The 387th meeting of the NY Comics & Picture-story Symposium will be held on Tuesday, March 19, 2024 at 7 pm ET. ONLINE PRESENTATION VIA ZOOM. Please email comicssymposium@gmail.com to register for this event. Free and open to the public.

Lee Marrs: Career-Hopping for Survival

A survey of survival skills for future writer/artists will be presented based on Lee’s many careers as an illustrator, cartoonist, movie storyboard artist, animation director, games art director and college instructor.

Best known for The Further Fattening Adventures of Pudge, Girl Blimp (nominated for a 2017 Eisner Award), Lee Marrs was a frequent contributor to underground comics and one of the “founding mommies” of the Wimmen’s Comix collective, as well as Gay Comics. In 1982 she received the comics industry’s Inkpot Award. In 2022, CXC gave her the Transformative Work Award “For Changing the Course of Comics and Cartooning History”. 

Using a more illustrative style, she created short futuristic graphic tales for Heavy Metal magazine, and Epic Illustrated. After assisting on Prince Valiant, Lil’ Orphan Annie and other comic strips, she drew tales for DC’s Plop, Weird Mystery and House of Secrets. But most of her mainstream comics work was as a writer, for Unicorn Isle (1983), Wonder Woman : Annual (1989), Viking Glory: the Viking Prince (1991), Zatanna: Come Together (1993), Faultlines(1997) and Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight: Stalking (1998).

For most of her career she ran Lee Marrs Artwork, a digital design & animation company. An Emmy Award-winning art director, she pioneered in 2D digital animation in the early 1980s. Her clients have included Disney/ABC, Apple Computer, IBM, Time Warner Inc., Children’s Television Workshop, Nickelodeon, Electronic Arts, and MTV. Beginning in 2000, Marrs taught at Berkeley City College. She served as Multimedia Chair there until she retired in 2014, glad to have spent time out of the cold.