was a commercial illustrator. Her father's family was Quaker and she attended Quaker schools when she was young. She has a younger sister. Gloeckner's parents divorced when she was 4 years old. In 1972, when she was 11 or 12 years old, her mother remarried and the family moved to San Francisco. She attended several Bay Area schools, including The Urban School of San Francisco and Lick-Wilmerding High School. She was a boarding student at Castilleja (in Palo Alto) for a year, but returned to San Francisco to live with her mother, her mother's boyfriend, and her sister, when she was 14. Gloeckner began cartooning at the age of 12. Because her mother was dating Robert Armstrong, a cartoonist in Robert Crumb's band Cheap Suit Serenaders, she met many San Francisco underground comics figures who had a profound influence upon her, including Robert Crumb, Aline Kominsky, Bill Griffith, Terry Zwigoff, and Diane Noomin. Gloeckner attended San Francisco State University from 1980 to 1985, where she was a pre-med student and studied French and art. She spent the 1983–1984 academic year in Université d’Aix-Marseille studying art, French, and biology, and from 1984 to 1985 spent about six months studying Czech and literature at Charles University in Prague. She has an M.A. in Biomedical Communications from University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas, which she received in 1988. The degree was in medical illustration. Her 1987 dissertation was on the "Semiotic Analysis of Medical Illustration," in which she studies narrative devices used in medical and surgical illustration. Gloeckner became interested in medical illustration through her maternal grandfather, an antique dealer who collected and sold old books, and her paternal grandmother, Dr. Louise Carpenter Gloeckner, who was a physician in Philadelphia and was the first woman to be elected vice president of the American Medical Association. Career Gloeckner worked prolifically as a medical illustrator since 1988, and her training is evident in her paintings and comics art, which are highly detailed and often prominently feature the human body. Her first prominent work in fiction publishing, a series of illustrations for the RE/Search edition of J. G. Ballard's novel The Atrocity Exhibition, used clinical images of internal anatomy, sex,