Jim Valentino

Jim Valentino
Valentino at the New York Comic Con in Manhattan, October 9, 2010.
Born	(1952-10-28) October 28, 1952 (age 64)
Nationality	American
Area(s)	Writer, Penciller, Inker, Editor, Publisher
Notable works	Guardians of the Galaxy normalman ShadowHawk
http://www.valentinocomics.com

Jim Valentino is an American writer, penciler, editor and publisher of comic books.

Valentino began his career in the late 1970s creating small press and mostly autobiographical comics. The early-mid-1980s saw normalman which first appeared as a back-up story in Aardvark-Vanaheim's Cerebus. Aardvark-Vanaheim's Dave Sim and Deni Loubert (Sim's wife at the time) began publishing normalman as a 13-issue limited series but only did so until #8, when Loubert began her own publishing company, Renegade Press, which finished the series. Renegade also published three issues of Valentino's self-titled series, in the mid-late 1980s.

In the late '80s Valentino began working for Marvel Comics on their superhero titles. His most notable work for the company was as writer/ artist on the future-set super-hero series Guardians of the Galaxy and selected issues of What If...?, plus fill-ins on most of Marvel's major titles.

He left Marvel in 1992 to co-found Image Comics with Whilce Portacio, Erik Larsen, Jim Lee, Rob Liefeld, Todd McFarlane and Marc Silvestri. Valentino originated several projects at Image, which he published through his own Shadowline imprint. Unlike at Marvel, where Valentino worked on characters owned by that company, the original Shadowline titles were all creator-owned.

Of these titles, the most notable was the super-hero series ShadowHawk, on which he was both writer and artist. In 1997 he began another series in black and white called A Touch of Silver, a semi-autobiographical novel about a young comic book fan coming of age in the 1960s. Also during this time he repackaged most of his earliest autobiographical work into a trade paperback called Vignettes, with an introduction by Dave Sim.