Kathryn Garrison was born and raised in the People's Republic of New Jersey. She began drawing and making up stories at a young age, hoping to someday supplant Charles Schulz. Her cartoons and illustrations ended up in the Shore Regional HS newspaper and yearbook, and got her into hot water on more than one occasion.
Trained as a landscape gardener, Kathryn served an internship at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in England. While there, she took pictures, soaked up the culture, and gathered material for her comic strips.
A removal to a farm in the hills of southern West Virginia changed her life. It was a homecoming of sorts for a girl who used to raise chickens and rabbits in the backyard of her family's suburban lot, and who dreamed of owning her own stable of horses. Farm animals play an important role in Kathryn's cartoons.
The farm provided her with material for a series of comic strips which first saw publication under the title Mother in a local paper, and which will be presented here as Kate's Mountain, named after a real geographical feature not far from Kathryn's home. This series was created as amusement for one of her friends, a veterinarian who helped Kathryn through the trials and tribulations of adjusting to farm life. She insists that nothing in these cartoons is "made up."
Other friends helped to kick-start Kathryn's ambition to give her artwork an audience. Of Mouse And Moon is a direct result of the inspiration she received from Marc Saxton and Scott Kellogg, two school-friends without whose help she would probably still be giggling to herself. She also owes a debt of gratitude to Allen Woolley, the sponsor of this site. Thanx, Mako!
Her present interest in pirates is inexplicable, except to say everybody loves pirates! Pirates of Penumbra, the sequel to Of Mouse And Moon came from a silly ditty Kathryn sang while cutting hay one day. The Legend Of Anne Bunny is an outgrowth of her interest in the notorious lady pirate of the 1720's, Anne Bonney, who, with Calico Jack Rackham and Mary Read, blazed her way into the history books alongside such notable scoundrels as Blackbeard and Bartholomew Roberts.
Kathryn also spends much of her free time writing fantasy novels, and hopes to bring one or two of these into graphic-novel form sometime in the near future.