Jan Eliot (born 1950 in San Jose,

California California is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States, located along the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the List of states and territori ...

) is an American

cartoonist A cartoonist is a visual artist who specializes in both drawing and writing cartoons (individual images) or comics (sequential images). Cartoonists differ from comics writers or comic book illustrators in that they produce both the literary and ...

Life and career

Before becoming a full-time cartoonist, Jan worked as a waitress, car salesperson, bookmobile driver, advertising copywriter, graphic designer, and greeting card writer. In her cartoonist career, she initially worked as a graphic designer in the daytime, while doing cartoons at night. Some independent papers published her work, and after 16 years, she achieved syndication, and became a full-time cartoonist. Prior to Eliot's syndication, she was mentored by cartoonist

Lynn Johnston Lynn Johnston (born May 28, 1947) is a Canadian cartoonist and author, best known for her newspaper comic strip '' For Better or For Worse''. She was the first woman and first Canadian to win the National Cartoonist Society's Reuben Award. Ea ...

, who proofed the cartoon strips. She chose the name Eliot after her divorce, in honor of

George Eliot Mary Ann Evans (22 November 1819 – 22 December 1880; alternatively Mary Anne or Marian), known by her pen name George Eliot, was an English novelist, poet, journalist, translator, and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era. She wro ...

.Washington Post chat transcript
October 24, 2003, retrieved on July 8, 2007. She lives in

Eugene, Oregon Eugene ( ) is a city in the U.S. state of Oregon. It is located at the southern end of the Willamette Valley, near the confluence of the McKenzie and Willamette rivers, about east of the Oregon Coast. As of the 2020 United States Census, Eu ...

and is married to Ted Lay.

Cartoons

Eliot wrote and illustrated the

comic strip A comic strip is a sequence of drawings, often cartoons, arranged in interrelated panels to display brief humor or form a narrative, often serialized, with text in balloons and captions. Traditionally, throughout the 20th and into the 21st ...

Stone Soup Stone Soup is a European folk story in which hungry strangers convince the people of a town to each share a small amount of their food in order to make a meal that everyone enjoys, and exists as a moral regarding the value of sharing. In varyin ...

''. She created a previous strip known as ''Patience and Sarah'', which enjoyed a run of five years in 10 publications. Her next comic strip was called ''Sister City''. This weekly strip appeared in the

, ''

The Register-Guard ''The Register-Guard'' is a daily newspaper in the northwestern United States, published in Eugene, Oregon. It was formed in a 1930 merger of two Eugene papers, the ''Eugene Daily Guard'' and the ''Morning Register''. The paper serves the Eugene- ...

'' for five years before the name was changed to ''Stone Soup'' in November 1995, when it became nationally syndicated by

Universal Press Syndicate Universal Press Syndicate (UPS), a subsidiary of Andrews McMeel Universal, was an independent press syndicate. It distributed lifestyle and opinion columns, comic strips and other content. Popular columns include Dear Abby, Ann Coulter, Roger Eb ...

/Universal Uclick. ''Stone Soup'' is syndicated to more than 300 newspapers, mostly in America but also across the world. The strip's characters, widowed single mom Val and her children Alix and Holly, were based on Eliot's life and the lives of those around her, but she also considers each character a reflection of herself. Val's sister, Joan is also a working mom, who lives across the fence from her. Other characters include Joan's husband, Wally and Val's new husband, Phil. ''Stone Soup'' featured as a daily strip for 20 years until October 2015, when Eliot decided she no longer wanted to draw a daily comic, to devote more time to travel, socialize and focus on other creative projects. She continued to create a Sunday cartoon strip. After reader outcry at the family-oriented strip's cessation in the ''

Montreal Gazette The ''Montreal Gazette'', formerly titled ''The Gazette'', is the only English-language daily newspaper published in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Three other daily English-language newspapers shuttered at various times during the second half of th ...

'', the weekend version of ''Stone Soup'' was reintroduced to the ''Montreal Gazette'' in January 2016. On June 15, 2020, she announced that she was retiring. The last Stone Soup strip was published on July 26, 2020.

Books

In addition to eleven ''

'' compilations, Eliot's work has appeared in: * ''Women's Glibber: State-of-the-Art Women's Humor'', edited by Roz Warren. (1992) * ''Mothers! Cartoons by Women'', edited by Roz Warren. (1993) * ''What Is This Thing Called Sex? Cartoons by Women'', edited by Roz Warren. (1993) * ''Off Road Parenting: Practical Solutions for Difficult Behavior'', by Caesar Pacifici, Patricia Chamberlain, Lee White, and Jan Eliot. (2002)

Group exhibitions

2011 ''Timely and Timeless'', Library of Congress (September 2011) 2016 ''Comic City, USA'', Oregon Historical Society (December 2016 - January 2017)

Awards

2010 Eugene Arts and Letters award

Notes

External links

Jan Eliot bio at Universal Press Syndicate
{{DEFAULTSORT:Eliot, Jan Living people 1950 births American comic strip cartoonists Female comics writers American female comics artists Writers from Eugene, Oregon Artists from San Jose, California