Mark Crilley

Mark Crilley was raised in Detroit, where he started drawing almost as soon as he could hold a pencil in his hand. After graduating from Kalamazoo College in 1988, where he was befriended by children’s author David Small, he taught English in Taiwan and Japan for nearly five years. His first comic series, Akiko, was published in 1995, garnering immediate critical praise, including 13 Eisner award nominations during its 53-issue run. In 1998 Crilley was named one of the "100 Most Creative People in Entertainment" by Entertainment Weekly Magazine, leading Random House to invite him to adapt his Akiko comic books as a series of ten prose-fiction novels for young readers. After the two-book Billy Clikk series in 2005, Crilley created his first manga-style graphic novel series, Miki Falls, a set of four paperbacks published by HarperCollins in 2007. Miki Falls was chosen by the American Library Association as one of the 2007's “Great Graphic Novels for Teens," and it was optioned by Paramount Pictures and Brad Pitt’s Plan B Production Studio for development as a feature film. Also in 2007, Crilley launched his highly popular YouTube channel, which would go on to gain him more than 300 million video views, and a following of more than 2.5 million subscribers. In 2010 Dark Horse Comics published the first of six Brody’s Ghost graphic novels, resulting in Scholastic releasing a special edition of the series for its book fairs, a first for both Crilley and Dark Horse. In 2012 Crilley released his most successful book yet, Mastering Manga, an instructional art book that would soon be published in eight languages and rank consistently among the top-selling books of its kind. Mastering Manga 2 and 3 would soon follow. 2015 saw the publication of The Realism Challenge by Watson-Guptill, a book teaching hyperrealistic illustration techniques, followed by The Drawing Lesson in 2016, a graphic novel that blends narrative fiction with art instruction. Crilley’s work has been featured in USA Today, Entertainment Weekly, and on CNN Headline News and Comcast On Demand. He lives in Michigan with his wife, Miki, and children, Matthew and Mio.

Related exhibitions: BAM! It’s A Picture Book: The Art Behind Graphic Novels (2013)