Cathy Guisewite was born in Dayton, Ohio on September 5, 1950. "All my life my parents have been wildly enthusiastic about anything creative my sisters or I did. Every time we made a greeting card--and we almost always made our own--Mom would say, 'Oh, this is good enough to be published.' Most mothers tape their children's work to the refrigerator door. Mine would send them off to the Museum of Modern Art.

"When I was growing up, I resented my mom for not being the kind of mother who sat home baking all day. She didn't bake and she didn't knit, and I felt mothers should do those things. Mom tended to be more cosmopolitan than the other mothers I knew. She took us to art museums and foreign films, and I hated everything she dragged us to. I wanted a fat little mother baking cookies.

"But I have...