| Birth Name: | Jess David Spurlock |
| Birth Date: | November 18, 1959 |
| Birth Place: | Memphis, Tennessee, U.S. |
| Write: | y |
| Pencil: | y |
| Edit: | y |
Jess David Spurlock (born November 18, 1959) is an American author, illustrator, editor, and artist's-rights advocate best known as the founder of Vanguard Productions, a publisher of art books, graphic novels, and prints.
J. David Spurlock was born on November 18, 1959, in Memphis, Tennessee.[1] [2] He moved to Dallas, Texas in 1973.
He has taught art at The University of Texas at Arlington, the Joe Kubert School, and the School of Visual Arts in New York.[3] He has served as a president of the Dallas Society of Illustrators.
As a comic book artist, he co-penciled and inked the alternative press comic Sparkplug #1 (March 1993), from Heroic Publishing's Hero Comics imprint, credited as David Spurlock. The following year he contributed a text page to a Dallas, Texas, tribute comic honoring industry legend Jack Kirby, who had recently died.[4]
Spurlock founded Vanguard Productions in 1993,[5] although he had used that name, in conjunction with Sparrowlake Enterprises, to self-publish the comic book Badge #1 in 1981.[6] The company initially had been founded to publish a comics anthology, Tales from the Edge, with 15 issues released as of 2010.[7] The company then moved into art books, biographies and eventually graphic novels, including Neal Adams' Monsters (2003),[8] (originally serialized in the comics anthology series Echoes of Future Past, published by Adams' Continuity Studios), with four additional story pages plus additional Adams material.[9] DC Comics editor Julius Schwartz, an architect of the Silver Age of Comic Books, said "Spurlock's line of books serve as the vanguard of Silver Age comics histories."[10] Other comics magazines and collections published by Vanguard beginning in 2001 include Space Cowboy, Jesse James Classic Western Collection, Steve Ditko: Space Wars and Wally Wood's The Complete Lunar Tunes and The Wizard King.[11]
In an article on the Fort Worth, Texas, comics artist Pat Boyette, Don Mangus, who assisted Spurlock during this time, wrote of the early Vanguard comics that,
Spurlock co-created the Wally Wood Scholarship Fund with Wood's brother, Glenn Wood, for students of the School of Visual Arts.[12] [13] In a joint venture with Marvel Comics and Diamond Comic Distributors, Vanguard Productions in 2002 sponsored artist Jim Steranko's "The Spirit of America" benefit print,[14] created to fund an art scholarship "for victims of anti-American terrorism".[15]
In 2008, Spurlock, with artist and publisher Neal Adams and the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies Arts & Letters Council, spearheaded a petition campaign in which over 450 comic book creators and cartoonists urged the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum to return to artist Dina Babbitt seven portraits she was forced to paint in the Auschwitz death camp in 1944.[16]
Vanguard Productions' Hal Foster: Prince of Illustrators, Father of the Adventure Strip was a finalist for a 2003 Independent Publisher Book Award (the IPPY) in the "Popular Culture" category.[17] It was nominated for a 2002 Eisner Award for "Best Comics-Related Book".[18]
Vanguard's Wally's World: The Brilliant Life and Tragic Death of Wally Wood, the World's Second-Best Comic Book Artist (2004), by Spurlock and Steve Sarger, was nominated for a 2007 Eisner Award for "Best Comics-Related Book".[19]
The original self-published limited edition of The Art of Nick Cardy by John Coates (Coates Publishing, 1999), which was reissued in a wider edition by Vanguard in 2001, was nominated for a 2000 Eisner Award for "Best Comics-Related Book".[20] [21]
In March 2011, he was named Inkwell Awards Special Ambassador. He still holds that recognition at present.[22]