Jill Thompson
Author of The Invisibles, Vol. 1: Say You Want a Revolution
About the Author
Jill Thompson is a comicbook artist. She graduated in 1987 from the American Academy of Art in Chicago and has been working as a cartoonist and illustrator ever since. Jill has risen to the top of her field and has garnered acclaim for her work on WONDER WOMAN, SWAMP THING, BLACK ORCHID and the show more award winning title SANDMAN with Neil Gaiman. In 1997, Jill's first children's book, THE SCARY GODMOTHER was released to critical acclaim. Subsequent books in the series include Scary Godmother-The Revenge of Jimmy, Scary Godmother-The Mystery Date and Scary Godmother-The Boo Flu. Select Scary Godmother stories have been translated into Spanish by La Factoria, into Italian by Kappa Edizione and into German by Ehapa. Jill travels the US and beyond meeting fans and speaking about comics, literacy and art. She enjoys working with other writers and artists from time to time and most recently has collaborated with former wrestler turned author Mick Foley and illustrated MICK FOLEY'S HALLOWEEN HIJINX which debuted at number seven on the New York Times children's book best seller's list. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Series
Works by Jill Thompson
The Invisibles Vol. 1 #07 — Illustrator — 7 copies
The Invisibles Vol. 1 #08 — Illustrator — 7 copies
The Invisibles Vol. 1 #06 — Illustrator — 5 copies
The Invisibles Vol. 3 #03 — Illustrator — 4 copies
The Invisibles Vol. 3 #04 — Illustrator — 4 copies
Seekers Into the Mystery # 14 — Illustrator — 3 copies
CORUM BULL & THE SPEAR #1-4 MICHAEL MOORCOCK's complete story (CORUM THE BULL AND THE SPEAR (1985 FIRST)) (1989) 2 copies
The Little Endless portfolio 1 copy
Scary Godmother 0 1 copy
Seekers Into the Mystery # 12 — Illustrator — 1 copy
Associated Works
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland / Through the Looking-Glass (1865) — Cover artist, some editions — 29,267 copies, 314 reviews
The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl Vol. 1: Squirrel Power (2015) — Variant Cover (3), some editions — 1,011 copies, 65 reviews
9-11: The World's Finest Comic Book Writers & Artists Tell Stories to Remember (2002) — Illustrator — 256 copies, 1 review
Chicks Dig Comics: A Celebration of Comic Books by the Women Who Love Them (2012) — Contributor — 90 copies, 5 reviews
Strip AIDS U.S.A.: A Collection of Cartoon Art to Benefit People With AIDS (1988) — Contributor — 65 copies
Bad Doings & Big Ideas: A Bill Willingham Deluxe Edition (2011) — Illustrator — 47 copies, 3 reviews
House of Mystery Vol. 2 # 02 — Illustrator — 3 copies
Back Issue #54 — Interviewee — 2 copies
Future Quest #2 — Cover artist, some editions — 2 copies
Action Girl Comics #1-19 — Contributor — 1 copy
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Other names
- THOMPSON, Jill
- Birthdate
- 1966-11-20
- Gender
- female
- Education
- American Academy of Art (BA|1987)
- Occupations
- writer
illustrator - Organizations
- DC Comics
- Awards and honors
- Eisner Award (Best Painter/Multimedia Artist, 2001, 2004, 2007, 2009, 2010, 2017)
Eisner Award (Best Single Issue, 2015, 2017)
Eisner Award (Best Short Story, 2005)
Eisner Award (Best Publication for Early Readers, 2001)
Eisner Award (Best Publication for Teens, 2010)
Eisner Award (Best Graphic Album: New, 2017) (show all 7)
Eisner Award (Best Humor Publication, 2000) - Relationships
- Azzarello, Brian (spouse)
- Short biography
- Jill Thompson is a graduate of the American Academy of Art in Chicago. She has been working professional as a comic book creator since she was a teenager and her work has been published around the world. She is the creator of the Scary Godmother, which has graced comics, stage, and screen, as well as the graphic novel series for younger reader, Magic Trixie. Jill considers herself fortunate to have collaborated on comics such as Wonder Woman, Sandman, The Invisibles, Finals, Beasts of Burden, and many, many more.
