The Ephemerata

Carol Tyler is a crucial voice for the medium. Poetic, her work is ornamented with detail, yet not flowery. Carol is neither sensationalistic or sentimental, yet she documents all the clumsiness of human existence with incredible grace.–Craig Thompson (author of Blankets and Habibi)Carol Tyler’s work stands out for its thoughtfulness, energy and bite. She is a great storyteller with an ethereally expressive drawing style that enables her to convey emotion and personality with aching resonance, and she understands people with an acuity that is tender, wise and devastating.–Jim Woodring (author of Weathercraft and One Beautiful Spring Day)The verdant richness and humanity of her whole body of work has raised her in my mind to one of the handful of true greats of the original ‘underground’ generation.–Chris Ware (author of Building Stories)

Born in Chicago in the 1950s, Carol Tyler is a cartoonist who bridged underground and alternative comics with her debut in Weirdo magazine in 1987. Collections such as The Job Thing (1993) and Late Bloomer (2005) followed. In 2015, Fantagraphics published Soldier’s Heart, her Eisner Award-nominated biography of her father, tracing his return from WWII and how his trauma impacted his family. Fab4 Mania (Fantagraphics, 2018), based on her 1965 diary, is about her teenage obsession with the Beatles. In recent years, she has taught Sequential Art at the University of Cincinnati’s College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning. She is a CXC Master Cartoonist and a Slate Studio Prize winner. In 2023, Married To Comics, a documentary about Tyler’s life with her husband and fellow cartoonist Justin Green (1945-2022), won rave reviews.