Judd Winick

Judd Winick (born February 12, 1970 on Long Island , New York) is an American comic book author and illustrator.

Life and work

Judd Winick

Winick grew up in Massachusetts, where he graduated from high school in 1988. Then he began - influenced by the work of cartoonists Garry Trudeau and Berkeley Breathed - to study art at Ann Arbor's School of Art. During this time, Winnick made his first published work, "Nuts and Bolts," a comic strip published in the Michigan Daily, the Ann Arbor School's campus newspaper.

After completing his studies, Winick published a small collection of his comic strips under the title "Spin Cycle: The Nuts & Bolts Collections". A nationwide publication of Nuts and Bolts in various daily newspapers, originally promised by the Universal Press Syndicate, the distributor of well-known cartoons such as Calvin & Hobbes , ultimately failed to materialize.

In 1994 Winick took part in the MTV show The Real World: San Francisco , during which he met his future wife Pam Ling - whom he married in 2001 - and with whom he now has a child born in 2005.

In the further course of the 1990s, works such as Frumpy the Clown and Road Trip appeared, most of which were published in the anthology Oni Double Feature # 14 distributed by Oni Press . This was followed by the 1999 miniseries The Adventures of Barry Ween published by Image Comics . Boy genius . He also designed the illustrations for the popular info book series The Complete Idiot's Guide to ... (e.g. The Complete Idiot's Guide to Internet , in German as Internet for Dummies ).

In 2000, Winick published the sensitive comic novel Pedro and Me: Friendship, Loss, and What I Learned about his friendship and the death of AIDS sufferer Pedro Zamora. The volume has won numerous awards - including six American Library Association Awards, the GLAAD Award, and the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award in the "Best Children's Book" category - and was included in the US Department of Education's "Young Adult Literature Highly Recommended List" has even been included in the curriculum of various US schools.

In 2001 Winick took over the writing duties for the traditional science fiction series Green Lantern, which he was to write until 2003. His artistic partners at Green Lantern were the draftsmen Darryl Banks and Romeo Tanghal . In 2003 Winick was hired to succeed Kevin Smith as the author of the adventure series Green Arrow . Both Green Lantern and Green Arrow received an unusual amount of media attention during Winick's authorship, which was mainly due to the fact that he did not shy away from tackling topics that are extremely unusual for mainstream comics such as homosexuality and HIV , which they logically fit into To integrate fictional action, but at the same time to flank it with socially critical reflections that are recognizable overflowing into the "real world". He was invited to the MSNBC talk show by Phil Donahue and interviewed by the news channel CNN.

Other titles that Winick worked on in the 2000s were the series Batman , The Outsiders and Titans East (2007) for DC Comics , as well as Exiles for Marvel Comics , the four-part miniseries Superman / Shazam: First Thunder , the twelve-part series by Howard Porter illustrated, maxiseries The Trials of Shazam and miniseries Blood & Water for DC's Vertigo -Imprint.

For the cartoon network , Winick created the series The Life and Times of Juniper Lee in 2005, which had three seasons.