Al Columbia
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Al Columbia is an American comic book artist.
[edit] Career
As a teenager, Columbia worked as an assistant to Bill Sienkiewicz on Alan Moore's ill-fated Big Numbers. When Sienkiewicz withdrew from the series, Moore and his publishers asked Columbia to continue as artist on the series. For reasons that remain unknown Columbia also withdrew from Big Numbers, and the series remains unfinished to this day.
Columbia's first solo comic book was the 48-page Doghead, published by Tundra Press in 1992. He also contributed to several issues of From Beyonde, a horror anthology published by Studio Insidio, and to the seminal British comic-cum-lifestyle magazine Deadline. In these stories he moved away from the painterly photo-realistic idiom of Sienkiewicz towards a cruelly beautiful (and equally virtuosic) pen-and-ink style.
In 1994 Fantagraphics Books published Columbia's The Biologic Show #0 (a title borrowed from William S. Burroughs' book Exterminator!). It contained redrawn versions of the stories from Deadline along with new works. The Biologic Show #1 followed in 1995; an issue #2 was advertised but never appeared. Also in 1995, "I Was Killing When Killing Wasn't Cool" became the first of a series of two-color short stories by Columbia to appear in the Fantagraphics anthology Zero Zero. In these works he adopted a more cartoony style of drawing strongly evocative of the animated films of Max and Dave Fleischer. "The Trumpets They Play!", a widely praised work in the same style based on the Book of Revelation, appeared in BLAB! #10 (also published by Fantagraphics) in 1998. Since 2003 he has written two issues of The Pogostick, a comic book illustrated by Ethan Persoff. Other Fantagraphics publications featuring Columbia's work include Kristine McKenna's Book of Changes and the anthology Dirty Stories Volume 3.
Columbia's Illustrations have been published in The New York Times and The Stranger.
Columbia is also a musician and a founding (but no longer active) member of the band The Action Suits.
After a three-year delay, Columbia's website went online in late 2006.
[edit] Works published in Zero Zero
- "I Was Killing When Killing Wasn't Cool," 4 pages, issue #4 (August 1995)
- "Jack never woke up," 1 page (inside front cover), issue #8 (March/April 1996)
- "Walpurgischnacht '97," 1 page (back cover), issue #15 (March 1997)
- "The Blood-Clot Boy," 6 pages, issue #16 (April/May 1997)
- "Amnesia," 8 pages, issue #20 (September/October 1997)
- "Alfred the Great," 5 pages, issue #26 (July/August 1999)
- "Vladimir Nabokov's Cheapy the Guinea Pig" (back cover) and untitled front cover, issue #27 (August 2000)
