Caryn Louise Leschen is a freelance illustrator, copywriter, cartoonist and animator. Her work has been featured in Wimmen's Comix and Twisted Sisters anthologies, as well as the She Draws Comics exhibition.
Life and Career[]
Originally from Bell Park, a post-WWII Veteran’s Housing Co-op in Queens, New York City, Leschen began taking classes at the Art Students League as a teenager. She graduated from the California College of Arts & Crafts in Oakland, California with a BFA in 1987. She has remained in San Francisco since.
She has served as editor-in-chief and art director of Wimmen's Comix, and has been featured in all issues since 1983. Her work can also be seen in the Twisted Sisters graphic novel anthologies. Her Aunt Violet Productions has provided copywriting, art, design and animation services since 1987 to many clients.
In the 1990s she produced the popular weekly cartoon-format advice column, "Ask Aunt Violet" for alternative weeklies such as the SF Weekly, Chicago Reader and Creative Loafing. She self-syndicated "Ask Aunt Violet" internationally. Leschen's print and web work includes catalog copywriting, animated online greeting cards, and design, illustration and copywriting for many websites. More recently, she designs and writes iPhone and iPad apps, often medical iPhone apps, but other ones too: culinary apps, silly humor apps, and various other widgety things.
For the past two years, Ms. Leschen has been teaching animation, graphic arts and writing as an Adjunct Professor at the University of San Francisco—and working as a Writing Coach in The Writing Center there.
She is currently working on a collection of her syndicated comics, the never-before-collected "...Cool, Calm and Collected Ask Aunt Violet," with Puzzled Squirrel Press, which is planned for release in the Summer of 2012. She is also eagerly entertaining grants and other opportunities (such as writer's retreats) or just plain money so that she can work on a graphic novelized memoir about her grandmother’s very peculiar and tragic life, tentatively called Miss Internal Revenue, and plans to follow that with another graphic novel, Ev’ry Month Like a Period, about a long-distance romance gone terribly, terribly wrong. Currently she is single, lives in California, and has a really lovely, insanely tall son in college.
Bibliography[]
- Wimmen's Comix #8-15
- Mind Riot
- Twisted Sisters Vol. 1 & 2
- Strip AIDS USA (1988)
- "The Liter Side of AIDS"