Jill is the proud recipient of 7 Eisner Awards. She loves creating comics and has no plans of stopping anytime soon. [from Wonder Woman : the True Amazon] - Nationality
- USA
- Birthplace
- Forest Park, Illinois, USA
- Associated Place (for map)
- Illinois, USA
Members
Reviews
The first couple issues of this, with Jack Frost's awakening guided by Tom o'Bedlam, are as good this time around--exhilarating, erudite, phantasmagorical-as they ever felt: not only the psychedelia, but the human stuff--the gently hungry way Tom's age looks at Jack's youth; the way, at 36, I can't any longer elide over the fact that Jack is kind of a prick and a half but at the same time recognize exactly how much the wild life in him is worth--taking neither thing any longer for granted (I show more am the parent of a toddler). The other Invisibles, as they pose and pout their way on in, are a bit too self-conscious a badass crew of mystic rebels to impress quite as much as they did (in this case age attenuates that beauty--perhaps because they are grown humans and Jack is just a kid? But that's not an attitude I'd endorse. Hm.) But I know that they are gonna get cool character dev and secrets revealed and trust that I'll love 'em as much as I ever did--all except one: King Mob has aged poorly (worse than the drag queen!), so clearly an authorial avatar and feminist bro (which in the world of the Inviz means of course also a open-the-doors-of-perception bro, a wisdom-of-the-East bro, all those things). But that kind of depreciation is only to be expected in a work whose beating heart is so totally of its times, and the main reason I didn't enjoy this as much as I did a decade ago is, to be honest, that it's full of ugly graphic violence, swaggering in oh-so-pleased with itself. Literature should break the ice within, certainly, and the bits like where Orlando cuts off Jack's finger while he's in his trance ("Such a small piece of you ...") certainly might be justified in terms of the affective yields; but then other parts, like where Orlando, uh ... skins the guy out getting ice cream for his kids and then comes home and nails the dog to the door and dismembers the kids and pops one of their heads onto the end of the lamppost and rapes and disembowels the guy's wife while wearing his skin, all rendered with a clever but filthy visual economy (literally all we see of the wife is a single breast, entrails, and bloodied thighs, reducing her neatly to a collection of brutalized parts; all we see of the one kid is the severed head, the part that smiled and sparkled)--no. Done with it. I'm not so hoary that I can't just about remember how this kind of gore once seemed kind of admirably punk, anti-hypocrisy, to say nothing of an almost irresistible card to play to say EVIL EVIL EVIL, and so I don't blame the creators--but in this world we have today, those conditions are long gone, and we're all intimately familiar with how brutalizing and pornographic this kind of thing is (ironically, undercutting the original impact of its use and replacing it with an uglier). So that's unpleasant, but The Invisibles is of its times--and still wonderful in so many ways. show less
I liked this than I liked the original The Little Endless Storybook, I think because it had more interactions between all the different Endless. Or maybe it's because Barnabas is the greatest, and the last book was about him being lost, while in this one he's here all the time. Or maybe it's because I read this one like I should have done the first one: aloud, to someone else. In this case my wife, who enjoyed it, despite being largely sans any knowledge of Sandman. It would be hard to be show more not charmed by Delirium, I think.
Neil Gaiman's The Sandman Spin-Offs: « Previous in sequence | Next in sequence » show less
Neil Gaiman's The Sandman Spin-Offs: « Previous in sequence | Next in sequence » show less
Magic Trixie, a mischievous little witch with domestic issues - in the first installment of her story, Magic Trixie, she confronts her jealousy of her baby sister, Abby Cadabra, while in the second, Magic Trixie Sleeps Over, she deals with the problem of bedtime rituals - returns in this third adventure, once again faced with a common childhood experience: the desire for a pet. Having fallen in love with the dragons at the circus, Magic Trixie wants one herself, and although everyone from show more her cousin Tansy (whose boyfriend is a Dragon Rider!) to her parents and grandparents insist that dragons can't be kept as a pets, she can't stop thinking about them. Unfortunately, this fixation gets in the way, when she is transmogrifying Abby Cadabra's diapers, and suddenly her baby sister has been turned into a dragon! What will her parents say? And how will Stitches, her beloved feline companion, who has come to believe that Magic Trixie is no longer interested in him, react...?
Another engaging installment in Jill Thompson's graphic novel series, aimed at younger readers, about the antics of a somewhat bratty, but ultimately lovable little witch, Magic Trixie and the Dragon expands upon the enchanted world its heroine inhabits, while also offering a satisfying tale of a young girl, her family and friends, and her beloved cat. I liked the inclusion and depiction of the CIA (the Cryptozoological Institute of Atlantis), which studies and preserves mythological and magical creatures, and found the sub-plot in which an unhappy Stitches runs away very poignant. Magic Trixie's apology, in which she explains that she doesn't consider Stitches a pet at all, but a good friend and companion, had me tearing up (what can I say? I have a black cat myself, and he's a darling), while the conclusion, with its promise of more trouble, had me chuckling.
