Jen started making penguin cartoons as birthday cards for her sister Tina, who really likes penguins.

Then, since humans tend to go out in gangs for birthdays, she started doing them for other relatives and friends. They are the sort of things that are fun to pass around at Japanese steak houses while you’re waiting for the chef to throw food on you.

Eventually the whole thing evolved into a weekly penguin cartoon (pengcognito.com) and Jen & her husband (Moof) ended up travelling to South Africa with Earthwatch to help out with a penguin research project (and take a ton of penguin photos!)

Moof takes the actual penguin photographs, but most of the rest of it is not his fault. He comes up with the occasional brilliant inspiration, like the WaddleMaster 3000.

Jen can occasionally be found doing incomprehensible human stuff like writing USB device drivers for the Mac, doing software archaeology, or making database back ends for web sites at House of C, (houseofc.com – a quirky little software company) when she really ought to be busy documenting the secret life of penguins, which is a lot more interesting.

The weekly comic also appears in Livejournal