Tony Isabella is an American comic book writer, editor, artist and critic, known as the creator and writer of Marvel Comics' Black Goliath; DC Comics' first major African-American superhero, Black Lightning; and as a columnist and critic for the Comics Buyer's Guide. Contents

Dean Motter is an illustrator, designer and writer who worked for many years in Toronto, Canada, New York City, and Atlanta. Motter is best known as the creator and designer of Mister X, one of the most influential "new-wave" comics of the 1980s. Dean then took up the Creative Services Art Director's post at Time Warner/DC Comics, where he oversaw the corporate and licensing designs of America’s most beloved comic book characters such as Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman. In his off-hours he went on to create and design the highly acclaimed, retro-futuristic comic book series, Terminal City—and its sequels, Aerial Graffiti. and Electropolis.

Brian Wood's history of published work includes over fifty volumes of genre-spanning original material. From the 1500-page future war epic DMZ, the ecological disaster series The Massive, the American crime drama Briggs Land, and the groundbreaking lo-fi dystopia Channel Zero he has a 20-year track record of marrying thoughtful world-building and political commentary with compelling and diverse characters. His YA novels - Demo, Local, The New York Four, and Mara - have made YALSA and New York Public Library best-of lists. His historical fiction - the viking series Northlanders, the American Revolution-centered Rebels, and the norse-samurai mashup Sword Daughter - are benchmarks in the comic book industry. He's written some of the biggest franchises in pop culture, including Star Wars, Terminator, RoboCop, Conan The Barbarian, Robotech, and Planet Of The Apes. He’s written number-one-selling series for Marvel Comics. And he’s created and written multiple canonical stories for the Aliens universe, including the Zula Hendricks character.

Edginton sees part of the key to his success coming from good relationships with artists, especially D'Israeli and Steve Yeowell as well as Steve Pugh and Mike Collins. He is best known for his steampunk/alternative history work (often with the artist D'Israeli) and is the co-creator of Scarlet Traces, a sequel to their adaptation of H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds. With 2000 AD we has written Leviathan, Stickleback and, with art by Steve Yeowell, The Red Seas as well as one-off serials such as American Gothic (2005). His stories often have a torturous gestation. Scarlet Traces was an idea he had when first reading The War of the Worlds, its first few instalments appeared on Cool Beans website, before being serialised in the Judge Dredd Megazine. Also The Red Seas was initially going to be drawn by Phil Winslade and be the final release by Epic but Winslade was still tied up with Goddess and when ideas for replacement artists were rejected Epic was finally wound up - the series only re-emerging when Edginton was pitching ideas to Matt Smith at the start of his 2000 AD career. With D'Israeli he has created a number of new series including Stickleback, a tale of a strange villain in an alternative Victorian London, and Gothic, which he describes as "Mary Shelley's Doc Savage". With Simon Davis he recently worked on a survival horror series, Stone Island, and he has also produced a comic version of the computer game Hellgate: London with Steve Pugh. He is currently working on a dinosaurs and cowboys story called Sixgun Logic. Also as part of Top Cow's Pilot Season he has written an Angelus one-shot. http://comicbookdb.com/creator.php?ID... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian\_Edgi...

Once a professional juggler and fire eater, Tom Taylor is a #1 New York Times Bestselling, multi-award-winning comic book writer, playwright and screenwriter. Well known for his work with DC Comics and Marvel, Taylor is the co-creator of NEVERLANDERS from Penguin Random House, SEVEN SECRETS from Boom Studios and the Aurealis-Award-winning graphic novel series THE DEEP. Taylor is also the Head Writer and Executive Producer of The Deep animated series, four seasons of which is broadcast in over 140 countries. He is perhaps best known for the DC Comics series, DCEASED (Shadow Awards Winner), NIGHTWING (nominated for 5 Eisner Awards), SUPERMAN: SON OF KAL-EL (GLAAD Award Nominee), INJUSTICE: GODS AMONG US, SUICIDE SQUAD, EARTH 2 and BATMAN/SUPERMAN as well as Marvel's FRIENDLY NEIGHBORHOOD SPIDER-MAN, ALL NEW WOLVERINE, X-MEN: RED, DARK AGES and SUPERIOR IRON MAN. Taylor is also the writer of many Star Wars series, which include STAR WARS: INVASION and STAR WARS: BLOOD TIES (Stan Lee Excelsior Award winner). Taylor has written for Marvel, DC Comics, Dark Horse Comics, IDW Publishing, Boom Studios, Wildstorm, 2000 AD and Gestalt Comics. He can be followed on twitter @TomTaylorMade.

