About this issue's contributors...
About this issue’s contributors...
Kurt Beaulieu is a Montreal-based comics artist. He is best known for his strip Sabine, installments of which have appeared in various underground publications, including MensuHell, BingBang and The Morning Dew Review. He is also the author-artist of the comic books Repent Sinners and Glitch Nos. 1 and 2. Semolina, a graphic novel-in-progress concerning the bizarre lives of an all-female industrial band, is his latest ongoing project. Kurt's pages at Comic Space: http://www.comicspace.com/kurtbeaulieu/.
Bill Harvey was one of the students at John Buscema’s original Workshop For Comic Book Art, in NYC. He has published the DangerWorld comic book and publishes THE ODDs comic strip. Michigan born and bred, he lives in the Detroit suburbs, and when not laid off, works as a computer technician. He generally considers himself a penciller/plotter in the arena of comic books. He does inking and lettering out of necessity. His favourite comic book was The Fantastic Four with art by Jack Kirby. At age 56, he would love to be part of a documentary on the life and works of Jack Kirby, mostly centred on his theatrical approach to comic books, his unfettered imagination and glorious artwork. Mr. Harvey's website is www.BeholdComics.com. Copies of DangerWorld can be ordered from there.
Dennis Hyer is the New Jersey artist behind the comic strips Inhuman Relations and Mullein Fields. He doesn’t have a lot to write about himself except that he loves old movies and television shows. He is also an amateur curmudgeon, with no patience for anime, rap music, modern newspaper comics, asphalt driveways, or anything produced by the Disney Channel (in that order). Aside from classic cartoons and comic strips, his other areas of interest include billiards, anthropology, girls, Indians, and agriculture. His two comic strips have been collected in the volumes Inhuman Relations and Greetings from Mullein Fields. Both are available in paperback and ebook editions from his store at Lulu.com. Hyer’s more current comics can be found at his website.
Jason Ihle was born and raised on Long Island, New York. He recently moved back home after five and a half years as an English teacher in Seville, Spain. Since his days as an undergraduate at Connecticut College, he has dabbled in film criticism. Cinema is his passion, but unfortunately it doesn’t pay the bills. His other interests include travel, running, and World Cup soccer. Other film reviews by Ihle can be found on his blog, Mostly Movies.
Christopher Lloyd is a freelance journalist and film critic with more than sixteen years of experience as a reporter, editor, broadcaster and blogger. He left newspapering full-time in 2009 after working at The Indianapolis Star as an A&E editor and reporter. Now he’s a senior editor/copywriter for an Indianapolis marketing firm by day, and intrepid movie reviewer the rest of the time. His film reviews appear regularly at The Film Yap, as well as on his blog, Captain Critic. An archive of his reviews can be found here.
John Powers was born in Chicago and began his studies in art as an apprentice to Tom Jay, a Washington State bronze sculptor. During his six years in the Pacific Northwest, Powers studied anatomy, figurative sculpture, and native carving. He is an alumnus of Pratt Institute’s sculpture program – where he made the jump to abstract work – and received his MFA from Hunter College. Powers’s work has been shown at PS1, Exit Art, the Kohler Arts Center, Caren Golden, Paul Rodgers/9W, Solomon Fine Art, Art Omi, the Swiss Institute, CUE Arts Foundation, Virgil de Voldere Gallery, The Black & White gallery and the Brooklyn Museum. He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Powers maintains a blog, Star Wars Modern.
Aaron Shunga is a cartoonist who earned his B.A. in drawing and painting at the University of Hawaii. His book Vacuum Horror was published in 2011 in two countries and three languages. He has had work included in several anthologies, such as the Chicago CAKE annual, Happiness, and Lodacal. He currently lives in Oakland, California, where he is working on a graphic novel, Cabeza. In his spare time he maintains a blog, The Mouthpiece, and a general website.
Jessica Tremblay currently lives in Vancouver, BC, where she creates her weekly haiku comic strip Old Pond. As a winner of the Best BC Poem of the Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival Hakiu Invitational 2008, her poem was sculpted in a stone at the VanDusen botanical garden. More of Jessica’s poetically insightful strips can be found at her Old Pond Comics website.
R. W. Watkins is a Canadian poet, essayist, and longtime appreciator of comics and cartoons. He was the editor and publisher of Contemporary Ghazals, the world's first English-language journal dedicated to the style of Middle Eastern poetry from which it took its title. His poetry and literary criticism have appeared most notably in Lynx, RAW NerVZ Haiku, Haiku Canada publications, and Agha Shahid Ali's ghazals anthology Ravishing DisUnities. Also known for his work in Japanese styles of poetry, he has published three chapbooks of haiku, tanka and renga, including New England Country Farmhouse (2005), which has proven fairly popular with fans of an early Jodie Foster film from which it takes inspiration. In recent years, Watkins has shifted much of his attention to internet publishing (‘weblishing’), serving as assistant poetry editor at webzine Red Fez in the process.
Rob Wells is a co-editor of the blog Comics—On The Ration, which is where his review of X’ed Out originally appeared. His favourite comics include Gilbert Hernandez’s Palomar installments, Frank Miller and Brian Michael Bendis’s DareDevil stories, Stan Lee and Steve Dtiko’s The Amazing Spider-Man, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s The Fantastic Four, and Alan Moore’s take on Swamp Thing. He resides in the UK, and considers most films to be rubbish.