When Bell was two, her American mother divorced her British father and took Gabrielle and her brother back to the United States. Ending up in a relatively isolated rural town in Mendocino County, Bell writes that she "grew up... spending a lot of time reading, walking in the woods, and making up stories." As a teenager Bell attended a college program for low-income and at-risk students hosted by Humboldt State University, where she took classes in Shakespeare and composition. When Bell was 17 she traveled in Europe, including England, where she met her British relatives. Later moving to San Francisco, Bell took art classes at the City College of San Francisco, worked in a series of dead-end retail jobs, and began self-publishing her comics. She currently lives in Brooklyn, NY.
Career
Books of...
From about 1998 to 2002, Bell annually self-published a 32-page minicomic, each of whose titles began with "Book of...", including Book of Insomnia, Book of Sleep, Book of Black, Book of Lies, and Book of Ordinary Things. Many of the stories from those comics were collected in When I'm Old and Other Stories, published by Alternative Comics in 2003.
''Lucky''
In 2003, Bell began the self-published semi-autobiographical Lucky series, of which the third won a 2003 Ignatz Award for Most Outstanding Minicomic. Lucky details Bell's day-to-day existence in a frank and good-humored manner, as she navigates a world of dilapidated rental apartments, low-paying jobs, yoga classes, roommate misadventures, and artistic frustration. These snippets of daily life in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, New York, are comforting in their familiarity; by settling into the rhythm of the artist's daily life, the reader experiences the heft of small victories and simple pleasures. Lucky tells of the anguish of nude modeling; sex-obsessed, adolescent art students; and Bell's own foibles. Lucky was collected by Drawn and Quarterly in fall 2006, and launched as a new series, also by Drawn and Quarterly, in 2007.
''Cecil and Jordan in New York''
Cecil and Jordan in New York is a collection of Bell's short comics work that has been published in various anthologies, including Kramers Ergot, Mome, and Drawn and Quarterly Showcase Book Four.
''The Voyeurs''
The Voyeurs is a real-time memoir of a turbulent five years in the life of renowned cartoonist, diarist and filmmaker Gabrielle Bell. It collects episodes from her award-winning series, Lucky, in which she travels to Tokyo, Paris, and the South of France and all over the United States, but remains anchored by her beloved Brooklyn, where sidekick Tony provides ongoing insight, offbeat humor and enduring friendship.
Bell collaborated with director Michel Gondry on a film adaptation of the title story of Cecil and Jordan in New York, in which a young woman turns herself into a chair so as not to be too much of a bother to those around her. The film, titled Interior Design, was co-written by Bell and Gondry and directed by Gondry as part of the film Tôkyô!. Bell and Gondry also collaborated on Kuruma Tohrimasu, a collection of drawings and photographs made during the production of Interior Design. Conceived of as a thank-you gift for the film's cast and crew, Kuruma Tohrimasu is published as part of Drawn and Quarterly’s Petits Livres series.
Anthologies
Bell was a regular contributor to Fantagraphics' quarterly anthology Mome. She has also contributed to publications such as The New Yorker, Kramers Ergot, Stereoscomic, Bogus Dead, Orchid, The Comics JournalSpecial Edition 2005, Scheherazade, Linus, and . Her work has been included three times in the annual Best American Comicsanthology series.
