Beaucoup Pop: Artist of the Month

Thursday, May 10, 2012

Artist of the Month - Colleen Doran

May's Artist of the Month

COLLEEN DORAN!

This month's featured arist is Gone to Amerikay's Colleen Doran! I recently came across Colleen's name when I picked up a copy of GtA. Her artwork in GtA is wonderfully complex and fluid. The thing I was dawn to the most, was her ability to convey a wide scale of emotions on people's faces. Even faces from a distance, have little nuances to them that are so expressive!

For our podcast interview with Colleen, check out Episode 61 - Gone To Gallifrey!

Ghost story or detective fiction? History or
mythology? Drawing on the freewheeling spirit
of Irish and Irish-American popular culture,
Gone To aMerIKaY is all of these. A tale that
takes place simultaneously in 1870, 1960 and 2010,
it recognizes that though enormous changes have
taken place over time in the relationship between
the New World and the Old Country, some things,
like love, justice and respect, are timeless and
imperative. With thrilling illustrations, rich with
the color and mood of these passions, you will find
yourself unable to avoid lingering at length on them
before picking up the story again.

— Philip Chevron
The Pogues

From her bio on www.ColleenDoran.com, Colleen has published works with about every publisher you can think of, The Walt Disney Company, Marvel Entertainment, DC Comics, Image Comics, Lucasfilm, Dark Horse Comics, Harper Collins, Houghton Mifflin, Sony, Scholastic...the list goes on.   Her credits include Amazing Spiderman, Sandman, Captain America, Wonder Woman, The Legion of Superheroes, The Teen Titans, Walt Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, Anne Rice’s The Master of Rampling Gate, Clive Barker’s Hellraiser, Clive Barker’s Nightbreed, A Distant Soil, The Silver Surfer, Lucifer, and many others.   As a cartoonist, illustrator and film conceptual artist, she has illustrated the works of Neil Gaiman, Clive Barker, Warren Ellis, Anne Rice and J Michael Straczynski.  

Her latest work is for DC Comic’s Vertigo division, with Derek McCulloch, a collaboration the original graphic novel Gone to Amerikay. She is also illustrating Stealth Tribes for Vertigo. Written by best-selling author Warren Ellis. Colleen Doran and Barry Lyga are teamed to produce Mangaman, an original graphic novel for Houghton Mifflin, already pegged as a top five teen graphic novel for libraries. She just signed with Dark Horse to create a fully painted graphic novel based on a short story by a New York Times best selling novelist.

A Distant Soil, Colleen’s epic science fiction/fantasy tale from Image Comics, is a complex space opera, among the first of its kind in the USA, and is ongoing as a webcomic and graphic novel series.
Colleen was one of the first American artists to discover the lure of Japanese comics, and later went on to work for various Japanese publishers as a consultant, teaching the American market to manga industry executives.  

She won a grant from the Delphi Institute to study American popular culture, and was chosen to represent the United States at the Japan/America manga/comics seminar in Tokyo, Japan along with Eisner award-winning cartoonist Jeff Smith, Pulitzer Prize and Oscar award-winning creator Jules Ffeiffer, Denys Cowan, and Nicole Hollander. She also lectured at the Singapore Writers Festival in 2005. , and was Artist in Residence at the Smithsonian. She has exhibited her work at shows and galleries in Milan, Vienna, New York, San Francisco, and Tokyo.

As a core member of the comic book industry’s self publishing movement, she and other creators changed the face of the industry by bypassing the publishing and distribution system to create and publish their works in new ways. She was profiled in the book Comic Book Rebels.