Biography

Stephen R. Bissette was born, raised, and still lives in Vermont. He has been cartooning professionally for over twenty years, and writing professionally for over a decade.

Shortly after the publication of his first work, Abyss (1976), Bissette enrolled in the Joe Kubert School of Cartoon and Graphic Art in Dover, New Jersey. Before his first year was completed, his work was being pubished professionally in the pages of Sojourn, Sgt. Rock, and Heavy Metal. In 1978, Bissette was among the Kubert School's very first graduating class, along with classmates Rick Veitch, Tom Yeates, and others.

His early work appeared in the pages of Heavy Metal, Epic, Bizarre Adventures, Scholastic Magazines' Weird Worlds and Bananas (illustrating stories written by Goosebumps founder and author R. L. Stine), and he worked with Rick Veitch on the graphic novelization of Steven Spielberg's motion picture 1941 (Simon and Schuster, 1979).

Bissette is best known for his multiple award-winning collaboration with writer Alan Moore and inker John Totleben on DC Comics' Saga of the Swamp Thing (1983-87). He subsequently worked with Moore, Veitch, Totleben, and others on the Image Comics' series 1963, their final creative collaborative effort.

He also worked briefly on Mirage Studios' Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. The character Tokka that appeared in the second TMNT feature film, Secret of the Ooze, was based upon his drawings.

Bissette has also illustrated special edition novels, novellas, and short story chapbooks by Douglas E. Winter, Joe Lansdale, Neil Gaiman, Joe Citro, Rick Hautala, Nancy Collins, and others.

Bissette co-founded, edited, and co-published the controversial Eisner Award-winning adult horror comics anthology Taboo (1988-95).

As a writer, Bissette's articles, interviews, and reviews have appeared in Rutherford, Gadfly, The Video Watchdog, Deep Red, Film Threat, Animation Planet, Fangoria, GoreZone, Gauntlet, Ecco, Animato, VMag, Euro-Trash Cinema, and others. His work has also appeared in books such as Clive Barker, Illustrator (1990), Cut! Horror Writers on Horror Films (Berkley, 1992), The BFI Companion to Horror (Cassell/The British Film Institute, 1996), and others.

His short fiction appeared in Words Without Pictures (1990), and his original novella Aliens: Tribes won a Bram Stoker Award in 1993 and has been published in foreign hardcover editions in Britain and Germany. He also co-authored Comic Book Rebels (Donald I. Fine, 1993).

Through his own imprint SpiderBaby Grafix, Bissette self-published collections of his earlier comics and comix work. Work continues on his ambitious serialized graphic novel, S.R. Bissette's Tyrant® (1994-present, four issues to date), a rigorously-researched portrait of the birth, life, and death of a Tyrannosaurus rex in late Cretaceous North America.

In December, 1998, Bissette secured all rights to the characters he co-created for the series 1963, including N-Man, The Fury, and The Hypernaut. Work has already begun on new material featuring these popular characters.

He is also collaborating with fellow native Vermonter Joe Citro on a series of regionally-published projects. They have just released the full-color illustrated map Vermont's Haunts, and Bissette is currently illustrating Citro's The Vermont Ghost Guide for publication in the year 2000.