MEET THE ARTISTS:

Matt BATTAGLIA (House on Fire, forthcoming) is an artist and video producer. His work in comics started from coloring for BOOM! Studios and Roche Limit at Image Comics. He collaborated with author Michael Moreci for their book Indoctrination at Z2 Comics. After a multi-year hiatus from making comics, he returned with his solo work Ghosts of the Carousel which was published by Dauntless Stories. His latest, House on Fire, is forthcoming from Living the Line. In his other professional life Matt works for Free the People, where he directs and produces a variety of video projects and documentaries.  

Carson GRUBAUGH (Strange Death of Alex Raymond, Six Macro Cons) earned an MFA in Painting from the Cranbrook Academy of Art as well as BFAs in Fine Art and Philosophy from the University of California at Berkeley. He was named the Mercedes Benz Financial Services Emerging Artist of 2011, was a keynote speaker at the 2013 Difference That Makes a Difference Conference at the Open University, placed 3rd in the 15th Art Renewal Center Salon portraiture category, and has shown in the US, Germany, England at venues such as The Cranbrook Museum of Art, Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, ABTART, Virginia Beach Museum of Contemporary Art, The Chrysler Museum, Museum of New Art, Sotheby’s NY and the European Museum of Modern Art among many others. Carson is currently a Full-Time Instructor of Art at Shelton State Community College in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

Ryan HOLMBERG (Plaza, translator) is a leading scholar of postwar manga. He has edited and translated over two dozen manga for such publishers as Drawn & Quarterly, New York Review Comics, Breakdown Press, Bubbles, and PictureBox. His edition of Tezuka Osamu’s The Mysterious Underground Men (PictureBox) won the 2014 Eisner Award for Best U.S. Edition of International Material: Asia. He is also the author of The Translator Without Talent (Bubbles, 2020) and Garo Manga: The First Decade, 1964-1973 (Center for Book Arts, 2010). On social media, he can be found at @mangaberg, and online at mangaberg.com.

Erik Kriek (The Exile) studied illustration and graphic arts at the Rietveld Academy for Art and Design in Amsterdam. Ever since graduating in 1991 he has been working as a freelance illustrator and his work has adorned almost every printable surface one can think of, ranging from skateboards, snowboards, posters, record sleeves, sneakers and of course books and magazines. He has also achieved (inter)national acclaim as a comics author for his ongoing ‘silent’ comic book series Gutsman, stories centered around a faux-superhero and the troubled relationship with Tigra, his scantily clad girlfriend. In 2006, Gutsman was even brought to the stage as a ‘silent’ music-theatre piece, combining both dance and mime. In 2008 Kriek received the ‘Stripschapsprijs’ for his entire oeuvre. 

David Victor SIM (Strange Death of Alex Raymond) is the author, cartoonist, and publisher of Cerebus the Aardvark, a groundbreaking  independent comic which ran from December 1977 to March 2004. In 2018 he was entered into The Guinness Book of World Records for “most consecutive issues of a comic book written and drawn”. The series, which largely followed the life of the titular character, was noted for its exquisitely-rendered art and stylistic flexibility, its novelistic character development and story arcs, and bold violations of audience expectations. During the run of the series, Sim was awarded an Eisner award for Best Graphic Album (Flight, 1994), a Harvey award for “Best Cartoonist” (1992), an Ignatz award for “Outstanding Artist” (1998), a Joe Shuster award for “Outstanding Comic Book Achievement” (2005), and two Kirby awards for “Best Black & White Series” (in both 1985 and 1987). Throughout his career Sim has advocated for self-publishing as a means of securing both creative and financial freedom for comic creators. His influence, mentoring and advocacy led to a wave of self-publishing throughout the 1980s  and the1990s, prompting such notable (and distinct) self-published works as From Hell (Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell) A Distant Soil (Colleen Doran), and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird).

Miel VANDEPITTE (Centralia) lives in Ghent, Belgium and graduated at LUCA School of Arts with a degree in Graphic Storytelling. As part of this program, he got to spend a few months in the Pacific North-West College of Arts in Portland (OR), where under the tutelage of Jonathan Hill (known from Odessa and other works), his interest in comics only grew. He started Centralia as part of his thesis project, and finished the book almost two years later in "The Bright Yellow Cube", a workspace for young comic book artists in Brussels. His main interests are comics, professional wrestling and spending time with his amazing girlfriend Lise.   

Sean Michael ROBINSON (Discards, forthcoming) is a writer, illustrator, musician, and former high school art teacher, as well as a man-about-town. In his brief time as an adult human he's drawn hundreds of pages of comics, scribbled a gazillion portraits, sung two seasons as a mercenary Christmas caroler, performed on a hundred street corners, in a dozen plays, and written and recorded nine albums. This is the very short list, leaving out as it does candy salesman, lifeguard, and other unsavory occupations.

YOKOYAMA Yuichi (Plaza) is Japan's leading creator of avant-garde comics. Born in 1967, he studied painting in art school, then turned to manga in the late 1990s. Characterized by modernist abstraction, sparse dialogue, oversize sound effects, obsessive movement and speed, and a wry sense of humor, Yokoyama's "neo-manga" cross the boundary between art and comics. Among his many books are New Engineering (2004), Travel (2006), Garden (2007), Outdoors (2009), Baby Boom (2009), World Map Room (2013), Iceland (2016), and Plaza (2019). His works have been extensively translated, and have featured in museum exhibitions in Japan and around the world.

ABOUT LIVING THE LINE:

Sean Michael ROBINSON: Owner, Editor, and Production, Living the Line.

Carson GRUBAUGH: Advising Editor, Living the Line.