Joshua Hale Fialkov is the creator (or co-creator, depending) of graphic novels, including the Harvey Nominated Elk’s Run, the Harvey and Eisner nominated Tumor, Punks the Comic, and the Harvey Nominated Echoes. He has written Alibi and Cyblade for Top Cow, Superman/Batman for DC Comics, Rampaging Wolverine for Marvel, and Friday the 13th for Wildstorm. He’s writing the DC relaunch of I,Vampire, as well as debuting the new Marvel character The Monkey King. This fall sees the launch of The Last of the Greats from Image Comics with artist Brent Peeples. He also served as a writer on the Emmy Award Nominated animated film Afro Samurai: Resurrection, and as Executive Producer of the cult hit LG15: The Resistance web series. Elk’s Run, Tumor, and Alibi are all currently in development as feature films. He has written comics for companies including Marvel, Wildstorm, IDW, Dark Horse, Image, Tor Books, Seven Seas Entertainment, Del Rey, Random House, Dabel Brothers Productions, and St. Martin’s Press. He has done video game work for THQ, Midway Entertainment, and Gore Verbinski’s Blind Wink Productions. He also wrote a Sci-Fi Channel movie starring Isabella Rossellini and Judd Nelson. Unfortunately, at no point in the film does Judd Nelson punch the sky and freeze frame. Joshua grew up in Pittsburgh, PA, went to college in Boston, where he got a BFA in writing and directing for the stage and screen, and then worked in the New England film industry, until finally deciding to move to Los Angeles to do it properly. He lives with his wife, Christina, daughter, Gable, and their cats, Smokey and the Bandit. Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/joshfialkov Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/joshuahalefia... Photograph by Heidi Ryder Photography

Sina Grace’s parents had big plans for their son: Ivy League schooling, professional credentials, a 6-figure income as a doctor– the works! Fortunately for us, he found the wonderful world of comics instead. It was in this world of contradictions that he “matured,” one foot teetering on the edge of academia, the other drawn to the inescapable grasp of an ink-bound fantasy underworld. At 14, Grace seemingly appeased his parents by interning at Top Cow Productions, under the guidance of Editor-in-Chief Renae Geerlings (his single mother figured at least he was collecting college credit). However the only thing he was collecting (other than comics), was the compulsive habit of drawing unrealistically proportioned, scantily clad women. At 16, he got a perpetual summer-time job at the Santa Monica landmark: Hi De Ho Comics, where he would be inspired to create Books with Pictures. By 17 he wrote, drew, and self-published his first comic, The Roller-Derby Robo-Dykes versus the Cannibals. His knowledge of disproportionate harlots with weapons came in handy when depicting a story about Robo-Dykes bent on taking over the world. His mother was happy that he was taking interest in girls. The book went into a second printing, and received the praise of Lying in the Gutters critic, Rich Johnston. Weeks after graduating high school, he was asked by Rilo Kiley front-woman Jenny Lewis to illustrate a limited edition comic book adaptation of their 2004 record, More Adventurous. In the spring of 2006 he was asked to apprentice under comics genius, Howard Chaykin (even though it may not be apparent in Books with Pictures, Grace did learn the function of a ruler and the meaning of a vanishing point). Between the summers of 2005 and 06, Grace’s partially-biographical indie dramedy, Books with Pictures, went from hand-xeroxed zines to full-fledged, full-sized comic books. Shortly after its debut at San Diego Comic-Con, Diamond Distributors accepted the series into their ordering catalogue, Previews. Grace’s work on the series was met with admiration from bloggers and reviewers alike, and has since taken on several projects for multiple anthologies due in late 2008. To his parents’ delight, he graduated from the University of California, Santa Cruz, receiving an undergraduate degree in Literature, with an emphasis on Creative Writing. Sina Grace recently self-published an illustrated novel about a sorcerer sleuth in Orange County, aptly named Cedric Hollows in Dial M for Magic, his next project will be providing illustrations for Amber Benson’s novel, Among the Ghosts, through Aladdin Books.

Jim Zub is a writer, artist and art instructor based in Toronto, Canada. Over the past fifteen years he’s worked for a diverse array of publishing, movie and video game clients including Disney, Warner Bros., Capcom, Hasbro, Bandai-Namco and Mattel. He juggles his time between being a freelance comic writer and Program Coordinator for Seneca College‘s award-winning Animation program.

