Frank Santoro is a world renowned artist, cartoonist and educator currently based in Pittsburgh. Over the past twenty years, he has consistently applied himself to developing new approaches to creating comics, while simultaneously pushing down barriers separating comics from fine arts and the classical tradition. He has produced a unique body of work in a wide variety of formats, in the process pioneering an approach to comics production that consciously tailors form to content. His most heralded work, Storeyville, was self-published in tabloid newspaper form in 1995 and has been subsequently reissued in deluxe hardcover editions by publishers in the US and France. With the artist/animator, Ben Jones, he co-created and drew the cult comic book series Cold Heat. He co-founded the comics criticism magazine ComicsComics with Dan Nadel and Timothy Hodler. Santoro maintains and edits the Comics Workbook tumblr blog as a showcase for his students as well as new and under-appreciated comics work. His comics have been published in Kramers Ergot, Mome, and The Ganzfeld. He was a featured artist in the 2011 Pittsburgh Biennial at the Carnegie Museum of Art, for which he was commissioned to produce a 16-page tabloid newspaper, Blast Furnace Funnies, which has subsequently been produced as a high end artist edition. His latest works are the 2013 Graphic Novel, Pompeii, published in the US and France, and the 2014 self-published Morgan. In 2011 he founded the Santoro Correspondence Course, a distance learning program for cartoonists that has influenced comics pedagogy at the same time that it is molding and informing the next generation of comickers and cartoonists. Anyone considering signing up for the next session, can get started here:
