J. Scherpenhuizen

J. Scherpenhuizen is an Australian artist, writer and academic. His first published work was an original backup story in the Australian reprint comic Marvel Triple action in 1976. His first significant work was in the 1990s with Mister Blood which he co-created with Christopher Sequiera for Bloodsongs magazine. The pair later produced more material featuring Mister Blood for Sequira’s Sequence Productions which published it in Mister Blood and Bold Action in 2000. The Glowing Man was another Sequiera/Scherpenhuizen co-creation published by Sequence Productions in the Glowing Man/Lyrebird One shot.

Scherpenhuizen’s first major breakthough came when he met Michal Dutkiewicz at a convention in, who offered him work as an assistant on the special oneshot Wolverine Doombringer, written by Doug Moench, and published by Marvel Comics in 1997.

Soon thereafter, he co-created a strip with Christopher Sequiera as a 3-page pitch to Marvel Comics with Dutkiewicz attached as an inker. The industry had hit a slump, however, the pitch failed to sell and the strip was later expanded by the creators and published as the Catamorph in Terra Magazine by Black House Comics in 2012, for whom Scherpenhuizen had already created the horror series, The Twilight Age, published in 2008-9. The six issue series, written and drawn by Scherpenhuizen, was later collected as The Time of the Wolves graphic novel.

Dutkiewicz called on Scherpenhuizen again to help him finish the Lost in Space story arc Journey to the Bottom of the Soul, which had been left unpublished when Innovation ceased publication. It was published in 2005.

In 2008 he inked the second issue of the Buckaroo Banzai prequel pencilled by W.Chew Chan and published by Moonstone Comics.

Scherpenhuizen is a frequent collaborator with writer Jason Franks, inking Franks’ pencils on the second volume of Sixsmiths as well as doing full art on a chapter and contributing covers to two of the issues reprinting the series for the American marked, published by Caliber Comics. Scherpenhuizen’s story Absolution written by brother David ‘Scherwood’ was published in Franks’ famed anthology Kagemono: Flowers and Skulls. They teamed again in 2019 to co-create the character Princess who featured in a chapter of SuperAustralians published in 2019, for which Scherpenhuizen also provided the cover and most of the art to a second story featuring Gary Chaloner’s The Jackaroo.

Since 2016 he has been working on a graphic novel as part of a doctor of arts degree at the University of Sydney which is due to be published in 2021.