Art and Design Prof. Phoebe Gloeckner isn’t afraid to speak her mind. Whether she’s penning an excoriating criticism of the comics community, illustrating a cross-section of a blowjob or telling the story of a murdered Mexican teenager, she’s got a lot to say on the subject besides what’s on the page. A cartoonist, writer and professional medical illustrator, Gloeckner accepted a position teaching figure drawing and comics in the School of Art and Design this term.

There’s a good reason her voice is so strong: Gloeckner has come up against all kinds of censorship — some external, some self-imposed — as a comics artist. “My work was just recently (called) 'a handbook for a pedophile,'" she said. Last April, Stockton, Calif., Mayor Gary Podesto cited Gloeckner’s “A Child’s Life,” a collection of her illustrations and comics, as an example of a lack of control over potentially offensive materials in San Joaquin County libraries. An 11-year old recently checked out the book, which is clearly intended for adults. One story in “A Child’s Life” involves a young girl travelling through a fairy-tale forest in which she can see her future relationships with different men. In another comic, a girl named Minnie sees imaginary dolls — abused children, starving refugees — and tries to rescue all of them. The Stockton City Council decided that its library system would not carry the book because of its supposedly inappropriate content.

Although she’s upset about the censorship, Gloeckner feels comfortable with the content of her work. “I know it’s not (a handbook for pedophiles), but I hadn’t looked at my work in a long time. Then I forced myself to look at it and say, ‘Is this really bad?’ and then I realized it wasn’t. (Podesto) took it totally out of context.” But censorship of her work comes not only from readers and viewers, but from within the publishing community: A printing company in Ann Arbor refused to print Gloeckner’s most recent work, “Diary of a Teenage Girl,” because of its content.

“But there is that little-girl voice in you thinking, ‘You wicked child!’ I drew things like that ever since I was very small, for my classmates, and I think I did get in trouble,” says Gloeckner. As a young artist, her work went virtually unseen by family and friends; when her work first got published, she assumed that no one read the underground comic books in which her art appeared.

“I always thought, ‘I’m bad, I should hide,’ ” she said. “Then again, I have this overwhelming desire to express this, so I will. I don’t care if no one reads it. I’m doing what I have to do, and no one’s calling me bad because they don’t see it.”

Eventually, Gloeckner learned to forget about everyone else — at least while she's still involved in the creative process. “I think my big problem was people's misconstruing the meaning of my work. The relationship of the work to the viewer is the most important to the viewer. But to me, it’s my relationship to the work.”

Her comics have been called pornographic by some critics, but Gloeckner denies the label. “There are so many different things anything can mean,” she explained. “I think that when people look at a sexual picture, it makes them kind of excited, and they feel awkward feeling that, and they can’t work it out. So even if it’s a picture of child abuse, the knee-jerk response to that is sex.” Using disturbing imagery might make readers uncomfortable, but she knows that these illustrations are valuable to the larger work. “As an artist, you have to have that feeling, because you want the reader to have the same confusion the person in the story does. You don’t mind if they feel sexual for a few seconds if they get further into the psychological thing because that’s what it’s about.”