The following special guests have been confirmed for Comic-Con International 2018.
Special Guests
Rafael Albuquerque
Artist, American Vampire, All Star Batman, Hit-Girl
Rafael Albuquerque was born in Porto Alegre, Brazil. He has been working in the American comic book industry since 2005. Best known from his work on All Star Batman, Animal Man, and Batgirl, he has also published the creator-owned books Mondo Urbano (2010), Eight (2015), and Huck (2015). Rafael is an Eisner and Harvey Award winner for the NY Times Bestseller American Vampire (DC Comics/Vertigo, 2010), written by Scott Snyder and Stephen King. His upcoming projects include the adaptation of the popular Neil Gaiman tale A Study in Emerald, and Mark Millar’s Hit-Girl.
Yoshitaka Amano
Illustrator, designer, Sandman: The Dream Hunter, Vampire Hunter D
One of the most recognized Japanese artists of the last half-century, Yoshitaka Amano’s career began at age 15 on Speed Racer. His many anime character designs include Mospeada (part three of Robotech) and Gatchaman (Battle of the Planets). An illustrator on thousands of works including Hideyuki Kikuchi’s Vampire Hunter D and Neil Gaiman’s Sandman: The Dream Hunters, Amano won the Seiun Award (the Japanese Hugo) for Best Artist five times, and gained worldwide fame creating the look of the legendary Final Fantasy videogame series. Amano’s illustrated biography Yoshitaka Amano: Beyond the Fantasy will be released in October by Dark Horse.
Sergio Aragonés
Cartoonist, MAD, Groo the Wanderer
One of MAD magazine's longest-running cartoonists (only Al Jaffee has been around longer) and the creator of dim-witted barbarian Groo the Wanderer, Sergio Aragonés is one of comics’ most popular creators. He has won every major cartooning award including the Reuben, the Comic-Con Icon award, the Will Eisner Hall of Fame award, various other Eisners, various Harveys, and even has two awards named for him. In addition to his continuing work for MAD, Sergio had his own comic book series at Bongo Comics, Sergio Aragonés Funnies. He continues to draw Groo for Dark Horse Comics and is presently working on a series in which Groo meets Tarzan, of all people!
Marc Bernardin
Writer, The Authority, The Highwaymen, Castle Rock
Marc Bernardin was a writer on the first season of Castle Rock, the new Stephen King and J. J. Abrams original series for Hulu, and was a staff writer on Syfy’s television series Alphas. He is a comic book writer, with Genius (Image), Static Shock, The Authority, The Highwaymen, and Monster Attack Network on his shelf. Previously, he was the film editor for the Los Angeles Times, deputy editor of Playboy.com, a senior editor for The Hollywood Reporter, and a senior editor for Entertainment Weekly. He has contributed to GQ, Wired, and Empire, among others, including Comic-Con’s Toucan blog, where he is a monthly contributor.
Thi Bui
Writer, artist, The Best We Could Do
Thi Bui was born in Vietnam three months before the end of the Vietnam War, and came to the United States in 1978 as part of the "boat people" wave of refugees from Southeast Asia. Her debut graphic memoir, The Best We Could Do (Abrams ComicArts, 2017) has been selected as both an Indies Introduce and Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers title. She is the illustrator of A Different Pond, a children’s book by Bao Phi (Capstone, 2017). Thi taught high school in New York City and was a founding teacher of Oakland International High School, the first public high school in California for recent immigrants and English learners. She currently teaches in the MFA in Comics program at the California College of the Arts. She lives in Berkeley with her son, her husband and her mother.
Aminder Dhaliwal
Cartoonist, Woman World
Aminder Dhaliwal is a native of Brampton, Ontario, and received a Bachelors of Animation from Sheridan College. She now lives in Los Angeles, where she is the director at Disney TV Animation. Previously, she worked as a storyboard director at Cartoon Network and storyboard director on the Nickelodeon show Sanjay and Craig. She has serialized Woman World biweekly on Instagram since March 2017, garnering 150,000 followers and a nomination for an Ignatz Award for Outstanding Online Comic. The Woman World book will debut from Drawn & Quarterly at Comic-Con this July.
