School of Visual Arts

Archie Goodwin was an American comic book writer, editor, and artist. He worked on a number of comic strips in addition to comic books, and is best... known for his Warren and Marvel Comics work. For Warren he was chief writer and editor of landmark horror anthology titles Creepy and Eerie, and for Marvel he set up the creator-owned Epic Comics as well as adapting Star Wars into both comics and newspaper strips. He is regularly cited as the "best-loved comic book editor, ever." Archie Goodwin was born in Kansas City, Missouri, and lived in many small towns along the Kansas-Missouri border including Coffeyville. But he considered Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he spent his teen years at Will Rogers High School and in used magazine stores searching for EC Comics as his home town. Goodwin moved to New York City to attend classes at what became the School of Visual Arts. Goodwin began as an artist drawing cartoons for magazines and as a freelance "writer and occasional art assistant" to Leonard Starr's newspaper comic strip Mary Perkins, On Stage.
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James Jean is a Taiwanese-American visual artist, known for both his commercial work and fine art gallery work. He is known in the American comics... industry as a cover artist for various books published by DC Comics, as well as for his work for Prada, ESPN and Atlantic Records. His work, which has been collected in numerous volumes, has been compared by the New York Times to that of Maxfield Parrish. Jean was born in Taiwan and was raised in Parsippany-Troy Hills, New Jersey. He was educated at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, from which he graduated in 2001. In 2001, Jean became a cover artist for DC Comics, garnering seven Eisner awards, three consecutive Harvey awards, two gold medals and a silver from the Society of Illustrators of Los Angeles, and a gold medal from the Society of Illustrators of New York. He also worked in advertising, and has contributed to many national and international publications. His clients included Time Magazine, The New York Times, Rolling Stone, Spin, ESPN, Atlantic Records, Target, Playboy, Knopf, Prada among others.
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Stephen J. "Steve" Ditko is an American comic book artist and writer best known as the artist and co-creator, with Stan Lee, of the Marvel Comics... heroes Spider-Man and Doctor Strange. Ditko studied under Batman artist Jerry Robinson at the Cartoonist and Illustrators School in New York City. He began his professional career in 1953, working in the studio of Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, beginning as an inker and coming under the influence of artist Mort Meskin. During this time, he then began his long association with Charlton Comics, where he did work in the genres of science fiction, horror, and mystery. He also co-created the superhero Captain Atom in 1960. Ditko then drew for Atlas Comics, the 1950s forerunner of Marvel Comics. He went on to contribute much significant work to Marvel, including co-creating Spider-Man, who would become the company's flagship character. Additionally, he co-created the supernatural hero Doctor Strange and made important contributions to the Hulk and Iron Man. In 1966, after being the exclusive artist on The Amazing Spider-Man and the "Doctor Strange" feature in Strange Tales, Ditko left Marvel for reasons never specified.
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Burne Hogarth was an American cartoonist, illustrator, educator, author and theoretician, best known for his pioneering work on the Tarzan newspaper... comic strip and his series of anatomy books. Hogarth was born in Chicago in 1911. He displayed an early talent for drawing. His carpenter father saved these efforts and, some years later, presented them and the young Hogarth to the registrar at the Art Institute of Chicago. At age 12, Hogarth was accepted and thus began a long formal education that took him through such institutions as Crane College and Northwestern University in Chicago to Columbia University in New York City, all the while studying arts and sciences. Due to his father’s premature death, Hogarth began working at age 15, when he became the assistant at the Associated Editors Syndicate and illustrated a series called Famous Churches of the World. He worked for several years as an editor and advertising artist. This work provided steady and, by 1929, crucial employment.
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William Erwin "Will" Eisner was an American comics writer, artist and entrepreneur. He is considered one of the most important contributors to the... development of the medium and is known for the cartooning studio he founded; for his highly influential series The Spirit; for his use of comics as an instructional medium; for his leading role in establishing the graphic novel as a form of literature with his book A Contract with God and Other Tenement Stories. The comics community paid tribute to Eisner by creating the Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards, more commonly known as "the Eisners", to recognize achievements each year in the comics medium. Eisner enthusiastically participated in the awards ceremony, congratulating each recipient. In 1987, with Carl Barks and Jack Kirby, he was one of the three inaugural inductees of the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame. Eisner was born in Brooklyn, New York City, the son of Jewish immigrants. His parents provided a modest life for their son.
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Harvey Kurtzman was an American cartoonist and the editor of several comic books and magazines. Kurtzman often signed his name H. Kurtz, followed by... a stick figure . In 1952, he was the founding editor of the comic book Mad. Kurtzman was also known for the long-running Little Annie Fanny stories in Playboy , satirizing the very attitudes that Playboy promoted. Because Mad had a considerable effect on popular culture, Kurtzman was later described by The New York Times as having been "one of the most important figures in postwar America." Director and comedian Terry Gilliam said, “In many ways Harvey was one of the godparents of Monty Python.” Underground cartoonist Robert Crumb asserted that one of Kurtzman's cover images for Humbug "changed my life," and that another Mad cover image “changed the way I saw the world forever!” Writing for Time, Richard Corliss touted Kurtzman's influence: He was inducted into the comic book industry's Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame in 1989. As a child he drew Ikey and Mikey, a regular comic strip done in chalk on sidewalks.
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