CF

CF is a Providence-based artist and musician known for his deft combination of erotics, violence, and politics, all precisely delineated in graphite. A former member of Paper Radio and contributor to Paper Rodeo and Kramers Ergot, CF is the author of the multi-volume series fantasy graphic novel Powr Mastrs, of which three volumes have been released, and the just-published artists book Sediment. Sediment explores CF’s pictorial vocabulary in a series of portraits and narrative moments. CF has exhibited his artwork at galleries and museums in New York, Los Angeles, Athens, Tokyo and Switzerland. He has also releases voluminous amounts of music under the names Mark Lord, Kites, and Daily Life.

Jack Davis

Jack Davis arrived on the illustration scene in the euphoric post-war America of the late 1940s when consumer society was booming and the work force identified with commercial images that reflected this underlying sense of confidence and American bravado. Advertising agencies were looking for new ways to tap a rich and expanding market, and there was a vast array of media that needed illustrations. Davis’ animated and exuberant images possessed a sense of spontaneous energy that proved to have universal appeal in every medium he worked in. Beginning with his masterful pen and ink cartooning at EC Comics, he quickly forged a reputation as one of the most versatile artists in comics, drawing humor, horror, and war stories. In Harvey Kurtzman’s MAD, especially, Davis made a mark as a master of caricature, composition, and wild, anarchic crowd scenes, practically vibrating with energy. After stints at MAD, Trump, and Humbug — three humor magazines that defined the satirical zeitgeist of the ’50s — Davis went on to become the most successful commercial illustrator of his generation, illustrating movie posters, magazine fiction, LP jackets, and more. Davis is the subject of the first comprehensive book about his work, Jack Davis: Drawing American Pop Culture, from Fantagraphics.

 

Phoebe Gloeckner

Truth and fiction collide, searingly, in the work of Phoebe Gloeckner. Trained as a medical illustrator, Gloeckner, inspired by underground comix, has also produced a fascinating body of short comics, graphic work and mixed-media pieces. Gloeckner’s comics stories, which she categorizes as fiction, frequently feature an adolescent character named Minnie Goetze, who bears a striking resemblance to the author, engaging the emotional fallout of an experience-seeking adolescence complicated and intensified by a series of troubled and troubling relationships. These short stories have been anthologized in the book collection A Child’s Life and Other Stories, and their themes are addressed again in the mixed-format book The Diary of a Teenage Girl, which combines prose, illustration, and comics. In addition to her comics work, Gloeckner has illustrated books including J. G. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition, Weird Things You Can Grow, and The Good Vibrations Guide to Sex. Gloeckner has recently been engaged with an intensively researched visual book about the murders of women in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, a subject she first addressed for Mia Kirshner’s 2008 anthology I Live Here. Gloeckner was the recipient of a 2008 Guggenheim Fellowship, and in 2010 The Diary of a Teenage Girl was adapted as an off-Broadway play. She is currently an Associate Professor in the Art and Design department of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.

 

Lisa Hanawalt

Lisa Hanawalt was raised in Palo Alto, California, and started reading comics and making zines out of drawings from her sketchbook while she was in high school. Her first self-published mini-comics It’s Sexy When People Know Your Name and Stay Away From Other People established Hanawalt’s comic style of funny illustrated lists and anthropomorphized animals, which she continued to explore in her first published work. I Want You #1 appeared in 2009 and received an Ignatz for Outstanding Comic at the Small Press Expo in Bethesda, Maryland. I Want You #2 debuted on 2010 and won a Stumptown Award for Best Small Press in 2011. For the last year, Lisa’s been regularly contributing comics and illustrated movie reviews to The Hairpin, and she publishes a monthly comic strip in The Believer. Hanawalt’s illustrations can be seen in publications such as The New York Times, Vice Magazine, and Glamour. She recently illustrated a guide to farts, Farts Around the World, and a children’s book for McSweeney’s McMullen series, Benny’s Brigade, for release in 2012.

 

Chip Kidd

Chip Kidd is America’s most distinguished mass market book designer, and has also made his mark as both an author and as an influential editor of graphic novels. Kidd has worked for the art department of Alfred A. Knopf since 1986. His book designs include the iconic cover for Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park, which was adapted for the eponymous film series, as well as memorable book covers for authors including Cormac McCarthy, Haruki Muakami, David Sedaris, among many others. A comics reader since childhood, Kidd was instrumental in bringing artful comics to a broad audience. As Editor at Large at Pantheon Books, he has overseen the publication of books including Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, Dan Clowes’s David Boring, Kim Deitch’s The Boulevard of Broken Dreams, Mark Beyer’s Amy and Jordan, and many more. Kidd has produced several books about comics culture including Bat-Manga!, Peanuts: The Art of Charles Schulz, and Jack Cole and Plastic Man: Forms Stretched to Their Limits, a collaboration with Art Spiegelman. He has designed books and covers for comics by artists ranging from Frank Miller to Osamu Tezuka. Kidd has also written two novels, The Cheese Monkeys and The Learners, as well as the upcoming graphic novel Batman: Death by Design. His work is the subject of the monograph Chip Kidd: Book One, Work: 1986–2006.

 

David Mazzucchelli

For over two decades David Mazzucchelli has explored the language and ideas of comics across a variety of publications and genres, from the noir naturalism of Batman: Year One and Daredevil to the fable-like tales within the self-published anthology Rubber Blanket, to the epic character study Asterios Polyp. The key to these projects lies in a set of artistic concerns including space, line, perception (and misperception), relationships, and everyday morality. These concerns are explored by characters, whether the mysterious Big Man or dreamy Asterios Polyp, that have an inner animation to them teased out by Mazzucchelli’s gestural drawing and multi-layered narratives. Asterios Polyp was his first graphic novel, and has won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and been listed as a New York Times notable book.

John Porcellino

John Porcellino has inspired legions of other cartoonists to embrace a DIY ethic in the service of direct personal expression. Since 1989, Porcellino has self-published his seminal King-Cat Comics series (now up to its 71st issue) in the zine-like minicomics format. For more than 20 years, Porcellino has chronicled the events and rhythms of his life—relationships, break-ups, depression, death, and the experience of nature—as a series of small moments made resonant by a striving for grace. His drawing style has evolved from a messy punk scribble into refined, gestural calligraphics, just as his stories track the development of his values from reckless youthful enthusiasm toward a do-no-harm ethos. His books include the teenage chronicle Perfect Example, the King-Cat anthologies King-Cat Classix and Map of My Heart (Drawn and Quarterly), Diary of a Mosquito Abatement Man (La Mano), Thoreau at Walden (Hyperion), and his most recent book, The Next Day (Pop Sandbox), a collaborative project based on interviews with survivors of suicide attempts.

Brian Ralph

Brian Ralph is the cartoonist of Daybreak which is published by Drawn & Quarterly, and debuted on the New York Times Bestselling Graphic Novel list, and has been hailed as one of the best books of the year by Entertainment Weekly. Brian graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1996 with a BFA in Illustration, where he was also one of the founding members of the influential art collective Fort Thunder. Brian is the cartoonist of Harvey and Eisner nominated Cave-In, published by the defunct but influential Highwater Books, and the self-published Climbing Out. His comics are distinguished for their personalized approach to the idea of adventure and often funny bit of dialogue sprinkled amidst hair-raising adventure. He is currently a professor of sequential art at the Savannah College of Art and Design.