Contributors

We are always looking for new contributors, occasional and regular. Email the editor if you might be interested.

Meet the Staff

Founding Editor Martin Skidmore edited the print FA way back in the ’80s. He also edited at Trident Comics, which included work by Grant Morrison, Neil Gaiman, Mark Millar, Eddie Campbell and others. He was a comics fan since being reintroduced to them (especially Steve Gerber’s work) as a teenager. More recently, he was mostly enthusiastic about manga and old comic strips. He wrote at great length about Japanese Arts (including comics), reviewed many singles, occasionally wrote something for the Freaky Trigger website, and reviewed books on his own LiveJournal, when not doing his day job as a systems analyst at a top London university. He revived FA in this online form in late 2010, to an overwhelmingly enthusiastic response. Tragically, Martin was diagnosed with terminal cancer in early 2011, and died on Wednesday July 27th 2011 at the age of 52.

Tony Keen read comics in his youth, but was really suckered into American superheroes by the newsstand at Stockport railway station in 1979, and into fandom by finding a copy of pre-Skidmore FA in a newsagents in the early 1980s. He wrote occasional comics reviews for the print FA, and more recently for the online magazine Strange Horizons. He is very pleased to be part of the editorial team carrying on Martin Skidmore’s legacy.

Under his ‘maiden name’ of Howard Stangroom, Will Morgan was a frequent contributor to the print FA and myriad other fanzines from 1972 to the end of the 20th Century. He has also written comics journalism and criticism, and occasionally even comics.  In his Post-Crisis incarnation, he tries to make sense out of Marvel continuity in a, hopefully, entertainingly irreverent manner for the Marvel Figurine Collection.  He also is one-third owner of the 30th Century Comics store in beautiful downtown Putney, where he graces the  counter six days a week. 30th Century’s motto is “crumbly old comics for crumbly old people”.

Jonathan Bogart has neglected his bills in favor of comics and music for many years, and would do it again in a heartbeat. He lives in Arizona and blogs at Exist Yesterday, Bilbo’s Laptop, and Don’t Stay Up Too Late.

Somewhere after art school and boring freelance work as a graphic designer in advertising, Amy Brander decided to start blogging. She wrote about a number of topics for over ten years before starting TheFrogQueen.com in 2010. Eventually she started writing for Blue Raven Comics (now defunct). She decided she had a lot of questions for the creators of the comics she was reading. She decided to chase after her answers and began interviewing creators full-time. Some writers and artist she’s interviewed include Alison Sampson, Marguerite Sauvage, Mark Millar, Mike Allred, Dan Slott, Bengal, John Arcudi, and Brandon Graham, to name just a few. Besides reading loads of comics daily, she works for a comic book label and a software company. When she’s not working, she’s reading. Some of her all time favorite comics include The Maxx, Heavy Liquid, 100%, Hellblazer (like pretty much all of it ever), Y the Last Man, Prophet (current run), and Finder.  Some of her favorite artists (in no order) include Bengal, Mike Allred, Alison Sampson, Moebius, John Bivens, Milo Manara, Paul Pope, Faryl Dalrymple, Brandon Graham, and Shaky Kane. Some of her favorite writers include Peter Milligan, Dan Slott, Grant Morrison, Brian K. Vaughan, Carla Speed McNeil, Alejandro Jodorwosky, and all these lists get really lengthy. This is a good start. 

From his base in Brighton, England, Gavin Burrows has badgered the foolish and unwary with a plethora of articles, polemics, drunken rants and nuisance phone calls for over twenty-five years now. He used to write for the original print FA back in the day. (Just not very well and not very often.)  He produces his own comics. (See above.) His favourite subjects are comics, music, film and visual art, which he tends to rant about from his blog…

Peter Campbell learned to read with the aid of Carl Barks’ Uncle Scrooge comics, which was the start of a lifelong addiction to the comics medium.  He spent several years contributing to fanzines before deciding it was much easier to simply read comics, as opposed to critiquing them. When not being tempted out of retirement to write for FA, he restricts his creative efforts to writing infrequent and puerile entries for his LiveJournal blog, in addition to mordant works of fiction that inhabit the very lowest echelons of Amazon’s sales charts. He lives and works in the chilly north of Scotland.

