Special Guests

Born in 1971 in Japan's Fukushima Prefecture, Tsutomu Nihei has been drawing comics professionally since the mid 1990s. In 1995 he was awarded the Jiro Taniguchi Special Prize in that year's Afternoon Magazine Four Seasons Awards for his submission called Blame. After working as an assistant to veteran comic artist Tsutomu Takahashi, Nihei went on to launch his debut series Blame! in Afternoon Magazine in 1998. Following the success of Blame! he next penned BioMega (Viz Media) and Wolverine SNIKT (Marvel). In 2009 Nihei returned to Afternoon to launch his latest series, Knights of Sidonia. In 2015 he won the Kodansha Manga Award in the General Comics category for his work on Knights of Sidonia.

Courtesy of Vertical Comics

Award-winning herstorian and writer Trina Robbins has been writing books, comics, and graphic novels for over 40 years. She has written and drawn comics from Wonder Woman to Barbie. Her 2009 book The Brinkley Girls: the Best of Nell Brinkley’s Cartoons from 1913–1940 and her 2011 book Tarpe Mills and Miss Fury were nominated for Eisner and Harvey awards. Her all-ages graphic novel Chicagoland Detective Agency: the Drained Brains Caper was a Junior Library Guild Selection. Her graphic novel Lily Renee: Escape Artist was awarded a gold medal from Moonbeam Children’s Books and a silver medal from Sydney Taylor Jewish Library Awards. Trina’s most recent book is Pretty in Ink, her final and definitive history of women cartoonists. In 2013, Trina was inducted into the Will Eisner Hall of Fame. She is currently working on her memoirs.

Scott Shaw! has been a pro cartoonist for 45 years. He’s worked in the fields of comic books, comic strips, animation, advertising, and toy design. Scott is best known for his work on the funnybooks Captain Carrot And His Amazing Zoo Crew! (which he co-created with Roy Thomas), Sonic the Hedgehog, and Bart Simpson Comics; the animated cartoon series Jim Henson’s Muppet Babies, The High-Fructose Adventures of Annoying Orange, The Completely Mental Misadventures Of Ed Grimly and Camp Candy (the last two of which he produced and directed); a long run as key cartoonist and art director of the TV commercials. premiums, boxes and print ads for Post Pebbles cereal featuring the Flintstones; and designer of McFarlane Toys’ line of Hanna-Barbera figures. He’s also well known for his writing and presentations of Oddball Comics, “the craziest funnybooks ever published!” Scott was one of the San Diego Comic-Con’s originators and had attended every day of every year of the show since its “mini-con” in 1969 until last year when he had to stay home because of a shattered ankle. Understandably, he is quite eager to be back at Comic-Con, the world’s best-ever class reunion for weirdos (like him), and to start over on a new attendance record.

Jeff Smith is known best as the creator of Bone. He solidified the ’90s self-publishing movement when he joined other self-publishers and spearheaded a new era of independent comics publishing. In 1993, Smith jump-started the modern graphic novel marketplace with the unprecedented success of The Complete Bone Adventures Volume One: Out from Boneville. Now published in 23 languages, Smith has won awards around the world, including 10 Eisner Awards and 11 Harveys. In 2005, Bone, in full color for the first time, was chosen to launch Graphix, an imprint of Scholastic Books, putting comics back into the hands of millions of children for the first time in a generation.

In 2008, Smith released a second creator-owned project, the Tesla-inspired science fiction epic RASL. Originally serialized, RASL was published as a single New York Times bestselling hardcover novel in 2013 by Smith’s own Cartoon Books, and it won the Eisner Award for Best Graphic Novel–Reprint in 2014.

Tuki Save the Humans, Smith’s webcomic about the first human to leave Africa 2 million years ago published at Boneville.com, won the 2014 National Cartoonist Society Reuben Award for Best Online Comic. Smith was guest editor of Best American Comics 2013 for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

No one quite understands why, but apparently J. Michael Straczynski has another hit TV show on his hands, the globe-spanning Sense8, now available on Netflix. In addition, he's working on a Red Mars series for Spike TV based on the novels by Kim Stanley Robinson, writing Flash Earth One for DC, and finishing Dream Police for Image/ Joe's Comics. Honestly, why hasn't this guy's career flamed out by now? Seriously, enough is enough.