Judd Winick

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Image:JudWin1.jpgJudd Winick (born 1970 on Long Island, New York) is an American comic book and comic strip writer/artist famous for his stint on MTV's The Real World: San Francisco, as well for his work on such comic books as Green Lantern, Green Arrow, and Pedro and Me, his autobiographical graphic novel about his friendship with Real World castmate and AIDS educator Pedro Zamora. In 2001, Winick married his Real World co-star Pam Ling. They had been living as a couple since 1994, and had a baby in 2005.

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Early life and career

Winick began cartooning professionally at 16 when his single-panel strip, Nuts & Bolts, was picked up by Anton Publications, a newspaper publisher that produced town papers in the Tri-state area. The strip ran weekly, and Winick was paid $10 a week.

Winick graduated from high school in 1988 and entered the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor’s School of Art. His comic strip, Nuts and Bolts, began running in the school’s newspaper, the Michigan Daily, in his freshman year, and he was selected to speak at graduation. UM also published a small print-run of a collection of his strips called Watching the Spin-Cycle: The Nuts & Bolts Collection. In his senior year, Universal Press Syndicate, which syndicates strips such as Cathy, Doonesbury, The Far Side, and Calvin & Hobbes, offered Winick a development contract. In early 1993 UPS decided not to renew Winick’s strip for syndication, feeling it could not compete in the current market. Unable to convince other syndicates to pick up the strip, Winick, dejected, was forced to move back in with his parents in July.

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Experiences with The Real World

In August 1993, Winick saw an advertisement on MTV for the next season of that network’s reality tv show, The Real World, which would take place in San Francisco, and decided to apply, hoping for fame and a career boost.

Here he met his future wife Pam Ling and shared a room with AIDS activist Pedro Zamora.

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Life after The Real World

After moving out of the San Francisco loft, Winick began doing illustrations for The Complete Idiot's Guide to... series of books, and has done over 300 of them, including that series’ computer-oriented line. A collection of the computer-related titles' cartoons was published in 1997 as Terminal Madness, The Complete Idiot's Guide Computer Cartoon Collection.

In May 1995 Creator’s Syndicate began running Frumpy the Clown in 30 national newspapers on July 1, 1996. Some of the newspapers eventually began to cancel the strip, feeling that the character was “not a good role model” and “inappropriate for family newspapers”, but Winick had by then found a daily strip to be creatively and technically unfulfilling anyway, and ended the strip in June 1998. Winick also left strips because he had begun work on an autobiographical graphic novel, Pedro and Me: Friendship, Loss and What I Learned, about his friendship with Zamora.

While working on Pedro and Me, Winick also began working on comic books, beginning with a one-page Frumpy the Clown cartoon in Oni Press’ anthology series, Oni Double Feature #4, in 1998, before going on to do longer stories, like the two-part Road Trip, which was published in issues #9 and 10 of the same book. Road Trip received the comic book industry’s highest honor, the Eisner Award, for Best Sequential Story.

Winick followed up with a three-issue miniseries, The Adventures of Barry Ween, Boy Genius, about a cynical, profane grade school whiz kid, who invents a myriad of futuristic devices that no one other than his best friend knows about. Barry Ween was published by Image Comics from March through May of 1999, with two subsequent miniseries published by Oni Press, which also published trade paperback collections of all three miniseries. Barry Ween was also optioned by Platinum Studios to be adapted into an animated series, but to date, nothing has come of this.

Winick’s graphic novel, Pedro and Me: Friendship, Loss, and What I Learned, was published in September 2000. It was awarded six American Library Association awards, was nominated for an Eisner Award and won Winick his first GLAAD award. Among its other awards are:

Winick and Ling married in 2001, and had a child in 2005.

Winick’s work in mainstream superhero comics has received much attention for storylines in which he explores gay or AIDS-oriented themes. In his first regular writing assignment on a monthly superhero book, DC Comics' Green Lantern, Winick wrote a storyline in which Terry Berg, an assistant of the title character, emerged as a gay character in Green Lantern #137 (June 2001) and in Green Lantern #154 (November 2001) the story entitled "Hate Crime" gained media recognition when Terry was brutally beaten in a homophobic attack. Winick was featured on an episode of the talk show Donahue for that storyline, and received two more GLAAD awards for his "Green Lantern" work.

In 2003, Judd Winick left Green Lantern for another DC book, Green Arrow, beginning with issue #26 of that title (July 2003). He gained more media recognition for Green Arrow #43 (December 2004) in which he revealed that Green Arrow's 17-year-old ward, a former runaway-turned prostitute named Mia Dearden, was HIV-positive. In issue #45 (February 2005), Winick had Dearden take on the identity of Speedy, the second such Green Arrow sidekick to bear that name, making her perhaps the most visible and most positive mainstream HIV-positive superhero to star in an ongoing book without being killed off soon after her status was revealed, a decision for which Winick was interviewed on CNN. [2] (Other comics characters had been established to have HIV/AIDS, though they were either minor characters or murderous vigilantes, killed off not too long after their HIV status was revealed, and in short-lived books that were not generally considered well-written.[3])

Winick’s other comic book work includes Batman, The Outsiders, and Marvel's Exiles. Winick also wrote a five-issue miniseries for DC’s Vertigo imprint called Blood and Water, about a young man with terminal illness whose two friends reveal to him that they are vampires, and that they wish to save his life by turning him into a vampire himself.

Winick has also turned his attention to television, as the creator and executive producer of Cartoon Network's series, The Life and Times of Juniper Lee.

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Sources and External Links

Pedro and Me: Friendship, Loss, and What I Learned by Judd Winick (2000; Henry Holt & Co.)

The Real World Diaries (1996; Pocket Books; MTV Books)

http://www.frumpy.com/judd/index.html

The Worlds of Judd Winick

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