James Sturm

James Sturm (b. 1965 in New York City) 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.

Biography

Sturm grew up in Rockland County, New York, and later attended the University of Wisconsinâ€"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 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.

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 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 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

Awards

• 2004: Won "Best Limited Series" Eisner Award, for Fantastic Four: Unstable Molecules, with Guy Davis
• 1996 Xeric Award

Bibliography

(writer and artist unless otherwise noted)

• Above and Below: Two Stories of the American Frontier (Autumn 2004)
• Aesop's Fables #2 (Fall 1991), Fantagraphics Books, story "The Lion and the Mouse"
• The Cereal Killings #1â€"8 (March 1992â€"September 1995), Fantagraphics Books
• Drawn & Quarterly #2 (October 1990), Drawn and Quarterly, story "Friday Night"
• Drawn & Quarterly #3 (January 1991), Drawn and Quarterly, story "Signs of the Times"
• Drawn & Quarterly #4 (March 1991), Drawn and Quarterly, story "Ring"
• Market Day (2010), Drawn and Quarterly ISBN 1-897299-97-4
• The Golem's Mighty Swing (July 2001), Drawn and Quarterly
• The Revival (1996), Bear Bones Press
• Satchel Paige: Striking Out Jim Crow (2007), Hyperion/Jump at the Sun (script only)
• Startling Stories: Fantastic Four - Unstable Molecules #1â€"4 (Marchâ€"June 2003), Marvel Comics (script and layouts only)
• Adventures in Cartooning with Andrew Arnold, and Alexis Frederick-Frost (2009) First Second
• Adventures in Cartooning Activity Book Andrew Arnold, and Alexis Frederick-Frost (2010) First Second
• Adventures in Cartooning: Christmas Special with Andrew Arnold, and Alexis Frederick-Frost (2012) First Second
• Adventures in Cartooning: Characters in Action with Andrew Arnold and Alexis Frederick-Frost (2013) First Second
• Sleepless Knight with Andrew Arnold & Alexis Frederick-Frost (2015) First Second

References

External links

• James Sturm at the Comic Book DB
• James Sturm at the Center for Cartoon Studies
• James Sturm at the Lambiek Comiclopedia
• Read Yourself Raw profile
• Drawing on Life, JewishJournal review of The Golem's Mighty Swing
• Jeet Heer's examination of the CCS, originally published in Boston Globe Ideas
• "Thinking in Comics: A Roundtable on the Present and Future of the Graphic Novel". Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts 26 (1). 
• Booklist Online interview
• Entering James Sturm's America, Newsarama, March 15, 2007
• Excerpt from The Comics Journal interview