Current Work
Dean Haspiel is currently the artist and co-writer of The Fox.
Overview
Dean Edmund Haspiel is a comic book artist living in Brooklyn, New York. He is known for his collaborations with writer Harvey Pekar on his American Splendor series as well as the graphic novel The Quitter. He has been nominated for numerous Eisner Awards, and won a 2010 Emmy Award for TV design work for the HBO show Bored to Death.
Career
In the mid-1980s, Haspiel worked as an assistant to Howard Chaykin on American Flagg!, Bill Sienkiewicz on New Mutants and Elektra: Assassin, and Walter Simonson on Thor. Later, Haspiel attended the State University of New York at Purchase first majoringing in illustration and eventually switching to film.
In 1987, while still an undergraduate, Haspiel inaugurated his professional comics career when he co-created The Verdict with Martin Powell. Haspiel went on to co-create the two-man comics anthology Keyhole with cartoonist Josh Neufeld.
Haspiel's "last romantic anti-hero" Billy Dogma debuted in Keyhole, and has appeared in a number of comics since then, published by Top Shelf Productions and Alternative Comics. Recent works starring Billy Dogma include Brawl a "creature romance double feature" mini-series with Michel Fiffe for Image Comics; and "Sex Planet," a Billy Dogma interlude for Popgun volume 2 .
Haspiel was a long-time collaborator with Harvey Pekar on American Splendor. The culmination of their work together was The Quitter, published by Vertigo in 2005. In fall 2008, Vertigo released the original graphic novel The Alcoholic, written by Jonathan Ames and drawn by Haspiel. Also in 2008, Françoise Mouly's Toon Books published Mo and Jo: Fighting Together Forever, written by Jay Lynch and drawn by Haspiel. Haspiel serialized Street Code, a webcomic for Zuda Comics, after editing the webcomics anthology Next-Door Neighbor for SMITH Magazine.
He then founded the webcomics collective Act-I-Vate, where he revived and updated the romantic adventures of Billy Dogma and his girlfriend, Jane Legit. Since then, Haspiel helped to found an online "Brooklyn literary salon" called Welcome to Trip City, which puts comics alongside music, essays, fiction, podcast and other new digital content.
Haspiel contributes to mainstream comics periodically, including one of the stories in The Amazing Spider-Man #692, marking the 50th Anniversary of Peter Parker.
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