Marz is well known for his work on Silver Surfer and Green Lantern, as well as the Marvel vs DC crossover and Batman/Aliens. He also worked on the CrossGen Comics series Scion, Mystic, Sojourn, and The Path. At Dark Horse Comics he created Samurai: Heaven and Earth and various Star Wars comics. He has also done work for Devil’s Due Publishing’s Aftermath line, namely Blade of Kumori. In 1995, he had a brief run on XO-Manowar, for Valiant Comics. Marz’s more recent works includes a number of Top Cow books including Witchblade and a Cyberforce relaunch. For DC Comics, he has written Ion, a 12 part comic book miniseries that followed the Kyle Rayner character after the One Year Later event, and Tales of the Sinistro Corps Presents: Parallax and Tales of the Sinestro Corps Presents: Ion, two one-shot tie-ins to the Green Lantern crossover, The Sinestro Corps War. His current creator owned projects include “Dragon Prince” (Top Cow) and “Samurai : Heaven and Earth” (Dark Horse). Photo by Luigi Novi.

Paul Chadwick (b.1957) has worked widely as an artist and writer for comic books, with collaborators like Ron Randall, Doug Wheatley, Alan Moore, John Bolton, Harlan Ellison, Jan Strnad, Randy Stradley, Archie Goodwin, Brian K. Vaughan, and others. He's most noted for his award-winning series Concrete, about a thoughtful man stuck in a brutish, rock-coated body. Born in Seattle, he grew up in its lakeside suburb Medina, then a haven for Boeing engineers and their families, now the site of palaces for Bill Gates and his ilk. His father Stephen F. Chadwick was City Attorney for the small hamlet. As a teen, he joined Apa-5, the amateur press alliance of comics fans which also provided a creative outlet for future comics luminaries like Frank Miller, Mike Richardson, Randy Stradley, Chris Warner, Randy Emberlin, and others. He attended Art Center College of Design, majoring in illustration. Around this time Chadwick lived in a courtyard apartment building, The Golden Palm, which teemed with talent. Bryn Barnard, Ron Harris, David Mattingly, James Gurney, Thomas Kinkade, Kurt Cyrus, Mark Verheiden, Andy Su, Terry Robinson all lived there, five of them as Chadwick's roommate (at different times). Chadwick graduated in 1979, and began storyboarding movies for Disney, Warner Brothers, Lucasfilm and others. Credits include Pee Wee's Big Adventure, Strange Brew, The Big Easy and Ewoks: The Battle for Endor. Chadwick says the auteurs behind two small films he worked on, Lies (Jim & Ken Wheat) and Miracle Mile (Steve DeJarnatt) were the greatest personal influences on his writing. Chadwick also freelanced illustration, mainly for movie advertising (Streamers and Galaxy of Terror were the only finished posters among the dozens of preliminary paintings he did) and for SF and Fantasy paperbacks. Chadwick decided to devote himself to comics, but Concrete didn't sell at first. Chadwick's first comic in print was The Life of St. Norbert, published by an order of Norbertine monks. Going from the sacred to the (mildly) profane, he next drew Steve Perry's strange and silly Salimba, about a jungle girl fighting "wormboys" and a giant three-headed were-dog. A year on Marvel's Dazzler completed Chadwick's apprentice years, and he sold Concrete in 1985 to Dark Horse comics. It has appeared intermittently ever since. A Concrete movie has been in development for years. Chadwick has written several screenplays for it, first in collaboration with Larry Wilson, then solo. Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh wrote one, as well, which briefly won a green light for the film. The decision was reversed upon the release of the surprise hit The Blair Witch Project, which caused the sudden mass delusion that Hollywood could dispense with costly visual effects and stars. The fever passed, but Concrete's window had closed, at least until somebody with the clout or energy decides to brave the thousand demons that lay waiting to kill every movie. Chadwick wrote and drew (inks by Ron Randall) eight issues of The World Below, about a network of vast, mysteriously lit caverns beneath northern Washington State, and the strange beings and technology to be found there. Dark Horse plans to reissue the series as a collection. The Human Dilemma, the newest Concrete series, won an Eisner Award (best cartoonist) and a Reuben Award (best in comic books division) from the National Cartoonist Society. Chadwick is currently drawing a miniseries for DC, Seven Against Chaos, written by Harlan Ellison. He's also working on a (non-Concrete, TBA) graphic novel for Dark Horse, as well as a new Concrete miniseries. Biography updated 2010