Ken Gale, producer, co-host, and interviewer for ’Nuff Said!, made his first professional sale, an interview with Jerry Robinson, to DC’s Amazing World of DC Comics 4 in 1974. During this period he started personal relationships with many comics professionals, which has been a great asset to the quality and diversity of guests for ’Nuff Said! His first fiction appeared in Creepy 106 and he has also written for math textbooks and numerous magazine, e-zine and newspaper articles. Together with Mercy Van Vlack, he founded the Evolution Comics imprint in the late 1980s, and has written a number of other comic scripts including The Good Guys for Defiant and the comic strip Miranda for Puritan magazine from 1996-2000. More recently, he’s put out a dvd version of ’Nuff Said!, and scripted an environmental horror story for the second issue of the anthology Psychosis.

Martin Hand lives in putney with his better half jenni, their daughter katie, & cats enzo & lulu – he likes gomics, telly and  eating & drinking too much – when not watching cbeebies with katie, martin’s gurrent obsessions include gollecting fred hembeck sketch cards, playing beatles rockband on the wii & replacing c with g at the beginning of some but not all words. Martin is VERY SORRY for everything he’s written & drawn previously – & he promises to try harder & do better from now on, if you’ll just give him another chance…

JT Lindroos is a Finnish-American writer, designer, editor, conceptual artist and an occasional publisher. A lifelong comics reader, he has never before written about comics, though his book and music reviews, biographies and interviews have appeared in Interzone, All Music Guide, Infinity Plus and many other publications. As a publisher he released the first novels by Duane Swierczynski, Allan Guthrie and Dave Zeltserman. As a conceptual artist his designs grace the hallways of Lockheed Martin, the homes of many Nascar race winners, not to mention Jay-Z, Guy Laliberté, and Kanye West. With his words he can transform mundane reality to sound like something spectacular. His design spillover sometimes appears on posterous. He lives with his lovely wife Kathleen in Southern Indiana.

A lifelong comics fan, Andrew Littlefield has contributed articles, reviews and interviews to The Comics Journal, Amazing Heroes and many British comics fanzines, including, of course, FA. After studying Media and Communications at Goldsmiths College, Andrew has worked as a writer, editor and proofreader for a wide variety of newstand and contract publications.

Ian Moore has been reading comics since some UK reprints of Disney comics crossed his path. He has a blog where he writes occasionally about comics but mostly about other things. It is called Inuit Panda.

Despite being a blond-haired Scouser who now lives in London, Seb Patrick will never be John Constantine no matter how many trenchcoats he buys. He also writes about comics for alternatecover.com and Comic Heroes magazine, and about various other things in various other places; and once created a character called Spider-Boy for Marvel UK that was considerably less well-known than the Amalgam one.

Alistair Robb lives in self-exile in the North-east of Brazil (Hey! It worked for Ronnie) and has done for the last 17 years. He began with Whizzer and Chips and worked his way up to The Mighty World of Marvel. He’s been teaching English as a Foreign Language for the past 20 years, but has been an inveterate writer all his life. He has a blog where he posts work in progress it’s called, funnily enough, Alistairrobb’s blog.

John Robbins (aka Sean MacRoibin) is a Dubliner and pioneer of slice-of-life comics sub-genre, mortal tedium. Under his Downright Bockedy imprint he self-publishes comics and short fiction – titles include Inside Outsiders, The Monkey-Head Complaint and Enter Out. Though a conscientious objector to work, he provides the children’s pages for The Echo newspaper, letters Carter’s Column at The Birmingham Mail, and dries the dishes after dinner (but not after tea). Previously he was published in FA 104 (1988) – Martin Skidmore sent him an extra copy rather than extend John’s subscription by one issue. Water under the bridge.

Rebecca Toennessen is studying for an MA in Creative Writing at London Metropolitan University. Along with fiction and poetry, she is studying comics and graphic novels.  She rates Doonesbury and Bloom County among her most influential comic strips and hopes to write a web comic starting in 2011.

Mercy Van Vlack was one of the more visible names in American comics fandom from the 1970s onward, her art and writing having appeared in myriad ’zines. Her first professional comics work was with Richie Rich for Harvey Comics in the 1980s (writing and layouts). She has inked for Malibu, Tekno and DC, and created the popular and long-running adult strip, Miranda the Tease, which ran in Leg Show and Puritan magazines from the late 1980s to 2000.  In the late ’80s she and Ken Gale started the independent imprint, Evolution Comics, where Mercy was creative director and also pencilled, lettered and inked Green Ghost and Lotus for Dangerous Times. From the mid-1990s she joined Ken Gale as co-host of and reporter for the ’Nuff Said! radio show.