Tim Kreider was born and educated in Baltimore, Maryland. His cartoon The Pain — When Will It End? ran in the Baltimore City Paper from 1997 to 2009 and also appeared in The New York Press, The Stranger, Philadelphia Weekly and other alternative weeklies. Fantagraphics has published three collections of his work, The Pain — When Will It End? (2005), Why Do They Kill Me? (2006), and Twilight of the Assholes (2011). He was featured in Ted Rall’s anthology Attitude 2: The New Subversive Alternative Cartoonists (2004). His essays have appeared in The New York Times, Film Quarterly, and The…
Artist Bio – Hank Ketcham
{mosimage}Henry (Hank) King Ketcham was born in 1920 on Queen Anne Hill in Seattle, Washington (how appropriate, then, that Seattle’s Fantagraphics Books is now collecting his life’s work). He attended the University of Washington in 1938, but he was soon tired of normal studies and started a career in animation. Until 1940, he was employed by Lantz Productions of Universal Studios. From 1941 to 1945, Hank Ketcham was chief photographic specialist with the United States Naval Reserve in Washington, DC, where he created his first comic strip, Half Hitch. After this, he worked with Walt Disney Productions on Pinocchio, Fantasia…
Artist Bio – Mark Kalesniko
{mosimage}Mark Kalesniko, born and raised in Trail, British Columbia, started his art career studying at the David Thompson University Center in Nelson, B.C. In 1981, Kalesniko relocated to California to study at the California Institute of the Arts. After receiving his B.F.A. in Character Animation, he worked in the animation industry as a layout artist. Projects he has worked on include The Little Mermaid, The Lion King, Mulan, and Atlantis, all for Disney. By the 1990s Kalesniko branched out professionally into adult-themed comics and graphic novels. His first, “Adolf Hears A Who” (1991), an eight page story about Hitler’s last…
Artist Bio – Roberta Gregory
{mosimage}Roberta Gregory was born in Los Angeles, California. She grew up reading (and drawing) comics because her father, Robert Gregory, was a very prolific writer and artist for various Disney titles, including Donald Duck. Considered one of the pioneers of women’s comics, her first published works date from the 1970s, with appearances in numerous feminist underground titles such as Wimmen’s Comix, and her own self-published comic, Dynamite Damsels (1976). Roberta has been writing and drawing comics ever since, giving her one of the longest-running ongoing careers in women’s independent comics. Her creative work has been very independent indeed, featuring a…
Artist Bio – Bob Fingerman
{mosimage}Best known for his comic series Minimum Wage (Fantagraphics Books), as well as the graphic novel White Like She (also Fantagraphics), Fingerman’s contributions to the world of comics have been many and varied. In 1984, while still in attendance at New York’s School of Visual Arts, he produced work for the legendary Harvey Kurtzman (creator of Mad magazine and Playboy’s “Little Annie Fanny” as well as the recently collected Humbug) on the short-lived young readers anthology NUTS! At the same time Fingerman produced a series of parodies exclusively for the European market, which ran in such periodicals as France’s L’Echo…
Artist Bio – Dame Darcy
{mosimage}Renaissance woman Dame Darcy won a scholarship to the San Francisco Art institute at the age of 17 in 1989. There she majored in film and animation, studying under George Kuchar and Larry Jordan. During this time, she self-published Meat Cake Comix; joined the band Caroliner with Lisa Carver, where she performed, released albums and toured; and illustrated Lisa’s magazine Rollerderby, as well as other Bay Area magazines and papers. Darcy moved to New York in 1992. Her Meat Cake comic-book series began publication with Fantagraphics Books Inc., who publishes Meat Cake and its compilations, which are distributed internationally, to…
Artist Bio – Robert Crumb
{mosimage}For four decades, Robert Crumb has shocked, entertained, titillated and challenged the imaginations (and the inhibitions) of comics fans the world over. In truth, alternative comics as we know them today might never have come about without R. Crumb’s influence — the acknowledged “Father” of the underground comics could also be considered the “Grandfather” of alternative comics. Crumb’s earliest cartoons were inspired more by the work of Carl Barks and Walt Kelly than the superhero comics enjoying their first wave of popularity at the time of Crumb’s childhood in the late ’40s. The man who once admitted to being “sexually…
Artist Bio – Daniel Clowes
{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,…
Artist Bio – Barry Windsor-Smith
{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…
Artist Bio – Ivan Brunetti
{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…
