Kurt Ankeny is an award winning cartoonist and painter whose work has been featured in Best American Comics, at the Society of Illustrators, and in Comics Workbook.
Kurt Ankeny is an award winning cartoonist and painter whose work has been featured in Best American Comics, at the Society of Illustrators, and in Comics Workbook.
Kurt Ankeny is an award-winning cartoonist and painter whose work has appeared in Best American Comics, the Society of Illustrators, the Cape Ann Museum, Comics Workbook, PEN America’s Illustrated PEN, Ink Brick, and Fantagraphics’s NOW Anthology. He is the letterer for the graphic novel limited series November by Matt Fraction and Elsa Charretier. He lives with his wife and son in Salem, Massachusetts.
2018 Excerpt from In Pieces: Someplace Which I Call Home featured on PEN America’s Illustrated PEN.
2017 Best American Comics 2017, excerpted In Pieces: Someplace Which I Call Home.
2017 Invited to speak at the New York Comics and Picture-Story Symposium hosted by Ben Katchor at Parsons School of Design.
2017 New England Book Show Award for In Pieces: Someplace Which I Call Home. First Place in Graphic Novels category.
2016 Massachusetts Independent Comics Expo (MICE) Mini-Grant award for Dark Desert Dawn.
2015 New England Book Show Award for Saltwater Snow. First Place in Small and Self Publishers Illustrated category.
2015 Society of Illustrators MOCCA Arts Festival Award of Excellence for Saltwater Snow and A Bomb. Short Form Category.
PLEADING WITH STARS
26 December 2019 - The Comics Journal (link)
“An impressive debut collection of short stories that explores various genres and styles. Ankeny is an artist with immense range and skill.”
—Marc Sobel, The Comics Journal, The Best Comics of 2019 article
November 2019 - The Copacetic Comics Company (link)
"Pleading with Stars, Kurt Ankeny's new collection from AdHouse Books, showcasing his work from 2014 to 2019, maps an intricate constellation of words and pictures. And what pictures! Ankeny can draw. His virtuosity extends to a wide range of tools and mediums: pencils, pens, markers and brushes; inks, paints and watercolors; alone and in combination. […] The core of the collection is a series of meditations on the mysteries of human behavior: "Gulls," "Between December and March," "Saltwater Snow," and "Dark Desert Dawn." […] If these stories are linked in any way, it is in their searching for, finding and then exploring facets of souls shrouded in darkness and striving for illumination; pleading with stars.”
—Bill Boichel, The Copacetic Comics Company
31 August 2016 - Warrior27.net (link)
"'Gulls' by Kurt Ankeny, is one of the most beautiful comics I have read all year. Using watercolors, adding a soft intimacy to the story, Ankeny relates a day in the life of a mother and son in Paris, where they live. In only ten pages, Ankeny offers readers a trio of well-developed characters, roaming through life as they try to make sense of it all, and try to find love—or at least companionship—along this journey. It’s an incredibly touching story that resolves satisfyingly, while also leaving narrative threads for the audience to follow, in their own minds, once they turn that last page. A great read."
—Chris Beckett, Warrior 27
25 August 2016 - Comicsbulletin.com (link)
"Kurt Ankeny’s “Mother Airplane” tackles the narrowing of possibilities with age in another of my favorite entries. [...] Ankeny uses the space on a page to add pauses into his work and carefully guide the reader’s eye, tying the two ends of his metaphor together. [...] The commitment to the very clever metaphor here is quintessentially poetic, and even if the prose here had been slightly more on-the-nose and narrative in its quality, the images and text placement would have still carried a great deal of this comic’s emotional impact and meaning.”
—Austin Lanari, Comics Bulletin
IN PIECES: SOMEPLACE WHICH I CALL HOME
22 January 2020 - The Comics Beat (link)
“At times, especially in the beginning, all these moments can see displaced from each other, but as they accrue through the work, you see what Ankeny is building. It’s like being presented with sections of a map that don’t quite fit together at first, but which are being handed to you in a purposeful way, in order to nurture your understanding of the area in the map and give you a different vantage point once the full map is in front of you. Ankeny’s process of doing this is gentle and patient, and it builds up into a rich and gracious examination of place and self and what one means to the other.”
—John Seven, Indie Beat Column, The Comics Beat
1 February 2018 - Pen America (link)
"Kurt Ankeny’s In Pieces: Someplace Which I Call Home (Two Hundred Zoo Press) is a poetic and thoughtfully crafted graphic novel that is centered around the notion of place. Through a series of beautifully drawn interactions, observations, and reflections, Ankeny brings the small Massachusetts town of Ipswich to life. His portrayal of the town’s quirky history, architecture, natural landscape, and people prove that reflecting on one’s home is both achievable and elusive. As a non-native to the area and someone who is part of a multiracial family, Ankeny is keenly aware of what it means to be an outsider. His observational skills are like that of an ethnographer in the sense that he is both detached from his environment and dependent on it. What results is a purposely fragmented tale that highlights the ineffable quality of what makes a place a home."
—Whit Taylor, Guest Editor for Pen America
27 January 2017 - The Salem News (link)
"In his new graphic novel, Kurt Ankeny compares Ipswich to purgatory. Neither heaven nor hell, the town appears as an intriguing, but puzzling, place in impressions that the artist recorded during the five years that he lived there.
—William Broaddus, The Salem News
November 2016 - The Copacetic Comics Company (link)
"In Pieces: Someplace Which I Call Home is Kurt Ankeny's debut graphic novel. Its 120 pages are filled with crisp, clear, pencil renderings of scenes drawn from life and memory which together weave a hybrid form of graphic novel; part observed, part recalled, part created. In Pieces uses this work to get at the natural rhythms that make up day-to-day life. Parts were serialized up at Comics Workbook, which is worth checking out to get an idea of what this is about, but the work has a very different—colder, harsher—feel online compared to the printed version, which is simultaneously warmer and sharper, while also being much more intimate, and just plain better, all around.”
—Bill Boichel, The Copacetic Comics Company
2 September 2016 - Comicsverse.com (link)
"As someone worn out with the over-coloring and digital conformity of certain mainstream comics, Kurt Ankeny is a sight for sore eyes.”
—Jake Grubman, ComicsVerse
In Pieces: Someplace Which I Call Home (released October 2016)
Author Photo | Cover Image | PDF of Press Release
