About Me

I’m John Martz, an author, illustrator, cartoonist, and designer.

I’m the author and illustrator of several books, including A Cat Named Tim and Other Stories (shortlisted for an Eisner Award and the Governor General’s Literary Awards), Burt’s Way Home (shortlisted for an Eisner Award, and the Doug Wright Award for Best Book), and Evie and the Truth About Witches.

When not working on my own books, I design books part-time for Tundra Books, where I was the art director from 2018–2022. I also work with other cartoonists, designing fonts based on their lettering for comics and graphic novels.

From 2005–2013 I ran a blog called Drawn! that focused on illustration, comics, and animation, which was named one of the 50 Coolest Websites of 2006 by Time Magazine. I’ve drawn political and editorial cartoons for both The Globe & Mail and The Nib. I was a regular contributor to MAD Magazine. In 2014 I was awarded a gold medal by the Society of Illustrators in the comics competition. I draw a dormant-but-not-dead-yet webcomic called Machine Gum, and am a founding member of the puerile jam comics collective Team Society League.

You can read some of my earlier minicomics online, including the Ignatz-winning Gold Star (Best Story, 2013), and its followup, the Ignatz-losing Be Good (Best Comic, 2016).

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Look, you don’t want to miss any of the solid gold updates to *gestures broadly* this rewarding creative life I’ve chosen for myself. And I certainly can’t trust that you’ll hear about any of it if I’m to trust the combination of a hostile social media algorithm and my own displeasure in posting about any of my accomplishments more than a total of one, single time.

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