Lynda Barry

Lynda Barry is a cartoonist, novelist, playwright, painter, and teacher. Her most recent book is Blabber Blabber Blabber-Volume 1 of Everything, a series that compiles works from across her 30-plus year career in American comics, beginning with her long-running syndicated weekly comic strip Ernie Pook’s Comeek. Her comics started appearing in the Chicago Reader in 1979.

Barry is the author of 17 books, including, recently, the “autobifictionalography” One Hundred Demons (2002), and the experimental comics-and-collage how-to book What It Is (2008), which won the Eisner Award for Best Reality Based Graphic Novel, as well as its companion Picture This: The Near-Sighted Monkey Book (2010). The latter two are based on her traveling workshop “Writing the Unthinkable,” about innate and latent creativity and the relationship between images and memory. Previous works include the comics collections Girls and Boys (1981), Down the Street (1988), Come Over, Come Over (1990), and It’s So Magic (1994); and the novels Cruddy (2000) and The Good Times are Killing Me (1999), which was adapted into an off-Broadway play.

Barry was the editor of The Best American Comics 2008 and is spring 2012 Artist in Residence at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Alison Bechdel

Alison Bechdel is the author of the graphic memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, a New York Times bestseller that was named the Best Book of 2006 by Time magazine and was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. Her comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, which ran for twenty-five years, has been syndicated in over fifty newspapers and translated into many languages. In 2008 Houghton Mifflin published the compilation volume The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For. She was the editor of Best American Comics 2011. Her work has appeared in Granta, Slate, The New York Times Book Review, and McSweeney’s, among other venues.

Bechdel is a Mellon Residential Fellow for Arts and Practice at the Richard and Mary L. Gray Center at the University of Chicago in spring 2012. At Chicago, she is co-teaching a course with Hillary Chute on comics and autobiography.

Bechdel’s next book, Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama, a graphic memoir about her mother, is due from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in May 2012.

Ivan Brunetti

Ivan Brunetti is a Chicago-based cartoonist, illustrator, editor, and assistant professor in the Art + Design Department at Columbia College Chicago. He is the creator of the comics series Schizo, compiled with other material in his book Misery Loves Comedy (2007). He has contributed comics and illustrations to numerous publications including The New Yorker — where he is a recurrent cover artist — The New York Times Magazine, and McSweeney’s. He is the editor of two volumes of An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons, and True Stories (2006 and 2008). In 2005, he curated the exhibition The Cartoonist’s Eye, which featured works by 75 cartoonists.

Brunetti has taught cartooning courses at the University of Chicago, his alma mater, and at Columbia College, and he recently published Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice (2011).

His next book, Aesthetics: A Memoir, will be published by Yale University Press in 2013.

Charles Burns

Charles Burns is a Philadelphia-based cartoonist and illustrator whose work became famous in RAW magazine. He is the creator of the graphic novel Black Hole (2005), which won Harvey and Ignatz Awards, among many other honors. His most recent book, X’ed Out, is the first volume of a three-part series inspired by William S. Burroughs and Hergé’s Tintin. The next volume, The Hive, is due to appear from Pantheon in October 2012.

Burns’s numerous book collections include Big Baby in Curse of the Molemen (1986); Hard-Boiled Defective Stories (1988); Skin Deep: Tales of Doomed Romance (1992); Modern Horror Sketchbook (1994); Facetasm, with Gary Panter (1998); Big Baby (2000); Close Your Eyes (2001); and One Eye, a book of photography (2007). Past projects include a set design for The Hard Nut, Mark Morris’ adaptation of The Nutcracker, and an animated film for Peur(s) du Noir (Fear[s] of the Dark). This year he had a solo retrospective at the Museum Leuven in Belgium.

In addition to contributing covers to Time, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Magazine, Burns is the official cover artist for The Believer magazine.

Daniel Clowes

Daniel Clowes is a cartoonist, illustrator, and screenwriter who grew up in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago. His influential series Eightball ran from 1989 until 2004, and earned numerous awards. In 2001, his graphic novel Ghost World was adapted into a film by Terry Zwigoff, for which he wrote the screenplay and was nominated for an Academy Award. They also collaborated in 2006 on the film Art School Confidential.

