2019

Katie O'Neill is an Eisner and Harvey Award-winning illustrator and graphic novelist from New Zealand. She is the author of Princess Princess Ever After, Aquicorn Cove, The Tea Dragon Society, and The Tea Dragon Festival, all from Oni Press. She mostly makes gentle fantasy stories for younger readers, and is very interested in tea, creatures, things that grow, and the magic of everyday life.

Alitha Evelyn Martinez never wanted to do anything other than draw comic books. In her teenage years, she was held back from a Marvel tryout by a teacher who was trying to spare her the feeling of being rejected by a major publisher because she was a girl, which prompted Alitha to head to New York and challenge the notion that girls did not draw superheroes.

Maya Kern is a comic artist, illustrator, and product designer based out of upstate New York. She has been self-publishing comics since 2012, starting with a compilation of short retellings of fairytale comics, Hearts Thorns and Scales. She gained online acclaim and features in io9, Daily Dot, Autostraddle, and Ladies Making Comics for her retellings Redden and How to Be a Mermaid. Now she and her wife own a small business together where they create unique apparel and merchandise with a colorful flair.

Jonathan Hickman is the visionary talent behind the award-winning East of West, Black Monday Murders, and Manhattan Projects. He also occasionally plies his trade at places like Marvel working on books such as Avengers, the Fantastic Four, and most recently, the relaunch of X-Men.

Jonathan lives in South Carolina, along with his twin brother, Marc, who recently won an Academy Award for the animated short, Pixeleffed.

Award-winning Maggie Thompson still has the copy of Dell Four Color #103 (Easter with Mother Goose) that she bought when she was three. That’s because her (science-fiction-fan) mom and dad encouraged her to read—and collect—comic books and attend conventions. As a result, she and her husband, Don, were pioneering publishers of comics fanzines and eventually took over Comics Buyer’s Guide, where she worked for 30 years.

Steve Sansweet is head of Rancho Obi-Wan, a nonprofit museum that houses the Guinness World Records-certified largest collection of Star Wars memorabilia (www.ranchoobiwan.org). Located in Northern California on the outskirts of Petaluma, it is open for pre-booked tours and events. Steve has written or co-authored 18 Star Wars books and many articles and has appeared on numerous television and online shows and podcasts.

Floyd Norman has been working in the entertainment business a very long time. He began his professional career while still in high school working as an assistant on Archie Comics. Enrolling in Art Center College of Design in the early fifties he dropped out of school when offered a position at Walt Disney Studios. Floyd learned his animation ropes doing the tedious, grunt work of an apprentice inbetweener. By the sixties, he suddenly found himself in Walt’s prestigious story department working on The Jungle Book and life has never been the same.

Audrey Niffenegger is an artist and a writer. Her novels The Time Traveler’s Wife and Her Fearful Symmetry were both international bestsellers. She recently collaborated with Wayne McGregor on a ballet, Raven Girl, for the Royal Opera House Ballet, and on Bizarre Romance, a collection of comics, with her husband, the artist Eddie Campbell. The Time Traveler’s Wife is being adapted into a television series for HBO by Steven Moffat. Ms. Niffenegger is writing a sequel, The Other Husband.

2019 marks the year that legendary artist Todd McFarlane makes history with the release of the historic Spawn #300 and record-breaking Spawn #301. These milestones make Spawn the longest-running independent comic in North America.

The road to McFarlane’s history-making comic run began in 1992 with the formation of Image Comics and the release of Spawn #1 the top-selling independent comic of all-time, and one of the most popular comic heroes in the world.

Ulli Lust was born in Vienna in 1967. In 1995 she moved to Berlin to study graphic design. Her work ranges from comics journalism, to erotic-mythological poetry, to graphic autobiography. She runs the online publishing company Electrocomics, which publishes e-books and online comics by a growing group of international cartoonists.