I don't know, all told, that I would consider these books a personal favorite, when it comes to this genre, but they definitely make for fun reading, and I would recommend them to young graphic-novel fans with a taste for witchy fiction. show less
Another engaging installment in Jill Thompson's graphic novel series, aimed at younger readers, about the antics of a somewhat bratty, but ultimately lovable little witch, Magic Trixie and the Dragon expands upon the enchanted world its heroine inhabits, while also offering a satisfying tale of a young girl, her family and friends, and her beloved cat. I liked the inclusion and depiction of the CIA (the Cryptozoological Institute of Atlantis), which studies and preserves mythological and magical creatures, and found the sub-plot in which an unhappy Stitches runs away very poignant. Magic Trixie's apology, in which she explains that she doesn't consider Stitches a pet at all, but a good friend and companion, had me tearing up (what can I say? I have a black cat myself, and he's a darling), while the conclusion, with its promise of more trouble, had me chuckling.
I don't know, all told, that I would consider these books a personal favorite, when it comes to this genre, but they definitely make for fun reading, and I would recommend them to young graphic-novel fans with a taste for witchy fiction. show less
I've decided it's time to re-read The Invisibles, which I was obsessed with as a teenager in the early '00s. I read the whole thing out of chronological order based on library reservation timescales and have no memory of what the hell happened at the end. So it'll be interesting to see if I still love it and what I notice twenty years later. My teenage self adored how weird and metatextual it is, different to anything I'd read before.
The first volume follows Dane McGowan, a delinquent show more Liverpool teenage boy from a deprived background. He is recruited by the Invisibles, a small cell of resistance fighters. He has no idea what is going on and neither does the reader, so this volume works better as an introduction than I remembered. (I didn't realise because I initially read it after at least four other volumes.) Characters from different time periods who become more significant later pop up here and there, plus the two key characteristics of the antagonists are established. They are i) interdimensional monsters, ii) Tories. For the first half of the book an enigmatic tramp named Tom O'Bedlam mentors Dane while the two live on the streets of London(s). O'Bedlam introduces Dane to magic and alternate realities. This feels relatively slow in comparison with later events, while setting up several main characters and much strangeness to come.
In the second half, the plot gets going and there are some fantastic time travel sequences. How could I have forgotten that the Invisibles visit the height of the Terror to recruit the Marquis de Sade? I only recalled De Sade turning up later, so this was a lovely surprise. Byron, Shelley, and Mary Shelley also appear, discussing utopia. Given that at the age of 16 I was already fascinated by the French Revolution and utopian thought, is it any wonder I got into this series. There's also a fair amount of creepy supernatural shit, brutal violence, and BDSM (hardly surprising, given De Sade's presence).
Definitely still five stars two decades later. Although the art hasn't hit its stride yet, the plot and tone are fully compelling from the start. I have a real dilemma about what genre tags to use for this series, though. It deliberately mixes sci-fi, horror, supernatural, and fantasy elements and borrows from a huge range of literary, historical, mythological, and spiritual sources. What the hell, let's say sci-fi and supernatural even though there is so much more going on than that. show less
The first volume follows Dane McGowan, a delinquent show more Liverpool teenage boy from a deprived background. He is recruited by the Invisibles, a small cell of resistance fighters. He has no idea what is going on and neither does the reader, so this volume works better as an introduction than I remembered. (I didn't realise because I initially read it after at least four other volumes.) Characters from different time periods who become more significant later pop up here and there, plus the two key characteristics of the antagonists are established. They are i) interdimensional monsters, ii) Tories. For the first half of the book an enigmatic tramp named Tom O'Bedlam mentors Dane while the two live on the streets of London(s). O'Bedlam introduces Dane to magic and alternate realities. This feels relatively slow in comparison with later events, while setting up several main characters and much strangeness to come.
In the second half, the plot gets going and there are some fantastic time travel sequences. How could I have forgotten that the Invisibles visit the height of the Terror to recruit the Marquis de Sade? I only recalled De Sade turning up later, so this was a lovely surprise. Byron, Shelley, and Mary Shelley also appear, discussing utopia. Given that at the age of 16 I was already fascinated by the French Revolution and utopian thought, is it any wonder I got into this series. There's also a fair amount of creepy supernatural shit, brutal violence, and BDSM (hardly surprising, given De Sade's presence).
Definitely still five stars two decades later. Although the art hasn't hit its stride yet, the plot and tone are fully compelling from the start. I have a real dilemma about what genre tags to use for this series, though. It deliberately mixes sci-fi, horror, supernatural, and fantasy elements and borrows from a huge range of literary, historical, mythological, and spiritual sources. What the hell, let's say sci-fi and supernatural even though there is so much more going on than that. show less
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Awards
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Statistics
- Works
- 82
- Also by
- 76
- Members
- 5,014
- Popularity
- #4,995
- Rating
- 4.2
- Reviews
- 159
- ISBNs
- 99
- Languages
- 8
- Favorited
- 12
