Biography

Judd Winick is a cartoonist and the creator of the award-winning, New York Times bestselling Hilo series.

Judd grew up on Long Island with a healthy diet of doodling, X-Men comics, the newspaper strip Bloom County, and Looney Tunes. He is a graduate of the University of Michigan School of Art where his earliest cartooning work was on display through his daily comic strip for the school paper.

In 1994, Judd was a cast, along with his (now) wife Pam Ling, on MTV’s The Real World: San Francisco. Their season received much attention and acclaim for its inclusion of Pedro Zamora, the 22 year old AIDS educator and activist, who literally changed the world’s perception of what it was like to be living with HIV.

Pedro passed away in November, 1994, but Judd carried on the message of his friend through his graphic novel, Pedro and Me: Friendship, Loss, and What I Learned. Published in September 2000, it was awarded six American Library Association awards, was nominated for an Eisner Award, won Winick his first GLAAD award, and has been incorporated into school curricula across the country.

Following The Real World, Judd began to juggle cartooning and writing full-time. From 1995-1998, he did a syndicated comic strip, Frumpy the Clown, which ran in newspapers across the country. He went on to become one of the top writers of superhero comics for over a decade writing dozens of titles including Batman, Green Lantern, Shazam, Superman, Green Arrow, Catwoman, The Outsiders, and The Justice League. He was nominated for three GLAAD awards for his work, winning twice for the Green Lantern series.

From 2005-2007 Judd was the creator, executive producer and show runner on the animated series The Life and Times of Juniper Lee for the Cartoon Network. The show ran for 40 episodes, and is currently rerunning on Boomerang. In 2010 he wrote the screenplay for the animated feature Batman: Under the Red Hood, which was based on his 2005 “Batman: Under the Hood” story arc that he wrote in the Batman comic book.

In 2015 Judd began his award winning New York Times best-selling all ages graphic novel series Hilo, published by Penguin Random House. Nine volumes of Hilo are on the shelves, is translated in seven languages, and has over a million copies in print.

Today Judd lives in San Francisco with his wife, Pam Ling; their two kids; their cats Troy and Abed, and far too many action figures and vinyl toys for a normal adult.

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