Justin Murphy is an independent publisher and creator of comics and graphic novels. He is also a playwright and composer. He co-wrote a play which won most outstanding musical at the New York International Fringe Festival.
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His comics career began in 1992 when he self-published a small press black and white series about the American Civil War entitled Southern Blood. The book received spotty distribution with Diamond Comics and ran for 8 issues. After the comics implosion in the early 1990s, Murphy was forced to close down his company JM Comics and discontinue the Southern Blood series.
After finishing a BFA at Jacksonville University, Murphy took a break from comics to write plays for the stage. His first collaboration was a musical based on the characters from Southern Blood called Eagle Song. He wrote the libretto and co-wrote all the music with composer Roger Butterley, a sometime musical director for artist Phoebe Snow. Together they produced and released a complete symphonic recording starring Jamie-Lynn Sigler[1] and numerous other Broadway actors. Murphy and Butterley also sang lead roles on the recording, but the show had difficulty finding a producer to stage it after New York was hit with the 911 attacks and Frank Wildhorn's musical The Civil War flopped on Broadway years earlier.
The duo continued to write however, and in 2006 produced the rock opera Fallen Angel at the New York International Fringe Festival. The musical tale of Lucifer's fall from Heaven won the Most Outstanding Musical Award at the festival that year.[2]
In 2008, after two years of collaboration with Marvel artists Al Milgrom and J.Brown, Murphy made his return to comics with the graphic novel Cleburne. The 208-page, full color book told the true story of Confederate General Patrick Cleburne and his plan to enlist freed slaves to fight for the South. Murphy wrote and illustrated the book, with Milgrom and Brown providing the inks and colors. The book won a Xeric Foundation grant[3] and earned a bronze Book of the Year Award in the graphic novel category from ForeWord Magazine [4] It was also a finalist for the IBPA Benjamin Franklin Awards.[5] A film adaptation is currently in development.