Hope Larson


Hope Raue Larson is an American illustrator and cartoonist. Her main field is comic books.

Biography

Larson grew up in Asheville, North Carolina, and attended Carolina Day School. Upon graduation from high school, she matriculated at Rochester Institute of Technology and then transferred to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she graduated with a BFA in 2004. She then moved to Toronto with her husband, Canadian cartoonist Bryan Lee O'Malley. In 2005, they moved to Halifax, Nova Scotia.
From 2008 until 2010, Larson and O'Malley lived in Asheville, North Carolina. They relocated to Los Angeles, California. She and O'Malley divorced in 2014. She returned to Asheville, where she currently lives.

Career

While Larson was in college, Scott McCloud took an interest in her illustrations, encouraging her to create comics. Soon after, she was invited to the webcomics anthology site Girlamatic and produced her first professional comic, a web serial entitled I Was There & Just Returned. Afterwards, Larson concentrated on a number of small, hand-made minicomics, combining her interests in comics, screenprinting, and bookmaking.
She contributed to comics anthologies Flight, True Porn 2, and You Ain't No Dancer, while working on a web-serialized graphic novel, Salamander Dream. This eventually became her first full-length book, published by AdHouse Books in September 2005; she moved to Oni Press for her second graphic novel, Gray Horses.
In 2006, Larson signed a two-book contract with New York publishing house Simon & Schuster. The first book under this deal, Chiggers, is a graphic novel about "nerdy teenaged girls" who meet at summer camp. Chiggers is intended for a 9- to 12-year-old audience.
In 2012, Larson adapted Madeleine L'Engle's work as A Wrinkle in Time: The Graphic Novel, published by Margaret Ferguson Books.
In 2016, Larson became the new writer for DC Comics Batgirl, a run that saw the character go on back-packing trip through Asia on a voyage of self-discovery.
In addition to comics, Larson has worked as a freelance illustrator for various clients, including the New York Times.
She has worked as a letterer on such books as Brian Wood and Ryan Kelly's Local.
Larson's book All Summer Long was released by Farrar Straus Giroux in the spring of 2018.

Publishing

In 2006, Larson launched her own publishing imprint, Tulip Tree Press. She has released several minicomics and prints through the Tulip Tree website; the only book released under the Tulip Tree name was House of Sugar, an award-winning collection of Rebecca Kraatz's comic strip, released 15 November 2006.

Acclaim

Larson was nominated for the 2006 Kim Yale Award for Best New Female Talent, and won the 2006 Ignatz Award in the category Promising New Talent. In 2007, Larson won the Eisner Award for Special Recognition. She won the Eisner Award again in 2012 for her A Wrinkle in Time adaptation.
Rebecca Kraatz's House of Sugar, Larson's first publishing venture, won the 2007 Doug Wright Award for Best Emerging Talent.
All Summer Long was a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2018.

Works

Mainstream comic book work