Clowes’s books include #$@&!: The Official Lloyd Lewellyn Collection (1989); Lout Rampage! (1991); Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron (1993); Pussey! (1995); Ghost World (1997); Caricature (1998); David Boring (2000); Twentieth-Century Eightball (2002); Ice Haven (2005); Wilson (2010); The Death Ray (2011); and Mister Wonderful (2011), which collects his comic strip that was serialized in the New York Times Magazine.

In 2011, Clowes won the PEN Award for Graphic Literature. This April, Clowes will have his first major solo exhibition at the Oakland Museum of California. In conjunction with the show, Abrams will release a full color monograph of Clowes’s work entitled The Art of Daniel Clowes: Modern Cartoonist.

R. Crumb

R. Crumb is the founder of the underground comics movement and is considered the most influential of living cartoonists. He created Zap Comix in San Francisco in 1967, which featured some of his most famous strips and characters, including the oft-cited and interpreted “Keep On Truckin’” strip. His enduring characters include Mr. Natural, Flakey Foont, Angelfood McSpade, Shuman the Human, and Fritz the Cat.

Crumb founded and edited Weirdo magazine (1981-1993), a venue in which many alternative cartoonists began their careers. He is the subject of the acclaimed documentary Crumb (1994) directed by Terry Zwigoff and produced by Lynn O’Donnell and David Lynch.

Crumb has published many, many comic books (including Dirty Laundry Comics and Self-Loathing Comics, with Aline Kominsky-Crumb), books (including R. Crumb’s Kafka and The Book of Genesis), and book collections (including The Book of Mr. Natural and R. Crumb’s America). Fantagraphics has issued 17 volumes of The Complete Crumb Comics. Crumb’s illustration and comics work has been shown in art exhibits all over the world.

His next book Drawn Together (released in France as Parle-Moi d’Amour), is a collaboration with his wife, Kominsky-Crumb, and includes past work from The New Yorker, Weirdo, Self-Loathing, and Dirty Laundry, as well as a new collaborative 12-page strip. The book will be released in 2012.

Phoebe Gloeckner

Phoebe Gloeckner is a cartoonist, a writer, a trained medical illustrator, and a professor at the University of Michigan School of Art and Design. Her best-known works are the comics collection A Child’s Life and Other Stories (1998), and the genre-defying illustrated novel Diary of a Teenage Girl: An Account in Words and Pictures (2002). Gloeckner is also known for her illustrations of J.G. Ballard’s reissue of The Atrocity Exhibition (1991), and for her covers to the classic books Angry Women and Angry Women in Rock.

Gloeckner’s piece on the serial murders of young women in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, La Tristeza, appeared in the 2008 volume I Live Here. Gloeckner’s current project, a long-form, multi-media work of experimental reportage, extends her focus on Juárez. In 2008, Gloeckner received a Guggenheim fellowship for this project.

Justin Green

Justin Green inaugurated comics autobiography with his risk-taking, hugely influential Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary, first published as a stand-alone 44-page comic book in 1972. This classic work was re-issued as a deluxe edition, large-format book by McSweeney’s in 2009. This also includes an Afterword by Green, which explores the cultural context of the earlier work. French and Spanish translations were published in 2011. His work has appeared in scores of publications in the underground and official press, including The Sacramento Bee, Print Magazine and The New Yorker.

From 1986 through 2006 he had a monthly strip in Signs Of The Times magazine. ST Publications’s Justin Green’s Sign Game is a collection of those pieces and explores his adventures and discoveries in becoming a lettering craftsman. From 1992 until the demise of Tower Records in 2002, he drew a monthly biographical feature titled, “PULSE! Presents Musical Legends.” The collected anthology, comprised of over 100 musician studies, is available through Last Gasp. This San Francisco publishing house also printed an anthology in 1996, The Binky Brown Sampler, which includes the original 44-page Binky opus with lesser-known stories featuring his cartoon doppelgänger.

He continues to work as a cartoonist, fine artist and sign painter in Cincinnati. His main web presence Justin Green Cartoon Art has links to several other sites.

Ben Katchor

Ben Katchor is an award-winning cartoonist and the author of books including Cheap Novelties: the Pleasures of Urban Decay (1991); The Jew of New York (1998); Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer: The Beauty Supply District (2000); and most recently The Cardboard Valise (2011). His comic strips appear monthly in Metropolis magazine. Katchor has also been a contributor to The New Yorker, among other venues. With musician Mark Mulcahy, Katchor has created a series of musical theater pieces set in his own illustrated landscapes, which The New York Times called “an answered prayer for anyone who has dreamed of living inside a graphic novel.” His most recent musical Up From the Stacks (2011) was commissioned by and performed at The Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library and Lincoln Center.

