Rant Violet

Violet LaCello is the nom de toon of Caryn Louise Leschen. Professor Leschen was born in the sleepy little village of Queens Village, New York, and made paper dolls and her own personal versions of Seventeen magazine before she grew up to be a famous cartoonist, writing bodice-ripping stories of passion and vice for Wimmin’s Comix and Twisted Sisters. In addition, her cartoon advice column, Ask Aunt Violet, appeared in alternative weekly newspapers from 1992 to 1998. Around 1996, she began applying her sequential art and storytelling expertise to writing and designing websites and other graphic design and writing projects. These days, Caryn spends much of her time designing clever, artful interfaces for mobile devices, including developing lavish cookbooks and children’s books for the iPad. One of her passions is traveling to meetings with various organizations and trade shows as a graphics facilitator. When at home, however, she works as an Adjunct Professor in the Computer Science Department of the University of San Francisco, expanding the minds of her lucky students on the subject of digital animation, graphic design and writing. She is also working on a graphic novel about her mother’s peculiar childhood (hence, her peculiar childhood), entitled Miss Internal Revenue. Following that she is hoping to give birth to  another graphic novel, called 850 Apartments, about growing up in Bell Park, a wacky, kibbutz-like post-WWII Veteran’s Housing Co-op. You can learn lots more about Caryn Louise by visiting her website, Aunt Violet Productions.