Alexander M. Freed is the author of Star Wars: The Old Republic: The Lost Suns, as well as many short stories, comic books, and videogames. Born near Philadelphia, he endeavors to bring the city’s dour charm with him to his current home of Austin, Texas. His first novel, Star Wars: Battlefront: Twilight Company was included on BuzzFeed’s “Best Science Fiction Books Of 2015” list.

New York Times bestselling author John Jackson Miller has spent a lifetime immersed in science fiction. His Star Trek novels include the Discovery – Die Standing, the acclaimed novel Discovery—The Enterprise War, the Prey trilogy, and Takedown. His Star Wars novels include A New Dawn, Kenobi, Knight Errant, Lost Tribe of the Sith, and the Knights of the Old Republic comics, available from Marvel as Legends: The Old Republic. He’s written comics and prose for Halo, Iron Man, Simpsons, Conan, Planet of the Apes, and Mass Effect, with recent graphic novels for Battlestar Galactica, Dumbo, and The Lion King. Production notes on all his works can be found at his fiction site. He is also a comics industry historian, specializing in studying comic-book circulation as presented on his website, Comichron.. He also coauthored the Standard Catalog of Comic Books series.

Mike W. Barr is an American writer of comic books, and mystery, and science fiction novels. Barr's debut as a comics professional came in DC Comics' Detective Comics #444 (Dec. 1974-Jan. 1975), for which he wrote an 8-page back-up mystery feature starring the Elongated Man. Another Elongated Man story followed in Detective Comics #453 (November 1975). He wrote text articles and editorial replies in letter columns for the next few years. By mid-1980 he was writing regularly for both DC and Marvel, including stories for Marvel Team-Up, Mystery in Space, Green Lantern, and various Batman titles. Legion of Super-Heroes #277 (July 1981) saw him take on editorial duties at DC, while writing issues of DC's Star Trek comic, for whom he created the native American character Ensign Bearclaw and a pacifist Klingon named Konom. In December 1982, he and artist Brian Bolland began Camelot 3000, a 12 issue limited series that was one of DC Comics' first direct market projects. In August 1983, Barr created what may well be his most enduring work, the monthly title Batman and the Outsiders with art by Jim Aparo. Barr wrote every issue of the original series, and its Baxter paper spinoff, The Outsiders. His other comics work includes Mantra and Maze Agency as well as the 1987 OGN hardcover book Batman: Son of the Demon (with art by Jerry Bingham), proceeds from which reputedly "restored DC Comics to first place in sales after fifteen years." This title, and Barr's work on Batman with artist Alan Davis have been cited by Grant Morrison as key inspirations for his recent (2006) run on the Batman title. In 2007, he wrote a two-part story for the pages of DC's JLA: Classified (#47-48, Jan-Feb 2008), returned to the Outsiders with Outsiders: Five of a Kind—Katana/Shazam #1 (Oct 2007), contributed to Tokyopop's Star Trek: The Manga, and relaunched Maze Agency at IDW Publishing. He has also scripted many of Bongo Comics' Simpsons titles, including a Christmas story for 2010. In May 2010, the Invisible College Press published Barr's science fiction/fantasy novel, Majician/51, about the discoveries of a scientist working at Area 51.

Librarian note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name Chris Warner (born 1955) is an American comic book writer, artist, and editor for Dark Horse Comics. (source: Wikipedia)

Jim Woodring was born in Los Angeles in 1952 and enjoyed a childhood made lively by an assortment of mental an psychological quirks including paroniria, paranoia, paracusia, apparitions, hallucinations and other species of psychological and neurological malfunction among the snakes and tarantulas of the San Gabriel mountains. He eventually grew up to bean inquisitive bearlike man who has enjoyed three exciting careers: garbage collector, merry-go-round-operator and cartoonist. A self-taught artist, his first published works documented the disorienting hell of his salad days in an “illustrated autojournal” called Jim. This work was published by Fantagraphics Books and collected in The Book of Jim in 1992. He is best known for his wordless comics series depicting the follies of his character Frank, a generic cartoon anthropomorph whose adventures careen wildly from sweet to appalling. A decade’s worth of these stories was collected in The Frank Book in 2004. The 2010 Frank story Weathercraft won The Stranger’s Genius Award and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for that year. The most recent Frank book, Congress of the Animals, was released in 2011. Woodring is also known for his anecdotal charcoal drawings (a selection which was gathered in Seeing Things in 2005), and the sculptures, vinyl figures, fabrics and gallery installations that have been made from his designs. His multimedia collaborations with the musician Bill Frisell won them a United States Artists Fellowship in 2006. He lives in Seattle with his family and residual phenomena. -Walter Foxglove

Rubio studied theater and photography throughout his high school years in California, and made his directorial debut at the age of 17 with a stage adaptation of Robert Redford’s Ordinary People. He spent the next two years directing musical theater in such productions as You’re a Good Man Charlie Brown and Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dream Coat, earning several awards for these productions. From 1984 - 1988, he apprenticed in the field of lighting, set design, and directing under George Costa, director of the San Jose Civic Light Opera House. In 1988, Rubio attended Long Beach State University with a major in film. He almost graduated in 1991 and spent the next three years doing various production jobs. In 1992, Rubio wrote and directed Re-Animation, an animated Frankenstein short that attracted the attention of the Fox Kids Network. Based on the strength of the short, Rubio was hired to design animated characters for their Saturday morning line-up, and eventually headed up their cel animation art department. In 1996, Rubio produced his first feature film, the low-budget Movies ‘til Dawn, but his biggest success to date came in 1997 with the internet release of Troops, a Star Wars/COPS parody that has been credited with starting the Internet short film craze. The film was later recognized by Lucasfilm with the Pioneer Award at the 2002 Official Star Wars Fan Film Awards. Rubio has made a living since as a freelance writer and award-winning promotion producer, and has written comic books for Dark Horse's successful Star Wars Tales line. In 2001, Lucasfilm asked Rubio to create a two-part original comedic story for the Star Wars comic line, and he delivered "Tag and Bink Are Dead", which has gone on to critical and financial success. His compilation trade paperback: "Tag and Bink Were Here" was named one of the top trade paperback books of 2006 by The American Library Association. His list of writer/director credits includes a pilot presentation for the Sci-Fi Channel (Alien Hunter - a sort of Crocodile Hunter in space), Colossor (a pilot for MTV), Action Man for Fox Kids, and Storm Watch, a pilot for the USA Network. In 2006, Rubio was inducted into the 501st Legion as an honorary member during the 501st dinner at Comic Con International in San Diego. In 2007, Rubio was contracted by G4 to help integrate Attack of the Show with an online webcam from the site Stickam. He can be seen on the aots webcam talking to fans. In 2015, Rubio released a Star Wars fan film titled Ackbar's Eleven.

"Nearly thirty years of writing and editing comics, and this is what I have to show for it." —Randy Stradley, pointing to this biography. More to come, folks!

J. W. Rinzler has authored over 20 books including two New York Times bestsellers and a #1 best-selling graphic novel. With more than 600,000 copies in print, his books have been translated into seven languages. J. W. Rinzler grew up in Manhattan, New York City, and then in Berkeley, California. He fell in love with old monster films, such as Dracula and Frankenstein, as well as Robin Hood and other adventure movies. He was an avid comic-book and novel reader, an intrepid moviegoer, and had his mind blown by The Beatles, Star Trek, Bruce Lee, Sherlock Holmes, James Bond, Frank Frazetta, Michelangelo, and Mad Magazine. Rinzler drew his own comic books (badly), then, in his 20s, moved onto figurative oil painting (okay-ly, but self-taught). He lived in France for almost 10 years, where he began writing. Back in the USA, he worked as executive editor at Lucasfilm for fifteen years, chronicling the work of George Lucas and his genial collaborators in a series of books about Star Wars and Indiana Jones. During this time, Rinzler also directed and wrote an animated short Riddle of the Black Cat, based on an Edgar Allan Poe story, which was accepted into several festivals, including the Montreal World Film Festival. His latest book is an epic historical fiction thriller called ALL UP, an epic about the first Space Age, published in July 2020. The sequel will be out in a year or two... Meanwhile his book on Howard Kazanjian, producer, is due in May 2021; and on Kubrick's The Shining in fall 2021. Rinzler is married and has two daughters and one grandson. He lives on the northern California coast.