Fantagraphics Blog Mike Baehr

{mosimage}Daniel Clowes was born in Chicago, Il. on April 14, 1961. He attended the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY from which he graduated with a BFA degree in 1984. He began his career as an “alternative” or “underground” cartoonist in 1985 with the short-lived comic book series Lloyd Llewellyn, a feature loosely based around the adventures of a private detective which, in its gleeful embrace of the detritus of post-war pop culture (1950s science fiction, bad detective fiction, Russ Meyer movies, EC comics, etc) predated many of the popular art trends of subsequent decades. He ended the series in 1987,…

{mosimage}When Barry Windsor-Smith began his career as a comics artist in the late-60s, working on Marvel’s new Conan the Barbarian series, the young artist immediately made a name for himself as one of the most exciting stylists ever to arrive upon the scene. Infusing a Pre-Raphaelite influence into comics had never been done before, and Windsor-Smith created many of the most elegant and beloved comics of the 1970s with stints on Conan the Barbarian, The Uncanny X-Men, The Avengers and more. Then, after he had taken the comics form to new heights in his momentous two-year run on Conan, Windsor-Smith…

{mosimage}Ivan Brunetti was born in a small town in Italy on October 3, 1967. His misspent childhood consisted entirely of self-absorption, spontaneously generated hallucinations, bad drawing, and disappointments to his family. He was named after Ivan The Terrible, but as part of some apparent cosmic drollery, he turned out to be an overly sensitive, severely introverted, sad little sissy-boy. At the tender age of 8, he moved from his grandparents’ farm in Italy to the industrial South Side of Chicago; he has lived in this fair city for about 5000 years, rarely venturing outside of its bittersweet confines. He has…

{mosimage}Born in 1941 in Utica, New York as WWII broke out, Vaughn Bodé had a traumatic childhood. He first created a stir with his art in several college newspapers at Syracuse University. Professional and hardworking, Bodé blazed through the world of comics in less than a decade. His cartooning career took off in the late ’60s, as he art-directed, created animated commercials, made comic books, won a Hugo Award, and contributed to magazines such as EVO, The East Village Other, National Lampoon, Creepy, and Eerie. His series Deadbone (or Deadbone Erotica) ran in the men’s magazine Cavalier for over 200…

{product_snapshot:id=568,true,false,false,left}Ted Stearn was born in Massachussets in 1961 as a small baby, but soon grew up to be a very short child. He loved to draw, so when he grew a little more he decided that he wanted to be an artist. In 1979 he went to Rhode Island School of Design and majored in painting. His senior year he spent in Rome, Italy, where he was blown away by seeing the real thing, instead of all those fuzzy slides in art history class. He was also blown away by the fact that he was losing his hair already. After…