Fantagraphics Blog

{mosimage}Chris Ware was born in 1967 in Omaha, Nebraska, where he was first inspired by reading Peanuts paperbacks in his grandmother’s basement, unlimited access to 1970s television, and a local neighborhood cartoonist who had also worked under his grandfather’s managing editorship at the newspaper the Omaha World-Herald. Ware got his start in published comics, however, while attending the University of Texas in Austin. He drew comics every week, and sometimes on a daily basis, for The Daily Texan, still the country’s largest university newspaper. It was here that Ware began developing such characters as Quimby the Mouse and an early…

{mosimage}Known for the most part simply as “Spain,” Spain Rodriguez was an active participant in the revolutionary underground comix movement of the 1960s and ’70s. Born in 1940, Spain grew up in a Buffalo, New York and later lived in New York City. He attended the Silvermine Guild School, an art and design school in Connecticut. After living in New York with fellow artists Kim Deitch and Trina Robbins, Spain moved to San Francisco where he became involved in the thriving underground comix movement. Spain’s comics were in the groundbreaking Zap comix along with R. Crumb, Victor Moscoso, Gilbert Shelton…

{mosimage}Sophie Crumb was born in 1981 to Robert Crumb and Aline Kominsky-Crumb in Winters, California. As a child, her father read classic comics to her such as Little Lulu and Popeye. When she was 8 years old, her family moved to France. While attending high school there, her sketchbook was chosen to represent Enid Coleslaw’s art in the popular film Ghost World. Post-graduation, she went to circus school in Paris. Crumb returned to the U. S., briefly residing in Berkeley, California while working at Comic Relief, before moving to Brooklyn, New York to apprentice as a tattoo artist with Adam…

{mosimage}Richard Sala’s paintings and prints have been exhibited internationally and his animated serial, “Invisible Hands” appeared on MTV’s Liquid Television. He has done illustrations for many magazines and newspapers, including Esquire, Newsweek, Playboy, The Washington Post and The New York Times. He provided the artwork for a story by Lemony Snicket in one of the series of Little Lit children’s books and did over sixty drawings for Jack Kerouac’s recently discovered Dr. Sax screenplay. A new adaptation of Dracula by horror writer Steve Niles, published in Fall 2005, contains twenty-two new color paintings by Sala. His comic strip work officially…

{mosimage}Stan Sakai was born in Kyoto, Japan, grew up in Hawaii, and now lives in California with his wife, Sharon, and children, Hannah and Matthew. He received a Fine Arts degree from the University of Hawaii, and did further studies at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. His creation, Usagi Yojimbo, is the story of a samurai rabbit living in a feudal Japan populated by anthropomorphic animals. It first appeared in Albedo Comics in 1984. Since then, Usagi has been on television as a guest of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and as toys, on clothing, in…