Tom Hart (cartoonist)

Career

Tom Hart began making mini-comics while living in Seattle in the early 1990s. Like many of his colleagues including Megan Kelso, Dave Lasky, Jason Lutes, Jon Lewis, and James Sturm, he was an early recipient of the Xeric Foundation grant for cartoonists.

His Xeric-winning book, Hutch Owen's Working Hard was 56 pages and self-published in 1994.

Hart returned to the Hutch Owen series and published a first collection of stories with Top Shelf Productions in 2000. Later books in the series have also been published by Top Shelf. Time magazine called Hutch Owen "A devastating satire [which] feels like a scalding hot poker cauterizing the open wound of American corporate and consumer culture."

Hutch Owen was also distributed as daily print and webcomic strips, and Hart is a former editor of and contributor to Serializer.net. One of the original comics on Serializer was Trunktown, a Hutch Owen spin-off drawn by Hart and written by Shaenon Garrity. His strip version of Hutch Owen, ran in the Metro newspaper in New York and Boston for a year and a half from 2006-2008.

In 2008 his comic strip collaboration with Marguerite Dabaie, Ali's House, was bought and syndicated by King Features Syndicate. The strip is now archived at GoComics.

Tom Hart is also an experienced teacher, having taught for more than ten years at New York's School of Visual Arts, Parsons, the Education Alliance, Young Audiences, numerous places across the country and all over New York City. In 2011, he and his cartoonist wife, Leela Corman, moved to Gainesville, Florida, and founded the Sequential Artists Workshop.

In 2012 he published Daddy Lightning, about his experiences as a father. In January 2016 he published Rosalie Lightning, a memoir named after his daughter, who had died suddenly when she was almost two, and about his and his wife's grief and their attempts to make sense of their life afterwards.

Personal life

Hart is married to fellow cartoonist Leela Corman. Since the death of their daughter Rosalie, the couple have since had another child.

Awards

• 1994 Xeric Award
• 1997 (nomination) Ignatz Award for Promising New Talent
• 2000 (nomination) Ignatz Award for Outstanding Graphic Novel or Collection, for Banks/Eubanks
• 2001 (nomination) Ignatz Award for Outstanding Story, for "Stocks Are Surging", in The Collected Hutch Owen
• 2002 (nomination) Ignatz Award for Outstanding Online Comic, for Hutch Owen: Public Relations
• 2005 (nomination) Ignatz Award for Outstanding Anthology or Collection, for Hutch Owen: Unmarketable
• 2013 (nomination) Ignatz Award for Outstanding Story, for “Arid,” in Secret Prison #7
• 2017 (nomination) Eisner Award for Best Reality-Based Work, for Rosalie Lightning

Bibliography

• Hutch Owen's Working Hard (self-published, 1994)
• New Hat (Black Eye Productions, 1995)
• The Sands: A Picture Story (Black Eye, 1997)
• Banks/Eubanks: New Hat Stories (Top Shelf, 1999)
• Hutch Owen vol. 1: The Collected (Top Shelf Productions, 2000)
• Hutch Owen vol. 2 Unmarketable! (Top Shelf, 2004)
• Hutch Owen vol. 3: Let's Get Furious (Top Shelf, 2010)
• How to Say Everything (Sequential Artists Workshop, 2011)
• Daddy Lightning (Retrofit Comics, 2012)
• Rosalie Lightning: A Graphic Memoir (St. Martin's Press, 2016)
• She's Not Into Poetry: Mini-Comics 1991-1996 (Alternative Comics, 2016)
• The Sequential Artists Workshop Guide to Creating Professional Comic Strips (Alternative Comics, 2016)
• The Art of the Graphic Memoir: Tell Your Story, Change Your Life (St. Martin's Griffin, 2018

Notes

Citations

References

• Tom Hart at Lambiek's Comiclopedia

References

1. MacDonald, Heidi. (Jan 8, 2016). "Surviving the Loss of a Child Through a Graphic Novel". Publishers Weekly.
2. Jebens, Harley. (August 26, 1996). "No laughing matter; Exhibits, grants take comic art seriously". [[Austin American-Statesman]].
3. Arnold, Andrew. (January 20, 2005). "I Moved Your Damn Cheese!". [[Time (magazine).
4. MacDonald, Heidi. (December 19, 2005). "Web Comics: Page Clickers to Page Turners; It's like manga five or six years ago". [[Publishers Weekly]].
5. (Oct 2021). "How to make a career out of art, with Tom Hart". Autonomus Creative with Jessica Abel.
6. Damiani, Rachel. (Dec 1, 2016). "Difficult journey: The art of following a dream and surviving great loss". Gainesville Sun.
7. (Oct 19, 2015). "Rosalie Lightning". Kirkus Reviews.
8. Fitzgerald, Leah. (September 2003). "A Cartoonist Couple Quizzed: Leah Fitzgerald Chats Up Tom Hart and Leela Corman". ComixTalk.
9. (May 1994). "Xeric Foundation Announces Grant". [[The Comics Journal]].
10. "Complete List of 2018 Eisner Award Nominees Announced, comicbook.com".