About me

I grew up in the country outside a town of 300 people in western Nebraska. When I was about 4, I started reading comics. Not long after, I started making some of my own.

The late 1990s industry bust drove me away from comics (I was also in high school and figured the hobby wasn’t helping me get a girlfriend), and I began focusing on writing. I studied journalism at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where I won a William Randolph Hearst award for writing and became editor of the Daily Nebraskan, the University’s student newspaper, and during that year it won a Pacemaker from the Associated Collegiate Press.

While a senior at UNL, I was the lead writer on a massive project examining the lasting impacts of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. If you’re interested, you can read about that right here.

I worked for three years at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in Little Rock, Ark., most of that time spent covering the crime beat. During that period, the newspaper sued Pulaski County on my behalf in a Freedom of Information Act case, which eventually was decided by the Arkansas Supreme Court.

During that time, I started writing freelance articles about comic books for the Democrat-Gazette (I had gotten back to reading comics a couple years earlier). After relocating to Atlanta, I began writing for Publishers Weekly, Comic Foundry, ComicMix and Comic Book Resources.

Eventually I also started working with Top Shelf Productions (also based in Georgia), and in the past year have moved out of journalism and more fully into working for Top Shelf and creating my own comics again. This summer, I helped launch Top Shelf’s books onto the Amazon Kindle, making Top Shelf the first graphic novel publisher with a major Kindle presence. Currently, all five Owly graphic novels are on the Kindle with many more books coming soon.

My first book comes out this fall. Pinocchio: Vampire Slayer, which was created and drawn by Dusty Higgins, will be published by Slave Labor Graphics in September, 2009. A 10-page preview is available right here.

I’ve also written a graphic novel about the disembodied leg of Mexican President Santa Anna and am currently working on two other books. I’ve also begun illustrating my own mini comics, which will be available at conventions.

I live in Atlanta with my wife and our mutt.

To contact me, send an email to van [dot] jensen [at] gmail [dot] com.