Elgin, Katherine "Jill" (1923-2005)
American comic book artist
Elgin is best remembered for drawing the World War II comic Girl Commandos between 1942 and 1945. She had taken the art on this comic over from Barbara Hall. She also drew Blonde Bomber and Twinkle Twins stories for Speed. Her work also appeared in Champ, Green Hornet, and Wild Bill Hickok.
She also drew the Golden Age Black Cat, Harvey Comics's most popular female superhero.
Ellis, Grace
American journalist, comics, and television writer
Ellis won the Eisner Award for Best New Series and Best Publication for Teens in 2015 for Lumberjanes and Best Reality-Based Work in 2023 for Flung Out of Space and was nominated for Best Writer.
After college, Ellis worked for Autostraddle where, during an annual sleepaway camp the site hosted, she met Shannon Watters, who was a writer and editor at Boom! Studios. Watters recommended that they make a comic together and they came up with the idea for Lumberjanes. The first issue of Lumberjanes was the first comic Ellis had ever written. Lumberjanes would go on to win the 2016 GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding Comic and to be nominated several more times.
In 2017, she began working on Moonstruck, a romantic comedy set in a world with mythological creatures, alongside artists Shae Beagle and Kate Leth. The comic started as a class project in the Columbus College of Art & Design, where the professor, Laurenn McCubbin, assigned student artists to work with professional writers. After Shae was placed with Ellis, McCubbin liked their story so much, she helped pitch it to Image Comics. It was listed by Entertainment Weekly as one of "10 LGBTQ comics to read this Pride Month".
In 2022, her first graphic novel, Flung Out of Space, was published by Abrams Books' new imprint Surley Books, a graphic novel line dedicated to queer creators and curated by Mariko Tamaki. With artist Hannah Templer, the comic looks at the life of Patricia Highsmith and her struggles as a "self-loathing lesbian" writer in the 1940s.
To learn more about Grace Ellis and her career, please follow the link https://www.ohheygraceellis.com/ to her official website.
Estrada, Jackie (1946 - )
American comic book convention coordinator, co-publisher and editor
San Diego resident since the 1950s, Estrada got involved in helping to put on the San Diego Comic-Con (now called Comic-Con International: San Diego) in the mid-1970s. In addition to having edited nine of the Con's program books over the years, she helped start the Robert A. Heinlein annual blood drive, created the position of pro liaison, and created (and was the first coordinator of) artists’ alley at the Comic-Con. She has been administrator of the Eisner Awards (the "Oscars" of the comics industry) since 1990, and she chairs the Con's guest committee and awards committee. She has since retired as administrator as of 2026, with Sarah Jones taking over the position.
As a professional editor, Estrada has edited hundreds of books, the majority of them college texts. Most recently she edited Comics: Between the Panels, a lavish four-color coffee table book from Dark Horse Comics. The book features more than one hundred of her photos, taken of various comics professionals over the past twenty-plus years. Estrada was one of the founders of the San Diego Professional Editors’ Network (SD/PEN), and has taught editing at the University of California, San Diego.
In 1994, Jackie married cartoonist Batton Lash and they founded Exhibit A Press, a publishing company devoted to producing Batton’s comic book series Supernatural Law. She has been the co-publisher, editor, and letterer for the company ever since.
Jackie is particularly proud of having edited the book Comics: Between the Panels by Mike Richardson and Steve Duin (Dark Horse, 1998) and co-written Comic-Con: 40 Years of Artists, Writers, Fans, and Friends (Chronicle Books, 2009).
Jackie is the author of two books of photos she took at Comic-Con and other fan events in the 1970s-1990s: Comic Book People: Photographs from the 1970s and 1980s, and Comic Book People: Photographs from the 1990s. Both were published by Exhibit A Press (www.exhibitapress.com) and make great “yearbooks” for collecting autographs.
Ewing, Dr. Eve Louise (1986 - )
American writer, scholar, sociologist and cultural organizer
Dr. Ewing is the bestselling author of the books Original Sins, Electric Arches, Ghosts in the Schoolyard, 1919, and Maya and the Robot. She writes comic books, including Exceptional X-Men and Ironheart and Black Panther. And TV, and theater, and a lot of other things as well.
Eve is an associate professor in the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity at the University of Chicago.
Her academic research in the sociology of education includes her 2018 book, Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago's South Side, a study of school closures in Chicago. She is the former editor at Seven Scribes and the author of the poetry collection Electric Arches which was released in September 2017. In 2019, she published 1919, a poetry collection centered around the Chicago race riot of 1919. Additionally, Ewing is the author of the Ironheart comic book series for Marvel centered on the young heroine Riri Williams.
Dr. Ewing is also a cultural organizer, which means she works collectively with other people to build and nurture creative communities, and strive for social transformation through artistic and cultural practices.
To learn more information about Dr. Ewing and her professional career, please follow this link https://eveewing.com/ to her own website.
