She dabbled in political comics with I Drew This!, which espoused her liberal political views. She attempted political allegory in 2009 with Raine Dog, a comic deconstructing the relationship between anthropomorphic animals and humans. Abandoned and later rebooted, negative fan response and time pressure from other projects eventually caused it to become an Orphaned Series.
In 2009, she won Amazon.com's "Comic Strip Superstar" contest with Girl, a comic about a young girl. This was a somewhat underdeveloped concept created specifically for the contest, which recycled some material from Ozy and Millie. The comic went through a prolonged development process before being retooled into Phoebe and Her Unicorn. It is currently syndicated by Andrews McMeel Universal on Go Comics, with a second book released at the end of May 2015 and newspaper release at the end of March 2015.
Tropes which appear in her works:
- Author Appeal: Characters with glasses show up a lot in her work, no doubt due to Dana being a glasses wearer herself.
- She also really likes drawing dragons, as shown with both Llewellyn and Todd the Candy Dragon.
- Author Tract: She tended to veer into left-wing politics in regards to her Orphaned Series Raine Dog, with
Anvilicious soapboxing about "Blue State" Democrats and gender identity, coupled with the Unfortunate Implications of the various intended metaphors. Previously, I Drew This! was pretty openly a political comic, but even her least political comic, Ozy and Millie, still had political commentary, usually with geoglobal politics boiled down to playground puppets, and famously Millie's Mr. W sockpuppet.- More recently, she's used Phoebe and Her Unicorn to address nihilism. Marigold gives a statement that's convincing enough that Phoebe's completely okay with nihilism as long as sparkles are involved.
- More recently, she's used Phoebe and Her Unicorn to address nihilism. Marigold gives a statement that's convincing enough that Phoebe's completely okay with nihilism as long as sparkles are involved.
- Career Resurrection: A minor example, but due to Author Tract nature on some of her later works, especially Raine Dog, she was a subject to massive criticism. Thankfully, she managed to recover from it when Phoebe and Her Unicorn became a hit.
- Half-Dressed Cartoon Animal
- Painting the Medium: Both Ozy and Millie and Phoebe and Her Unicorn have characters that use different fonts in their word balloons, to suggest different accents or manners of speaking.
- Schedule Slip: Ozy and Millie had an erratic update schedule toward the end; Raine Dog repeatedly went on hiatus, was restarted, then abandoned; Phoebe and Her Unicorn launched months later than originally expected.
- She Also Did: She's also a musician, and has a bunch of songs uploaded onto YouTube.
- World of Funny Animals: Both Ozy and Millie and Raine Dog, although the latter also contains humans (and might have been intended as a Deconstruction of the Lions and Tigers and Humans... Oh, My! trope).
