iFanboy Upstarts: Micah Gunnell

Several of today’s biggest comic artists got their start at Joe Kubert’s long-running technical school for comics. As the only accredited school devoted exclusively to cartooning and featuring Joe Kubert and his sons Andy and Adam as teachers, it’s trained everyone from Stephen Bissette and Rick Veitch to Rags Morales, Scott Kolins, Alex Maleev, Adam Warren and more. And one of the most exciting artists under the surface of comics today is someone who did a year at the Kubert School and then went straight into professional comics.

California artist Micah Gunnell got his start doing a backup story in the small press comic Government Bodies back in 2002, but after a year at the Kubert School he came back to comics with a passion to work and the skills to do it with. As one of the finalists in Comic Book Resources’ “Comic Book Idol” contest alongside future-star Jonathan Hickman, he caught the eye of Aspen Comics and in 2005 began a long-term relationship with the company that’s lasted to this today. His first project so him working alongside company founder Michael Turner on Soulfire: Dying Of The Light. After cutting his teeth on that project, he was picked to draw a new concept for the company, the high energy youth book Shrugged. Gunnell worked on that series while also doing shorts for NBC’s Heroes comic series. In 2009 he stepped things up a notch with the more dramatic and adult Dellec series, which caught the eye of Marvel. Gunnell moonlighted on Deadpool Team-Up for an issue while continuing work on Dellec. After that series’ conclusion in 2010, the artist worked on spinoff of the successful Executive Assistant series, subtitled Orchid. His next major project is the superhero-meets-American Idol series Idolized, also from Aspen.

Gunnell is currently balancing his comic work with a sideline career doing storyboards for film and television projects, so it’s hard to say where the artist will end up a year from now, let alone five.