Katchor is the first cartoonist to receive MacArthur “genius” Fellowship. He also received a Guggenheim fellowship in 2002. He is currently a professor at Parsons, The New School for Design in New York City.

Aline Kominsky-Crumb

Aline Kominsky-Crumb, a cartoonist, painter, and a pioneer of comics autobiography, resides in southern France. Her piece “Goldie: A Neurotic Woman” appeared in the inaugural issue of the underground Wimmen’s Comix in 1972, making it the first female-authored narrative autobiographical comic. She has published her work in a number of underground comics anthologies, including Twisted Sisters, which she co-founded, and Arcade, and she created her own comics solo title, Power Pak. She was the editor of Weirdo magazine for seven years.

Kominsky-Crumb’s books include Love That Bunch (1990), The Complete Dirty Laundry Comics (with R. Crumb, 1993), and Need More Love: A Graphic Memoir (2007). In 2007, the Adam Baumgold Gallery in New York City mounted a solo retrospective spanning thirty-three years of work. Roberta Smith, reviewing the show in The New York Times, declared Kominsky-Crumb “excels at the drawn-and-written confessional comic.”

Kominsky-Crumb recently finished a new 12-page strip with R. Crumb, with whom she has often collaborated. It will be included in their book Drawn Together (released in France as Parle-Moi d’Amour, and forthcoming in the U.S. this year). The book contains their collaborative comics from 1972 to the present, including from Dirty Laundry, Self-Loathing, Weirdo, and The New Yorker.

Françoise Mouly

Françoise Mouly is one of the most important comics and art editors and publishers of the past 30 years. Mouly founded, edited, and published the influential avant-garde “comix and graphix” magazine RAW (1980-1991) along with her husband, cartoonist Art Spiegelman. RAW provided a venue for numerous groundbreaking alternative and international comics artists (including Lynda Barry, Charles Burns, Justin Green, Ben Katchor, Gary Panter, Art Spiegelman, and Chris Ware, among many others).

Mouly has been art editor of The New Yorker since 1993, and has been responsible for over 800 covers in her time there. This spring, Abrams will release her book Blown Covers: New Yorker Covers You Were Never Meant To See, in which she goes behind the scenes of some of the magazine’s most controversial covers.

In 2000, Mouly created a Raw Junior division, publishing books of comics for kids by star writers, cartoonists, and children’s book illustrators including Maurice Sendak, Paul Auster, and David Sedaris. Her Little Lit books have been New York Times bestsellers, and a paperback anthology, Big Fat Little Lit, was published in 2006. In 2009, she edited, along with Spiegelman, The TOON Treasury of Classic Children’s Comics.

Mouly is the publisher and editorial director of TOON Books, a series of learn-to-read comics for children.

Gary Panter

Credited with defining the 1970s California punk aesthetic, Gary Panter is a cartoonist and painter who works in many media. In 1980, he published “The Rozz Tox Manifesto,” which encouraged underground artists to infiltrate the mainstream. Within underground comics, Panter is perhaps best known for his “ratty line” aesthetic and character Jimbo. His strips have been published in such publications as RAW and Matt Groening’s Zongo Comics. Panter’s book publications include the graphic novels Jimbo in Purgatory (Fantagraphics); Jimbo’s Inferno (Fantagraphics); Cola Madnes (Funny Garbage); and Jimbo: Adventures in Paradise (Pantheon). PictureBox published the monograph Gary Panter in 2008.

Panter designed sets and puppets for Pee-Wee’s Playhouse, for which he won three Emmy awards, as well as posters and album covers for bands from The Germs to the Red Hot Chili Peppers. He has staged psychedelic light shows at the Hirschorn Museum in Washington, DC and The Anthology Film Archives in New York City. In 2008, Panter had a one-man show at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art.

