James Sturm

Sturm grew up in Rockland County, New York, and later attended the University of Wisconsin–Madison. In 1988, one year after graduating, he self-published Down and Out Dawg, a book collecting his college newspaper strips, and Commix, an anthology that featured some of the first works of Chris Ware and Scott Dikkers. In 1990, Sturm was hired as a production assistant on Art Spiegelman’s RAW magazine, and subsequently was published in the second and fourth issues of the Drawn & Quarterly anthology magazine.

In 2004, Sturm and Michelle Ollie founded the Center for Cartoon Studies, with its first classes offered in the fall of 2005. As of April 2010, he writes a column about the Internet for the website Slate.

In 2003, Sturm wrote the Marvel Comics four-issue miniseries Fantastic Four: Unstable Molecules, featuring characters based on the Fantastic Four. It won an Eisner Award for Best Limited Series.

In 1998, Drawn & Quarterly published the story Hundreds of Feet Below Daylight, the second in Sturm’s trilogy of American historical fiction pieces. Two years later came the last installment of the trilogy, the best-selling and award-winning graphic novel The Golem’s Mighty Swing. This book went on to be printed in three languages, earned praise from such publications as The Sunday Observer, Entertainment Weekly, and The Washington Post Book World, and was chosen as the Best Graphic Novel of 2000 by Time. In 2004, Drawn & Quarterly collected Hundreds of Feet Below Daylight and The Revival as a deluxe comic book titled Above & Below. In October 2007, the trilogy was collected in a volume entitled James Sturm’s America: God, Gold, and Golems.

In 1991, Sturm received a Master of Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts in New York. He then moved to Seattle, Washington, and co-founded the alternative newsweekly, The Stranger. Meanwhile, Fantagraphics published his first comic book The Cereal Killings #1. During the next five years Sturm juggled jobs as art director of The Stranger, publisher of his own Bear Bones Press, and work on his own comics, like The Revival, published in 1996. In 1997, Sturm became a professor at the Savannah College of Art and Design, in Savannah, Georgia.

James Sturm (born 1965) is an American cartoonist and co-founder of the Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction, Vermont. Sturm is also the founder of the National Association of Comics Art Educators (NACAE), an organization committed to helping facilitate the teaching of comics in higher education.

you may like: Lin Shaye