Mark Schultz (comic author)

Mark Schultz (* 1955 in Philadelphia , Pennsylvania ) is an American comic book author and illustrator.

Life and work

Schultz, who grew up in Pittsburgh, began his training as an academic painter at Kutztown University in Pennsylvania in 1973 . After successfully completing his studies in 1977 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts, Schultz began to work as a draftsman for advertising graphics.

In the early 1980s, Schultz, who cites the authors Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert E. Howard, as well as the draftsmen Frank Frazetta , Alex Raymond , Wallace Wood , Roy Krenkel and Al Williamson as artistic role models , began for the then emerging to inspire the American underground comics scene. 1982 was finally published a co-designed by Schultz comic story for the first time: The Story "The Sea King", by Val Semeiks had been drawn and revised by Schultz as Pens, was as a backup story in that of Marvel Comics published booklet Savage Sword of Conan # 132 built in.

As a result, from 1987 onwards, Schultz managed to make a name for himself as an independent artist with the series Xenozoic Tales (German: "Jack Cadillac - Stories from the Xenozoic"), which he himself had created and designed over a long period . The Xenozoic Tales , which deal with a post-apocalyptic world in which people coexist with various prehistoric creatures such as dinosaurs, appear in loose succession up to the present day. Long pauses in the series of publications are mainly due to Schultz's slow pace of drawing and his obsession with detail. The television broadcaster CBS picked up the Xenozoic Tales in the early 1990s as a premise for a television series that appeared in 1993/1994 under the title Cadillacs and Dinosaurs . Denis Kitchen, Schultz's agent and owner of the Kitchen Sink Press publishing house , which publishes the series, states that the Xenozoic Tales have so far been translated into eight languages.

In the 1990s and 2000s, Schultz mainly worked for the publishers DC-Comics and Dark Horse Comics: While he worked for DC between 1999 and 2003 as an author on the series Superman: Man of Steel - his most important artistic partner being the draftsman Doug Mahnke was - while developing the SubHuman series for Dark Horse, which deals with an underwater civilization , and worked on the Aliens and Predator series . For DC and Dark Horse, Schultz later created the cross-publisher crossover Superman & Batman vs. Aliens & Predator . He also worked as a novelist: He wrote a novel about DC's superhero Flash and presented an adaptation of his Xenozoic Tales .

In 2004 Schultz, who currently lives with his wife Denis Prowell in the mountains of northeastern Pennsylvania, took over the authorship of the traditional comic strip Prinz Eisenherz .

Awards

Schultz has received, among other things, five Harvey Awards , two Eisner Awards , an Inkpot Award, a Spectrum Award and three Haxturs for his work .

Web links

• Mark Schultz. Kitchen & Hansen, archived from the original on August 2, 2009 ; accessed on March 2, 2014 (English). 
• Jack Cadillac - Stories from the Xenozoic (Reiner Feest Verlag, 1990) in the Comic Guide
• Jack Cadillac (Comic Library, 1994) in the Comic Guide