Frank Santoro Draws!

Frank Santoro is a local graphic novel artist that has been around the block. He's the writer of the hit graphic novel Storeyville from 1995. He grew up in the Braddock area of Pittsburgh and immediately moved to San Francisco after college where he worked with the awesome SF artist Frank Kozik for many years! In case you are asking yourself who Kozik is, he was a well-established rock poster artist for many years, and more recently has been creating toys with the mega-popular Kid Robot (KR is big in just about every city except Pittsburgh)! Anyway, after living in San Francisco for almost ten years, Santoro moved to New York in 1999 where he lived up until moving back to Pittsburgh in mid-2007.

Frank's work is awesome as you can see here, and you can read a great interview with him on Newsarama (Part 1 here, Part 2 here) to learn a little about his experience. What's also pretty cool is that he contributes to a blog titled Comics Comics with other artists around the country including T. Hodler, Jason T. Miles, Dash Shaw and Dan Nadel.

The Copacetic Comics Company describes Storeyville as the "best kept secret in the last twenty years of comics." CCC goes on to say:

There is no other comics piece that so successfully captures the propulsive, American energy that we associate in literature with the works of Walt Whitman and Jack Kerouac. Storeyville was sui generis at the time of its original 1995 release when it appeared in the form of a 40 page tabloid newspaper. An epic poem in comics, it reveals previously unexplored depths to the form. Employing an artistic daring that was at the time without peer, Storeyville incorporates elements of expressionism and impressionism in ways that had never before been attempted in comics, blazing a trail that remains only rarely trodden upon even to this day.

Link