{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…
Artist Bio – Joe Sacco
{mosimage}Joe Sacco is a Maltese citizen currently residing in Portland, OR where he makes his living as a cartoonist and journalist. Sacco received his bachelor of arts degree in journalism at the University of Oregon in 1981. Two years later he returned to his native Malta, where his first professional cartooning work (a series of romance comics) was published. After relocating back to Portland, he co-edited and co-published the monthly comics newspaper Portland Permanent Press from 1985 to 1986; PPP lasted 15 issues, and included early work by such cartoonists as John Callahan and J.R. Williams. In 1986, Sacco moved…
Jules Feiffer interview
Jules Feiffer talks EXPLAINERS and much more with Newsarama. This is quite a good interview with Feiffer, who doesn't do a lot of interviews.
Artist Bio – Gary Panter
{mosimage}Texas-born illustrator, painter, designer and part-time musician, Gary Panter is a child of the ’50s who blossomed in the full glare of the psychedelic ’60s and, after surviving underground during the ’70s, finally made his mark in the ’80s as head set designer for the successful kid/adult TV show Pee Wee’s Playhouse, a job which brought his jagged art and surreal cartoon ideas into the homes of America and bagged him two Emmy Awards. With Pee Wee, Panter created another world, a fantasy extension of his natural studio habitat which was constructed out of a collection of garbage and buried…
Artist Bio – Tony Millionaire
{mosimage}Tony Millionaire was born in 1956 and raised in Gloucester, Massachusetts. He grew up surrounded by a family of artists. His mother teaches art to Junior High School students, while his father is an advertiser and designer. Two of Millionaire’s grandparents were artists (one of his grandfathers was friends with the cartoonist Roy Crane). Millionaire’s mentor/grandfather was also an illustrator for the Saturday Evening Post and various adventure books and magazines. Millionaire also picked up his predilection for drawing ships and ocean scenes from his grandfather. Millionaire attended the Massachusetts College of Art in 1974 for four years. Until the…
Artist Bio – Tim Kreider
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…
