Miriam Katin

Last updated
Miriam Katin
Born1942 (age 81–82)
Budapest, Hungary
Nationalitynaturalized American
Area(s) Cartoonist
Notable works
We Are on Our Own
Letting It Go
Awards Inkpot Award
Prix de la critique

Miriam Katin (born 1942) is a Hungarian-born American graphic novelist and graphic artist. She worked in animation from 1981 to 2000 in Israel and the United States. She has written two autobiographical graphic novels, We Are on Our Own (2006) and Letting It Go (2013). She has won an Inkpot Award and the Prix de la critique.

Contents

Biography

Katin was born in 1942, in wartime Budapest. While her father served in the Hungarian army, she and her mother escaped the Nazi occupation of Hungary by faking their own deaths and acquiring false identification documents. [1] In 1957, Katin and her family settled in Israel. [2] There she joined a graphic arts studio in Tel Aviv as an apprentice, and in 1960 she joined the Israel Defense Forces for two years as a graphic artist. In 1963 Katin moved to New York and married Geoffrey Katin a music educator. They have two sons, Aaron a musician and Ilan an artist. In 1981 the family moved to (kibbutz)|Ein Gedi, where she worked as a background designer for Ein Gedi Animation. In 1990 the Katins returned to New York where she continued working in background design for the Walt Disney Animation Studios, Nickelodeon Animation Studio and MTV Animation until 2000. [1] [3] At MTV, she worked on Daria and Beavis and Butt-Head . [4]

Katin started creating comics in the 2000s. She said, "I discovered comics for myself at age 63." [2] Inspired by Art Spiegelman's graphic novel Maus , a Holocaust memoir, she started to work on her first graphic novel, about her and her mother's experiences during World War II. The finished product, titled We Are on Our Own, was published by Drawn & Quarterly in 2006. It is drawn in black-and-white pencil and incorporates some of Katin's family photos. She created her second graphic novel, Letting It Go, published in 2013, in response to her "enormous need to deal with my trauma of my son's decision to move to Berlin". [1] Letting It Go is also autobiographical, depicting her initial reaction to her son's move to Berlin, and her own visit to Germany, including Berlin's Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. In contrast to her first novel, it is drawn in colored crayons. [5]

Katin lives in Washington Heights in Manhattan with her husband. She considers herself American rather than Hungarian or Israeli. [4]

Awards

Katin won a 2007 Inkpot Award. In 2006, We Are on Our Own was nominated for an Eisner Award and an Ignatz Award for Outstanding Story. In 2013, Letting It Go received an Ignatz Award nomination for Outstanding Artist. [6] The French translation of We Are on Our Own won the 2008 Prix de la critique. [7] Katin's work has been featured in the 2007 and 2014 volumes of The Best American Comics . [3]

Related Research Articles

An autobiographical comic is an autobiography in the form of comic books or comic strips. The form first became popular in the underground comix movement and has since become more widespread. It is currently most popular in Canadian, American and French comics; all artists listed below are from the U.S. unless otherwise specified.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Marc Hempel</span> American cartoonist/comics artist (born 1957)

Marc Hempel is an American cartoonist/comics artist best known for his work on The Sandman with Neil Gaiman.

The Ignatz Awards recognize outstanding achievements in comics and cartooning by small press creators or creator-owned projects published by larger publishers. They have been awarded each year at the Small Press Expo since 1997, only skipping a year in 2001 due to the show's cancellation after the September 11 attacks. As of 2014 SPX has been held in either Bethesda, North Bethesda, or Silver Spring, Maryland.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Julie Doucet</span> Canadian comic artist and writer

Julie Doucet is a Canadian underground cartoonist and artist, best known for her autobiographical works such as Dirty Plotte and My New York Diary. Her work is concerned with such topics as "sex, violence, menstruation and male/female issues."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Craig Thompson</span> American graphic novelist

Craig Matthew Thompson is an American graphic novelist best known for his books Good-bye, Chunky Rice (1999), Blankets (2003), Carnet de Voyage (2004), Habibi (2011), and Space Dumplins (2015). Thompson has received four Harvey Awards, three Eisner Awards, and two Ignatz Awards. In 2007, his cover design for the Menomena album Friend and Foe received a Grammy nomination for Best Recording Package.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Renée French</span> American comics writer and illustrator

Renée French is an American comics writer and illustrator and, under the pen name Rainy Dohaney, a children's book author, and exhibiting artist.

Debbie Drechsler is an American illustrator and comic book creator. Her semi-autobiographical graphic novel about incest, Daddy's Girl (1996), was nominated for an Ignatz Award.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nate Powell</span> American graphic novelist and musician (born 1978)

Nathan Lee Powell is an American graphic novelist and musician. His 2008 graphic novel Swallow Me Whole won an Ignatz Award and Eisner Award for Best Original Graphic Novel. He illustrated the March trilogy, an autobiographical series written by U.S. Congressman John Lewis and Andrew Aydin, which received the 2016 National Book Award, making Powell the first cartoonist to receive the award.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Anders Nilsen (cartoonist)</span> American cartoonist

Anders Nilsen is an American cartoonist who lives in Los Angeles, California.

<i>Hicksville</i> (comics)

Hicksville is a graphic novel by Dylan Horrocks originally published by Black Eye Comics in 1998. The novel explores the machinations of the comic book industry, and contains a slightly fictionalized account of the history of mainstream American comics, with particular attention paid to the era of Image Comics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mimi Pond</span> American cartoonist and writer

Mimi Pond is an American cartoonist, comics artist, illustrator, humorist, and writer.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gabrielle Bell</span> British-American alternative cartoonist

Gabrielle Bell is a British-American alternative cartoonist known for her surrealist, melancholy semi-autobiographical stories.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kate Beaton</span> Canadian comics artist (born 1983)

Kathryn Moira Beaton is a Canadian comics artist best known as the creator of the comic strip Hark! A Vagrant, which ran from 2007 to 2018. Her other major works include the children's books The Princess and the Pony and King Baby, published in 2015 and 2016 respectively. The former was made into an Apple TV+ series called Pinecone & Pony released in 2022 on which Beaton worked as an executive producer. Also in 2022, Beaton released a memoir in graphic novel form, Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands, about her experience working in the Alberta oil sands. Publishers Weekly named Ducks one of their top ten books of the year.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Eleanor Davis</span> American cartoonist and illustrator

Eleanor McCutcheon Davis is an American cartoonist and illustrator.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jillian Tamaki</span> Canadian American illustrator and comic artist

Jillian Tamaki is a Canadian American illustrator and comic artist known for her work in The New York Times and The New Yorker in addition to the graphic novels Boundless, as well as Skim, This One Summer and Roaming written by her cousin Mariko Tamaki.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sarah Glidden</span> American cartoonist (born 1980)

Sarah Glidden is an American cartoonist known for her nonfiction comics and graphic novels.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Emil Ferris</span> American writer, cartoonist, and designer

Emil Ferris is an American writer, cartoonist, and designer. Ferris debuted in publishing with her 2017 graphic novel My Favorite Thing Is Monsters. The novel tells a coming-of-age story of Karen Reyes, a girl growing up in 1960s Chicago, and is written and drawn in the form of the character's notebook. The graphic novel was praised as a "masterpiece" and one of the best comics by a new author.

<i>My Favorite Thing Is Monsters</i> 2017 graphic novel by Emil Ferris

My Favorite Thing Is Monsters is a two-volume debut graphic novel by American writer Emil Ferris. It portrays a young girl named Karen Reyes investigating the death of her neighbor in 1960s Chicago. Ferris started working on the graphic novel after contracting West Nile virus and becoming paralyzed at age forty. She attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago for writing and began the graphic novel to help her recover in 2010, taking six years to create 700 pages. The work draws on Ferris's childhood growing up in Chicago, and her love of monsters and horror media. The process of creating the book was difficult, with Ferris working long hours, living frugally, and encountering publishing setbacks, such as a cancelation by one publisher and the temporary seizure of the first volume's printing at the Panama Canal.

Aminder Dhaliwal is a Canadian animator, storyboard artist, cartoonist, writer, and director. She is best known for her 2018 graphic novel Woman World.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Miriam Libicki</span> American-Israeli graphic novelist

Miriam Libicki is an American-Israeli graphic novelist based in Vancouver, Canada. Her work often centers on the intersection of being Jewish and American. Her past service in the Israel Defense Forces has provided both the basis of some of her work and the source of controversy in her career.

References

  1. 1 2 3 Gravett, Paul (October 2015). "Miriam Katin: Coming To Terms". ArtReview . Retrieved April 4, 2017.
  2. 1 2 McCloud, Scott; Kartalopoulos, Bill, eds. (2014). The Best American Comics 2014. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. p. 368. ISBN   978-0-544-10600-0.
  3. 1 2 McGurk, Caitlin (April 16, 2015). "Spotlight on our GRAPHIC DETAILS guests for this weekend!". Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum . Retrieved April 4, 2017.
  4. 1 2 Traps, Yevgeniya (April 18, 2013). "An Enormous Amount of Pictures: In the Studio with Miriam Katin". The Paris Review . Retrieved April 4, 2017.
  5. ↑ "The New York Comics Symposium: MIRIAM KATIN". The Rumpus . October 4, 2013. Retrieved April 4, 2017.
  6. ↑ "Miriam Katin". Drawn & Quarterly . Retrieved April 4, 2017.
  7. ↑ "Miriam Katin wins Grand Prix 2008 de la critique BD". Drawn & Quarterly. Retrieved April 4, 2017.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.