BIOGRAPHY:

David Mazzucchelli (1960- ) had a brief but noisy career in superhero comics, which began while he was still studying painting at the Rhode Island School of Design. That career culminated in his collaborations with Frank Miller on the critically acclaimed Batman: Year One and Daredevil: Born Again, both of which showcased David Mazzucchelli's naturalistic, yet expressive, approach to his art.

"My education in comics almost goes sort of backwards and laterally. I grew up with a certain thing, and that's what I came to comics with, which would have been the comics of the 60's, and then sort of crept back into, Well, what were people doing right before then? Who was the influence on this person, who was the influence on that person? and back that way. So by the time I was doing Batman I was very interested in Chester Gould and Hergé, and Alex Toth. And the Angel story [in Marvel Fanfare #40] definitely had more of a Kurtzman... I mean, it looks nothing like Kurtzman, but I was thinking about a certain simplicity of shape, a certain kind of expressiveness."

Turning his back on a potentially lucrative career in superhero comics, David Mazzucchelli made an astonishing about-turn and found his way into the exciting but much quieter world of alternative comics, most notably through three issues of his ground breaking, self-published, RAW-sized anthology, Rubber Blanket in the early 1990's. "I wanted to make a comic book that wouldn't scare adults." Rubber Blanket featured several quietly moving short stories such as Discovering America, The Big Man and Dead Dogs. "What I wanted to do was just go back to the roots of what I liked about art in the first place. Without having the pressure of a deadline or a specific audience to think of. So I started trying to make drawings that were just for me, going back to drawing from life, watercolours, whatever..."

David Mazzucchelli lives in Manhattan, New York and teaches Comic Book Narrative, Storytelling and Illustration at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD).

He is also a frequent contributor to The New Yorker and a number of his covers can be found in Covering The New Yorker, a superb book which presents not only the best of The New Yorker's covers from it's 75 year history but also a behind the scenes peek at some of the sketches that lead up to them and a look at the controversy that sometimes followed in their wake.

Interviews:
Indy Magazine (2004)
The Comics Journal #194 (1997)
The Comics Journal #152 (1992)

Reviews:
Art Spiegelman: City Of Glass
The Times: City Of Glass
Indy Magazine: City Of Glass

Paul Auster's City Of Glass
with by Paul Karasik
St. Martin's Press, 1994
Quinn writes mysteries. An unknown voice on the telephone is begging for his help, drawing him into a world and a mystery far stranger than any he ever created in print.

"Auster's book is so much about language, and the structure of language, and identity, and, in fact, the structure of identity, the shifting nature and layering of identity, that the visual metaphors that Paul [Karasik] was coming up with were necessary and apropos. That was really the challenge, to find a visual way of expressing these things without having to keep all the text."
David Mazzucchelli speaking in an interview, The Comics Journal #194

"... does not merely render Auster's text visually but actively brings new metaphors to the surface by plumbing the novel's depths to a degree heretofore unheard of in a comic book literary adaptation."
Top 100 Comics, The Comics Journal #210

Batman: Year One
with Frank Miller
DC, 1986
"If your only memory of Batman is that of Adam West and Burt Ward exchanging camped out quips while clobbering slumming guest stars Vincent Price and Cesar Romero, I hope this book will come as a surprise."
Frank Miller from the introduction.

Daredevil: Born Again
with Frank Miller
DC, 1986
"I think there is some very good stuff, aspects of it, and I think there are some much weaker aspects of it, in terms of art and story and the whole thing. But the good points, the good parts, I think really stand up. And in terms of story, one of the things that was very important to me, I remember in discussions with Frank, was how we were going to end it. And it was clear that what we were trying to say was that here's a character who has big problems, and so we're basically going to kill him, and then bring him back to life better. And that became the issue to me: what does 'better' mean?"
David Mazzucchelli speaking in an interview, The Comics Journal #194

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Graphic Novels:
Paul Auster's City Of Glass (1994) with Paul Karasik
Batman: Year One (1986) with Frank Miller
Daredevil: Born Again (1986) with Frank Miller
Daredevil: Love's Labours Lost (1985) with Denny O'Neil

Periodicals:
Rubber Blanket #1-3 (1991-1993)
Batman: Year One #1-4 (1986-1987)
Daredevil #206, 208-217, 220-223, 225-233 (1984-1986)

Short Stories In...
The Fisherman and the Sea Princess (2000) in Little Lit #1
Darkseid (2000) in World's Funnest
The Boy Who Loved Comics (2001) in TCJ Special #1
Still Life (2000) in Zero Zero #27
Stubs (1996) in Zero Zero #11
Stop The Hair Nude (1995) in Zero Zero #2
Rates Of Exchange (1994) in Drawn & Quarterly Vol2 #2
New String (1994) in The Village Voice
Monday In The Park... (1994) in The New Yorker, 19 Sept 1994
The Fine Art... (1993) in The New Yorker, 4 Oct 1993
Phobia (1993) in Snake Eyes #3
A Brief History... (1992) in Drawn & Quarterly Vol1 #9
Hear The Atoms Splitting (1992) in Drawn & Quarterly Vol1 #9
Chiaroscuro (1988) in Marvel Fanfare #40
Sorry in Nozone #5
Midori in Manga Surprise #1