Best American Comics, 2015

Anders Nilsen began self publishing in 1999 by photocopying drawings and comics from his sketchbooks and stapling them together into a mini-comic called Big Questions. In the time since he has drawn numerous strips and graphic novels including Dogs and Water, Big Questions, Don't Go Where I Can't Follow, Rage of Poseidon, The End, and others. His work has been anthologized in Kramer's Ergot, Best American Comics, and Mome, amongst others. His illustrations have appeared on a number of book covers, and in newspapers and magazines. Nilsen's work has garnered several Ignatz awards, and Big Questions received the 2012 Lynd Ward Prize for Graphic Novel of the Year, as well as a citation as one of the New York Times' 100 Notable Books of 2011. He also still self publishes work now and then. Nilsen grew up in Minneapolis and New Hampshire and studied art at the University of New Mexico and, briefly, at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He currently lives in Minneapolis.

Bill Kartalopoulos is the publisher/editor of Rebus Books and the programming coordinator for SPX: The Small Press Expo. He was a cofounder and the programming director for the Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival.  He is a member of the Executive Committee for the International Comic Arts Forum (ICAF), a contributing editor for Print Magazine, and has worked as an assistant to Art Spiegelman for several years. Edited by Bill Kartalopoulos and Jonathan Lethem, Best American Comics 2015 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) showcases the work of both established and up-and-coming contributors and highlights both fiction and nonfiction from graphic novels, pamphlet comics, newspapers, magazines, minicomics, and the Web.

Gabrielle Bell is a British-American alternative cartoonist known for her surrealist, melancholy, semi-autobiographical stories. In 1998, she began to collect her “Book of” miniseries (Book of Sleep, Book of Insomnia, Book of Black, etc), which resulted in When I’m Old and Other Stories, published by Alternative Comics. In 2001 she moved to New York and released her autobiographical series Lucky, published by Drawn and Quarterly. Her work has been selected for the 2007, 2009, 2010, 2012 and 2013 Houghton-Mifflin Best American Comics and the Yale Anthology of Graphic Fiction. Her work has also been featured in The Guardian, The Big Issue, Vice Magazine, McSweeney’s, Bookforum, The Believer, and Flare. She is also the recipient of an Ignatz Award for "Most Outstanding Mini-Comic."The title story of Bell’s book, Cecil and Jordan in New York, has been adapted for the film anthology Tokyo! Her latest book, The Voyeurs, is available from Uncivilized Books.

According to the Comics Journal, “No one is wedding horror’s darkness to an equally black, equally lacerating emotional palette as effectively as Julia Gfrörer.” She is the author and illustrator of Black Is the Color, the acclaimed graphic novel about a 17^th century sailor abandoned at sea by his shipmates. Martyrdom: The Coloring Book (Pulp/Zest Books), which she illustrates, is an adult (very adult, as the body count will quickly indicate) coloring book gives aspiring crayon and paper artists the chance to hone their craft while also buffing up their knowledge of Catholic history and legends.