Mike Nappa is an American author of more than 60 books and an entertainment journalist for the e-magazine, PopFam.com “Pop Culture for Families.” Although he's published books for all ages with many different companies, he's best known for his work in children's religious publishing where he created the award-winning comic book characters, Johnny Grav & The Visioneer, and co-created the VeggieTales comic book characters, the Quitter Critter Quad Squad.
Biography
Mike Nappa started his career as a youth pastor, and then transitioned to writing church resources at Group Publishing in Colorado. He eventually joined Group as a book acquisitions editor, and remained active as an author. In 1995, Mike left Group Publishing to start his own company, Nappaland Communications Inc., which became the parent company for Nappaland Literary Agency and the long-running e-magazine, PopFam.com “Pop Culture for Families." Since then he has published over 60 books which have collectively sold more than a million copies worldwide. He has also served as a fiction acquisitions editor for Barbour Publishing, as a general acquisitions editor for David C. Cook publishers, and as Editor in Chief of the short-lived Destination Magazine. In 2000, Mike created the award-winning serialized comic book characters, Johnny Grav & The Visioneer, for Clubhouse kids magazine. That comic ran for three consecutive years in the magazine before being collected into a graphic novel format. In 2010 the Johnny Grav characters returned for another three-year run in Clubhouse, which included a serialized prose novel called Nightmare City that ran both in print and online, and was published in book format in 2013. In 2015, Mike Nappa joined the VeggieTales universe as a writer for the VeggieTales Super Comics line of graphic novels and comic books created under license from DreamWorks / Big Idea Entertainment. In this capacity he adapted classic VeggieTales videos into comic book format, and also co-created new Veggie characters for the original comic book story, LarryBoy and the Quitter Critter Squad. In 2017 he was featured in the Bibleman universe and also began publishing the independent fantasy comic, Chihuahuas Are Lucky with acclaimed illustrator Dennis Edwards. In 2016 Mike Nappa turned to adult fiction and began publishing the Coffey & Hill Investigations series of suspense novels. Each of these novels features an Atlanta-based private detective team investigating an Edgar Allan Poe-themed mystery. The first book in Coffey & Hill is Annabel Lee, and the second is The Raven, both published by Revell. The third book in the series, A Dream Within a Dream, is co-authored with Melissa Kosci and releases from Revell in 2020. Hard Way Home, a memoir of the passing of his wife, Amy Nappa, released in 2019.
