Jeff Walker

During Jeff Walker's Zelig-like career he has been an actor, entertainment journalist, rock critic, music publicist, film merchandise licensee (as a founder of The Thinking Cap Company) and genre marketing consultant. He's also a lifelong fan, amassing a respectable collection of comics by the age of 14. Of course, that was the generation whose mothers gave away those collections "along with my Hardy Boys, Tom Swifts, Bomba the Jungle Boys, Famous Monsters, and classic novels from The Science Fiction Book Club. That momentous decision of hers, of course, led to a career immersed in the music and genres that he grew up loving. After hearing about Comic-Con at the 1972 World Science Fiction con in L. A., he first went to San Diego the following year while working for United Artists Records and brought down a display of album covers that he thought would appeal to fans who loved the same things he did. In 1979 he was asked to join The Ladd Company as a genre consultant to work on Blade Runner and subsequently worked for WB, Amblin', and  Disney, and brought featurettes he produced, slide shows, talent, and promo items to Comic-Con every year. In 1987 he and Bob Kane brought the first glimpses of the then very controversial movie Batman that Tim Burton was filming with Michael Keaton. That was a landmark campaign that turned an initially highly skeptical fan base into one of the biggest hits of the decade and arguably launched the age of comic book-based movies that still dominates the box office today. For the next 25 years, and to this day, Jeff has consulted for most of the studios and has helped bring hundreds of film and TV panels to Comic-Con. He was awarded an Inkpot in 2011 for Fandom Service. Jeff lives in L. A. with his wife photographer Kim Gottlieb-Walker and has three grown children—Orion, Ethan and Rachel— who he is happy to say are all hardcore fans and whose collections were never thrown out.