Joe Sacco

Joe Sacco, born in Malta in 1960, is the contemporary innovator of comics journalism. In 1991 and 1992, Sacco spent several months in Israel and the Occupied Territories, interviewing about a hundred people and taking copious notes for what become his American Book Award-winning book Palestine (2001), a genre-defining piece of long-form comics journalism. Since then, he has published six books, including Safe Area Gorazde; The Fixer: A Story from Sarajevo; and, most recently, Footnotes in Gaza, which examines two massacres in Gaza in 1956. He has also contributed pieces to venues such as Harper’s, Details, The New York Times Magazine, VQR: The Virginia Quarterly Review, and the Guardian.

In 2001 he received both a Guggenheim fellowship and an Eisner award. Footnotes in Gaza received the Eisner award for “Best Writer/Artist – Nonfiction” in 2010.

Sacco’s next book, Journalism, a collection of short pieces, will be published by Metropolitan Books in June 2012.

Seth

Seth is a Canadian cartoonist, illustrator, and designer. He is the author of many books, including It’s a Good Life, If You Don’t Weaken (his first book, appearing in 1996), and The Great Northern Brotherhood of Canadian Cartoonists (2011). Seth’s serialized comics include Palookaville, Clyde Fans, and George Sprott (1894-1975), which appeared in the New York Times magazine in 25 installments in 2007.

Seth’s illustrations have appeared widely in Canadian and American magazines, including The New Yorker, as well as on book and album covers. He is the designer of numerous books, including Charles Schulz’s The Complete Peanuts. He is currently illustrating Lemony Snicket’s four-volume autobiography, Wrong Questions, the first of which, Who Could That Be at This Hour? is due from Little Brown in October 2012.

Art Spiegelman

Art Spiegelman is one of the world’s most famous cartoonists, and the recipient of many awards and honors. In 1992 he received a Pulitzer Prize for Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, a two-volume series (1986; 1991) that looks at his parents’ experience of the Holocaust, as well as the cartoonist son’s attempt to make a book about it.

In 1980, after he had founded the important underground comics magazine Arcade (1975-1976), among other titles, Spiegelman founded RAW, the avant-garde “comix and graphix” magazine, with his wife, Françoise Mouly. His numerous books include Breakdowns, a 1978 anthology republished in 2008 along with the new work Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*!; In the Shadow of No Towers (2004), about September 11th; and MetaMaus (2011), on which he collaborated with conference organizer Hillary Chute, about the stylistic, historical, and family research that went into making Maus.

From 1993-2003, Spiegelman was a staff artist and writer at The New Yorker, a venue to which he has contributed many covers, including the famous black-on-black 9/11 cover. In 2005, Spiegelman was named one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in the World and in 2006 he was named to the Art Director’s Club Hall of Fame. In 2011, he won the Grand Prix at the Angoulême International Comics Festival. Among other projects, he is currently working on a stained-glass window installation for the High School of Art and Design in New York City, his alma mater.

Carol Tyler

Carol Tyler, born and raised in Chicago and Ingleside, IL, is an award-winning cartoonist, educator, painter, and comedian known for her autobiographical stories. Her comics first began appearing in R. Crumb’s Weirdo in 1987 and also in the foundational Wimmen’s Comix as well as numerous other publications, including the Twisted Sisters book anthologies. She is the creator of the acclaimed comics collections The Job Thing (1993) and Late Bloomer (2005).

Tyler is currently working on You’ll Never Know, a three-volume graphic memoir. This work details the artist’s search for the truth about her father’s World War II service while examining the damage his life-long, untreated post-traumatic stress has had on her family and relationships. The highly-praised first two installments, A Good and Decent Man (2009) and Collateral Damage (2010) have garnered the Ohio Arts Council Award for Individual Excellence, among many other awards and nominations. The third installment, Soldier’s Heart, is scheduled for release in 2012.

Tyler teaches at the University of Cincinnati. Her blog is “My Screened-in Porch” and her website is Bloomerland.

Chris Ware

Chris Ware is a Chicago-based cartoonist whose early work appeared in RAW magazine and was serialized in Chicago newspapers Newcity and The Chicago Reader. He is the creator of the ACME Novelty Library series, and the American Book Award-winning graphic novel Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Boy on Earth (Pantheon, 2000), which also won the Guardian First Book Award. Ware’s work has been included in many national and international exhibitions, including the Whitney Biennial in 2002.

He is a contributor to The New Yorker and the New York Times Magazine, among other venues. He was the editor of The Best American Comics 2007 and McSweeney’s volume 13.

Ware’s next book, Building Stories, will be published by Pantheon in fall 2012.