Cory Doctorow
Photo: Jonathan Worth
Author, Walkaway, In Real Life
Cory Doctorow (craphound.com) is a science fiction author, activist, journalist, and blogger. He is the co-editor of Boing Boing (boingboing.net) and the author of Walkaway, a novel for adults, a YA graphic novel called In Real Life, the nonfiction business book Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free, such YA novels as Homeland, Pirate Cinema, and Little Brother, and novels for adults including Rapture of the Nerds and Makers. He works for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is an MIT Media Lab Research Affiliate, is a visiting professor of computer science at Open University, and co-founded the UK Open Rights Group. Born in Toronto, Canada, he now lives in Los Angeles.
Mark Evanier
Writer, producer, comics historian, Kirby: King of Comics
Mark Evanier has been writing comic books since he was 17, having started reading them when he was about that many minutes old. He apprenticed with the great Jack Kirby and has written much about Jack and comic book history. He's written countless comics including many with the superstars of Disney, Warner Brothers, and Hanna-Barbera, as well as Blackhawk and others for DC, his own co-creations including The DNAgents, Crossfire, and Magnor, plus he does something (God knows what) on Groo the Wanderer with Sergio Aragonés. He's also written hundreds of hours for TV including sitcoms, variety shows and cartoons, including writing/producing 20 years of Garfield the Cat.
Emil Ferris
Writer, artist, My Favorite Thing Is Monsters
Emil Ferris grew up in Chicago during the turbulent 1960s and is consequently a devotee of all things monstrous and horrific. In a previous life, she worked as an illustrator and toy sculptor and received her MFA from the Art Institute of Chicago. Ferris was a 2010 Toby Devan Lewis Fellow in the Visual Arts and in 2017 received two Ignatz awards for the first volume of her debut graphic novel, My Favorite Thing Is Monsters.
Brian Fies
Cartoonist, Mom's Cancer, A Fire Story
Brian Fies’s comics include the Eisner Award-winning webcomic and graphic novel Mom’s Cancer, the graphic novel Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow?, and the webcomic The Last Mechanical Monster. Within a day of his house burning down in last year’s northern California wildfires, Brian began documenting the experience in A Fire Story. That webcomic, and an animated version of it produced by PBS and shared on NPR, brought his story to more than 3 million readers worldwide. He is currently expanding A Fire Story into a full-length graphic novel while he and his wife Karen rebuild their home.
Manuele Fior
Writer, artist, Cinq Mille Kilomètres Par Seconde, Mademoiselle Else
Manuele Fior was born in Cesena in 1975. After getting a degree in architecture in Venice in 2000, he moved to Berlin, where he worked until 2005 as a cartoonist, illustrator and architect. He published the graphic novels Les Variations D’Orsay (Futuropolis 2015), The Interview (Futuropolis 2013), Cinq Mille Kilomètres Par Seconde (Atrabile 2010, winner Fauve d’Or, Meilleur Album, Festival International de Angoulême 2011, and Premio Gran Guinigi, Autore Unico, Lucca 2010), Mademoiselle Else (Delcourt 2009, winner, Prix de la ville de Genève 2009), Icarus (Atrabile 2006, winner, Prix A. Micheluzzi Meilleur Dessin, Comicon 2006), and Les Gens Le Dimanche (Atrabile 2004). His illustrations have appeared in The New Yorker, Le Monde, Vanity Fair, Feltrinelli, Einaudi, La Repubblica, Sole 24 Ore, Internazionale, and Rolling Stone magazine. He is working on a new comic book titled Celestia. His work appears in English translations from Fantagraphics Books. Manuele lives in Paris.
Andy Fish
Writer, artist, Dracula’s Army, Werewolves of Wisconsin
Andy Fish is a noted comic book artist, illustrator and painter. His work has been published all over the world and exhibited in galleries as far away as Sydney Australia. One of his paintings is in the collection of the National Gallery in Washington DC. He has a long history of published works, including a series of “How To” art books from Chartwell Publishing and several acclaimed graphic novels, including The Tragic Tale of Turkey Boy and Fly; A True Story Completely Made Up.
For McFarland Press, Andy has done the popular graphic novels Werewolves of Wisconsin which explores American Urban Legends and Dracula's Army which is a retelling of sorts of the Bram Stoker classic. He is currently working on an online version of the Adam West version of Batman and a new graphic novel mystery set during the age of the Dust Bowl in America's Midwest. He resides in New England with his wife and fellow artist Veronica.