ICAF 2017 Guest Artists & Speakers
University of Washington, Seattle
November 2 to 4, 2017
Jesús Cossio, Peruvian author, illustrator, cartoonist and graphic novelist, is author of Barbarie: Cómics Sobre la Violencia Política 1985-1990 (2010), Los Años del Terror (2016) and co-author of Rupay: Historias Gráficas Sobre la Violencia Política 1980-1984 (2008), Biopolítica para Principiantes (2012), and Guerrilla en Paucartambo (2013). Cossio is celebrated as one of the foremost creators of documentary, testimonial and journalistic comics in contemporary Latin America. Much of his work revolves around testimony surrounding the atrocities committed during the violent period of internal conflict between 1980-2000 in Peru, for which he was a recipient of a 2003 Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship in the Humanities. Since 2013, he has been working through a branch of the Peruvian Ministry of Justice to offer workshops on narrating community memory through graphic narratives in areas most directly affected by the violence that occurred during the internal conflict.

Kelly Sue DeConnick has written for Image Comics, Boom, Oni, Humanoids, Dark Horse, IDW, DC, Vertigo, and Marvel. Today, she is best known for Carol Danvers' rebranding as Captain Marvel and the Eisner-nominated mythological western, Pretty Deadly; the latter was co-created with artist Emma Ríos. DeConnick's most recent venture, the sci-fi feminist kidney-punch called Bitch Planet, co-created with Valentine De Landro, launched to rave reviews in December 2014.

Ramzi Fawaz is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in queer theory, American cultural studies, and contemporary literature. He received his Ph.D. in American Studies at George Washington University. His first book The New Mutants: Superheros and the Radical Imagination of American Comics (NYU Press, 2016) received the 2012 Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies Fellowship Award for Best First Book Manuscript in LGBT Studies. His writing has been published in a number of academic journals including American Literature, Calalloo, and GLQ. Along with Damon Young (UC Berkeley), he is a co-organizer of the Sexual Politics/Sexual Poetics Collective (SPSP), a working group of early career queer studies scholars developing new directions in the field. He is also currently co-editing a special issue of American Literature with Darieck Scott titled "Queer About Comics," which will be the first issue the journal has ever dedicated to the comics medium since its inception in 1929.

Emil Ferris exploded onto the literary scene in early 2017 with her debut graphic novel, My Favorite Thing is Monsters Vol. 1. The sprawling work, in the form of an illustrated college-ruled notebook, tells the first-person account of Karen Reyes, a ten-year old girl obsessed with Hollywood monsters who insists on portraying herself as a fanged wolf-child. My Favorite Thing is Monsters insistently de-centers the “normal,” making links between monstrosity, disability, various forms of otherness and self-emancipation. According to Publisher’s Weekly, Ferris’ graphic novel received Fantagraphics'  largest print run in its 40-year history. More than 30 news outlets have featured the work, with Ferris receiving profiles in The New York Times, the New Yorker, the Guardian, and on National Public Radio. Critical praise has proven robust; as Alison Bechdel wrote, “Once you enter Emil Ferris’ spectacular, eye-popping magnum opus, there is no turning back.” 

Gary Groth is an American comic book editor, publisher and critic, editor-in-chief of the seminal The Comics Journal and co-founder of Seattle-based Fantagraphics Books (launched 1976), a press synonymous with the rise of alternative comics in the 1980s, 90s and beyond. Groth first green-lighted The Hernandez Bros., Joe Sacco, Megan Kelso, Chris Ware, Ellen Forney, Dash Shaw and many other crucial comics artists. In 2016, to commemorate its 40-year anniversary, the press published We Told You So: Comics as Art, a Fantagraphics chronicle by Tom Spurgeon with Michael Dean. 

Moto Hagio, legendary shoujo manga artist, is a founder of the "Year 24 Group," which revolutionized shoujo manga in the 1970s--and its effects on the genre are still clear to this day. She has been writing manga regularly since 1969, and many of her stories have been adapted to film, television, theatre, and even radio dramas. Among many accolades, Hagio has won the Osamu Tezuka Cultural Prize (1997), the Comic-Con Inkpot Award (2010), and the Japan Cartoonist Association's Award (2011). She is also the first female manga creator to be awarded the Japanese Medal of Honor for Culture (2012). Fantagraphics has recently published several of her prominent works for the first time in English, including Heart of Thomas, A Drunken Dream and Other Stories, and the first volume of Otherworld Barbara volume one. The second volume of Otherworld Barbara is due out this summer.

Nick Sousanis is a professor of Humanities & Liberal Studies at San Francisco State University. He received his doctorate in education at Teachers College, Columbia University in 2014, where he wrote and drew his dissertation entirely in comic book form. Titled Unflattening, it argues for the importance of visual thinking in teaching and learning, and it is now a book from Harvard University Press. Unflattening received the 2016 American Publishers Awards for Professional and Scholarly Excellence (PROSE Award) in Humanities, the Lynd Ward Prize for best Graphic Novel of 2015, and was nominated for an Eisner Award for Best Scholarly/Academic work. Recent comics include “Against the Flow” and “Upwards” in The Boston Globe, and The Fragile Framework for Nature co-authored with Rich Monastersky.

Jim Woodring is a self-taught artist, his first published works documented the disorienting hell of his salad days in an “illustrated autojournal” called Jim. This work was published by Fantagraphics Books and collected in THE BOOK OF JIM in 1992.He is best known for his wordless comics series depicting the follies of his character Frank, a generic cartoon anthropomorph whose adventures careen wildly from sweet to appalling. A decade’s worth of these stories was collected in THE FRANK BOOK in 2004. The 2010 Frank story WEATHERCRAFT won The Stranger’s Genius Award and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for that year. The most recent Frank book, CONGRESS OF THE ANIMALS, was released in 2011.