JOHNNY RYAN

Johnny Ryan was born in Boston in 1970. As a boy, he says, "first I wanted to be a cartoonist, then I wanted to be a physicist, then I wanted to be gay, and then a cartoonist again." He now lives in Los Angeles and is the creator of the award-winning Angry Youth Comix. His work has also been published in Nickelodeon Magazine, Goody Good Comics, Measles and LCD. “Comics used to be fun and crazy and weird and gross,” says Johnny. “Now, they're a serious art form… it’s as if everyone was having a big crazy orgy and then your grandparents walked in. They really sucked the life out of the party.”

Johnny’s conversion of Bierce’s A Dog’s Bequest to an affectionate Peanuts parody appeared in Graphic Classics: Ambrose Bierce. And he transformed The Whole Duty of Children into a Dennis the Menace pastiche in Graphic Classics: Robert Louis Stevenson. When editor Tom Pomplun was selecting an artist for O. Henry's The Ransom of Red Chief, his first thought was Johnny, who seems born for the role.

Johnny’s decidedly unserious work appears in: