Dorkin, Evan

views updated

DORKIN, Evan

PERSONAL:

Born in Brooklyn, NY. Companion of Sarah Dyer (an artist and writer).

ADDRESSES:

Home—New York, NY. Agent—c/o Author Mail, SLG Publishing, 577 S. Market St., San Jose, CA 95113. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Comic book artist and writer.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Eisner Award for Talent Deserving of Wider Recognition, 1995, Best Humor Publication, 1996, for Milk and Cheese #666, Best Short Story, 1996, for "The Eltingville Comic-Book, Science-Fiction, Fantasy, and Role-Playing Club in Bring Me the Head of Boba Fett," in Instant Piano, issue 3, 1998, for "The Eltingville Comic-Book, Science-Fiction, Fantasy, and Role-Playing Club in The Marathon Men," in Dork!, issue 4, 2002, for "The Eltingville Comic-Book, Science-Fiction, Fantasy, and Role-Playing Club in The Intervention," in Dork!, issue 9, and Best Writer/Artist, Humor, 2002, for Dork!; Harvey Awards, Special Award for Humor, 1996, 2002, and 2003, all for Dork! and Best Single Issue or Story, 2001, for Superman & Batman: World's Funnest.

WRITINGS:

(Illustrator) Jason Cohen and Michael Krugman, Generation Ecch!, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1994.

Superman & Batman: World's Funnest, DC Comics (New York, NY), 2000.

SELF-ILLUSTRATED

Fun with Milk and Cheese (collection of Milk and Cheese issues), Slave Labor (San Jose, CA), 1997.

Hectic Planet, Book One: Dim Future (collection of Hectic Planet issues), Slave Labor (San Jose, CA), 1998.

Hectic Planet, Book Two: Checkered Past (collection of Hectic Planet issues), Slave Labor (San Jose, CA), 1998.

Hectic Planet, Book Three: The Young and the Reckless (collection of Hectic Planet issues), Slave Labor (San Jose, CA), 2001.

Dork!: Who's Laughing Now? (collection of Dork! issues), Slave Labor (San Jose, CA), 2001.

Circling the Drain (includes stories from Dork! issues 7-10 plus new material), Slave Labor (San Jose, CA), 2003.

Adapted Eltingville Club stories for proposed animated television series. Author of scripts, with Sarah Dyer, for animated television series, including Batman Beyond, Superman, and Space Ghost Coast to Coast. Contributor to various comics titles.

SIDELIGHTS:

Evan Dorkin is the creator of iconoclastic comics such as Milk and Cheese, about a pair of anthropomorphic dairy products who have gone bad—really bad: they're hostile, destructive, law-breaking drunks—and Dork!, an anthology series that features stories of the Eltingville Comic-Book, Science-Fiction, Fantasy, and Role-Playing Club, a group of young people obsessed with these hobbies, allowing Dorkin to satirize comics' fan base.

Dorkin first drew the characters Milk and Cheese as doodles on cocktail napkins and for autograph-seekers at comics conventions, and "had absolutely no idea at the time that the two characters would become somewhat popular and pretty much establish my career," he told an interviewer for the online magazine X-Entertainment. He added that he expects to "never stop drawing them in some form or another.…I like them too much to abandon them completely." Craig Elliot, in a profile of Dorkin for the Web-based publication More Goat than Goose, observed that Dorkin's work "reflects his own thoughts, feelings, and violent fantasies." This is evident, Elliot remarked, in the stories of the Eltingville Club, "four wretched, foul-mouthed geeks … driven together more by virtue of their misfit status and common interests than by any obvious affinity for one another." Dorkin, commented Publishers Weekly contributor Heidi MacDonald, "is a savage humorist who knows comics geek knowledge inside out."

Dorkin's comics knowledge is also on display in Superman & Batman: World's Funnest, a take-off on DC Comics' World's Finest title, in which Superman and Batman fought evildoers together. In Dorkin's version, the heroes are killed by two of their longtime nemeses—Mr. Mxyzptlk and Bat-Mite—who then try to outdo each other on a crime spree. They "end up wreaking havoc on both the past and the future, along with all of DC's various alternate universes," reported Bill Radford in the Colorado Springs, Colorado, Gazette, adding, "The better you know the DC Universe and all its incarnations, the more you'll be in on the joke."