About this issues's contributors...

Randall Hugh Crawford asked his mother to read him the word balloons in the Nancy comic strip. Later she acquired some used DC comics and Dell 4-Colors leading ‘Randy’ to tell people that Superman, Batman and Bugs Bunny taught him to read. At age seven, while staying at his aunt’s cottage, she sat him down with pencils, paper, crayons and toy soldiers and told him to draw. She later provided him with Speedball pens and a set of the Famous Artist Course lessons.

By 12th grade (class of ’71) he was a regular contributor of cartoons and filler art to his school paper, The Unionite, as well as three ‘alternative’ competitors, The Union Times, Vara and Roach. A few years later, he provided a similar function for the counter-culture freebie OM. At the end of 1975, he was approached by the publisher of Free Books, Inc to illustrate his first full length comic book, Man Unleashed Upon The Universe. He was approached by another writer in 1978, and co-created Nice Day. He then self-published a sketchbook of his early work under the title Charmaugagogmanchaugagcharbunagungamaug. Those two titles were listed in The Official Underground and Newave Comix Price Guide.

During his seven-year tenure as a clerk at The Book Stop, he collaborated with a coworker on Bolt, a mini-comic. Soon after that, he launched the Nice Day Mini-Comix series, which is still published (very infrequently) to this day. Other series published by Nice Day Comix include Your Dirty Li’l Comic, Bonus Mystery Comix and Swipe File. He also did work for several other small press publishers.

During this period (around 1986), he wrote a comic-book review column, Off The Rack, for a local tabloid, The Music Revue. After the Book Stop was evicted from its premises, he produced 75 issues of a monthly comic shop newsletter for Between The Covers (after that store changed owners, he did the final year or so’s worth of newsletters independently for subscribers as the Nice Day Comix Newsletter). At some point he also barely managed to almost marginally turn ‘pro’ with three pages of inking in an issue of Palliard Press’s Xxxenophile, some illustrations and a story for Jabberwocky’s Goodies, cartoons in two issues of Fantagraphics’ Amazing Heroes Swimsuit Special and a fan mail sketch published in the letters page of Kitchen Sink’s Omaha. This led to his being listed in the reference books Comic Book Superstars and ProMotion.

In the internet era he rose from frequent contributor to volunteer assistant moderator of the Yahoo group Jump The Shark, a spin off of the then-popular website. He was also given the adults only Bound_To_Please Yahoo group, and tried to launch his own media discussion group, Napoleon Park. He is currently an active participant in a number of Facebook groups and pages.

Michael French grew up on Indiana Jones, Ghostbusters and Huey Lewis. He has degrees in film and journalism, and spent most of college investigating where George Lucas’s talent went to die. French was closely involved with the development of Star Wars: Revisited and ESB: the Reconstruction. He also served as a staff writer for TheRaider.net and IndyGear.com. Between the discovery that Voltron was actually an ultra-violent Japanese cartoon and his scathing oratory on his dislike of the ThunderCats, French launched RetroBlasting on YouTube. Recently, RetroBlasting has been featured on the Official Voltron Facebook page. It is also showcased regularly on igrewupstarwars.com, and once a month hosts a dedicated podcast on Mike Alonzo’s Clobberin’ Time on BlogTalkRadio. One can visit French and his partner Melinda at RetroBlasting! and youtube.com/retroblasting.

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 (out of print) and Greetings from Mullein Fields. The latter has been replaced in recent months with The Complete Mullein Fields, which is available in paperback from CreateSpace and Amazon, and in a digital edition from Gumroad. Hyer’s more current comics can be found at his website.

George R. R. Martin is an American novelist and short-story writer in the fantasy, horror, and science fiction genres. His first novel, Dying of the Light, was published in 1977. In 1996, he published his first installment in the A Song of Ice and Fire series. Martin became a best-selling author in 2005 with the fourth title in the series, A Feast for Crows, and again in 2011 with the fifth, A Dance with Dragons. HBO adapted the Ice and Fire novels for its dramatic series Game of Thrones, which began airing in 2011. The series has won numerous Hugo and Emmy Awards in its five-season existence. Also a screenwriter and television producer, Mr. Martin resides with his wife in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Updated regularly, his blog is imaginatively entitled Not A Blog.

Grant Snider’s interests have changed drastically since he was four years old — with the exception of dragons, dinosaurs, and drawing. Snider’s first published cartoons appeared in the University of Kansas student newspaper, followed by a weekly strip called ‘Delayed Karma’ for the Kansas City Star. His comics and illustrations now appear in newspapers, books, magazines, and across the internet. He lives in Wichita, Kansas with his family, where he practises orthodontics and webcomics. More of his work can be found at his Incidental Comics website.