Born February 12th, 1970 and raised on Long Island in New York, Judd began cartooning professionally at 16 with a single-paneled strip called Nuts & Bolts. This ran weekly through Anton Publications, a newspaper publisher that produced town papers in the Tri state area. He was paid 10 dollars a week. In August of 1988, Judd began attending the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor bringing Nuts & Bolts with him, but turning it into a four-panel strip and creating a cast of characters to tell his tales. Nuts & Bolts ran in The Michigan Daily 5 days a week from my freshman year (freshperson, or first-year student, as they liked to say at U of M), until graduation in the spring of 1992. A collection of those college years Nuts & Bolts was published in Ann Arbor. Watching the Spin-Cycle: the Nuts & Bolts collection had a small run of a thousand books a couple of months before graduation. They sold out in about 2 weeks and there are no plans to republish it. Before graduation he accepted a development deal with a major syndicate (syndicates are the major league baseball of comic strips. They act as an agent or broker and sell comic strips to newspapers). Judd spent the next year living in Boston, and developing his strip. The bottom dropped out when the syndicate decided that they were not going to pursue Nuts and Bolts for syndication and were terminating his development contract. Crushed and almost broke, he moved back in with his parents in July 1993. Getting by doing spot illustration jobs, Judd actually had Nuts & Bolts in development with Nickelodeon as an animated series. At one point he even turned the human characters into mice (Young Urban Mice and Rat Race were the working titles). In August of 1993 he saw an ad on MTV for The Real World III, San Francisco. For those who may not know, The Real World is a real-life documentary soap opera, where 7 strangers from around the country are put up in a house and filmed for six months. You get free rent, free moving costs, you get to live in San Francisco, and get to be a famous pig on television. The "Audition process," was everything from doing a video, to filling out a 15 page application, to in-person interviews with the producers, to being followed around and filmed for a day. 6 months and 6 "levels" later, Judd was in. On February 12th 1993, he moved into a house on Russian Hill and they began filming. Along the way Nuts & Bolts was given a weekly spot in the San Francisco Examiner. This WHOLE deal was filmed and aired for the show. They moved out in June of 1994, a couple of days after O.J.'s Bronco chase in L.A. The show began airing a week later. Along with the weekly San Francisco Examiner gig, Judd began doing illustrations for The Complete Idiot's Guide series through QUE Books. Since then, Judd has illustrated over 300 Idiot's Guides and still does the cartoons for the computer oriented Idiot's Guides line. A collection of the computer related titles' cartoons was published in 1997 as Terminal Madness, The Complete Idiot's Guide Computer Cartoon Collection. Not too long after the show had been airing, Judd's roommate from the show and good friend, AIDS activist Pedro Zamora, took ill from AIDS complications. Pedro was to begin a lecture tour in September. Judd agreed to step in and speak on his behalf until he was well enough to do so again. In August of 1994, Pedro checked into a hospital and never recovered. Pedro passed away on November 11, 1994. He was 22. Judd continued to lecture about Pedro, Aids education and prevention and what it's like to live with some one who is living with AIDS for most of 1995. Speaking at over 70 schools across the country, Judd describes it as, "...the most fulfilling and difficult time in my life." But time and emotional constraints forced him to stop lecturing. In May of 1995 Judd found the weekly Nuts & Bolts under-whelming and decided to give syndication another go. Re-vamping Nuts & Bolts

Jeff Jensen is an American writer. As a journalist he worked for Entertainment Weekly from 1998 to September 2017, most recently as the publication's television critic. In 2012, Jensen and artist Jonathan Case won an Eisner Award for their work on the 2011 graphic novel, Green River Killer: A True Detective Story, published in 2011 by Dark Horse Comics. His first prose novel, Before Tomorrowland, a prequel to the film and co-written with Case, was released on April 7, 2015.

Grant Morrison has been working with DC Comics for twenty five years, after beginning his American comics career with acclaimed runs on ANIMAL MAN and DOOM PATROL. Since then he has written such best-selling series as JLA, BATMAN and New X-Men, as well as such creator-owned works as THE INVISIBLES, SEAGUY, THE FILTH, WE3 and JOE THE BARBARIAN. In addition to expanding the DC Universe through titles ranging from the Eisner Award-winning SEVEN SOLDIERS and ALL-STAR SUPERMAN to the reality-shattering epic of FINAL CRISIS, he has also reinvented the worlds of the Dark Knight Detective in BATMAN AND ROBIN and BATMAN, INCORPORATED and the Man of Steel in The New 52 ACTION COMICS. In his secret identity, Morrison is a "counterculture" spokesperson, a musician, an award-winning playwright and a chaos magician. He is also the author of the New York Times bestseller Supergods, a groundbreaking psycho-historic mapping of the superhero as a cultural organism. He divides his time between his homes in Los Angeles and Scotland.