Rachel Hartman‘s sketch was the first one to grace my book at the MoCCA Arts Festival in the summer of 2002. Her book Amy Unbounded was a blast, the story of a young girl in a fantasy world who’s starting to learn that life can be a little more complicated than she thought.

I really miss her comics; they were funny and smart and just full of energy. Her sketch here shows that humor on display, perfectly.

(Rachel! We need more comic books! Please!)

J.G. Jones is the kind of comic artist who is hitting it big and absolutely deserves it. Wanted, the comic he drew for writer Mark Millar, is hitting movie screens later this year and stars James McAvoy, Angelina Jolie, and Morgan Freeman. He’s also drawing Final Crisis, DC Comics’s huge 2008 comic book event.

When he drew this funny Incredible Hulk sketch for me, he was on tour to promote Wonder Woman: The Hikatea, written by the always-clever Greg Rucka. A great sketch from a great artist on a book tour for a great book.

What can I say? Great all around. (But who’s going to collect the juice after the grapes are stomped?)

Steve Conley is another friend from the area. He’s done all sorts of great science-fiction comics like Astounding Space Thrills, Star Trek: Year Four, and Michael Chabon’s The Escapist, and his current big project is the political comic strip Socks and Barney. He also co-founded Comicon.com, and ran SPX for three years. On the last one, I told him not to do that, but he didn’t listen.

One of the things I liked about Astounding Space Thrills was the larger-than-life, crazy pulp-styled science-fiction ideas. So when the head of a galactic corporation has extra brains implanted into his head (the rest of the board of directors, don’t you know), well… it just works perfectly.

Of course, it’s normally brain fluid, not merlot in the tank.

I’ve known Jeff Alexander for, gosh, at least a decade now. He’s a local friend, and a fellow compatriot in putting on the Small Press Expo (SPX).

Of course, he also handed off the Ignatz Awards to me, so I should be cursing him.

Anyway, this is his character Hinijx, the evil koala bear. I’m looking forward to him doing more comics, soon. (Hint, hint!)

I’ve been reading Alex Robinson‘s comics since, gosh, when did Box Office Poison first begin?

His comics have a great mix of humor and drama; Box Office Poison juggled its cast of characters adeptly over the years, and his graphic novel Tricked showed that he could boil a story down well into a single, non-serialized unit. When Alex drew this for me at Mid-Ohio-Con in 2001, I was standing off to one side talking with his wife Kristen Siebecker about how one would put on a comic book convention.

The next summer, she did just that with the MoCCA Arts Festival in New York City. (Which was a real joy to attend, I might add, and you’ll eventually see some sketches from that show here as well.) And Alex? Well, not only is this a great drawing, but his exaggerated self-portrait still makes me chuckle.

Tom Mandrake is probably best known for his run on The Spectre, which was nothing short of gorgeous. (The fact that almost all of the entire 62-issue series is uncollected is a royal shame.) When I met him at Mid-Ohio-Con in 2001, he was working on a mini-series called Creeps, which could probably best be described as if the X-Men really were hideous mutants.

This is one of the characters from that book—Booger was, needless to say, one of the more disgusting characters from it. It’s certainly a much more rough style than one is used to from Mandrake, but you get the idea.

I think most people in comics know David Mack for one of two things. Either they’ve never met him, in which case it’s his gorgeous painted art in books like Kabuki and Daredevil. Or, they have met him, in which case it’s the urge to try and bounce quarters off of his chest, which is forever encased in a form-fitting black t-shirt.

(What can I say? Really buff, attractive comic artists are rare. Ones as nice as David Mack, doubly so. And seriously, the number of men and women of all sexualities who have commented on his physique is pretty darn high.)

At any rate, David Mack’s Kabuki is his life work, and his paintings and mixed-media creations are jaw-dropping in their grace and minute details. And generally speaking, when you get a sketch from him it’s of one of the characters from Kabuki. So with that in mind, I remember being amazed that he went in an entirely different direction for the wine book. (Friends later commented that they’d never seen a non-Kabuki sketch from David Mack. I suspect these days he probably also draws his creation Echo from Daredevil, but you never know.) And while I love all of the pieces of art in my book, I will give the rare comment here that this is truly one of my favorites.

I don’t think one could come up with a definitive list of “the friendliest people in comics” because it would be fairly huge (it’s an industry full of great people), but if one tried, Pam Bliss would absolutely be somewhere near the top.

Pam Bliss’s mini-comics are usually full of children, dogs, and just about anyone else who’s full of joy. (I shudder to think of even the idea of a grim-and-gritty Pam Bliss comic. It just couldn’t happen!) At conventions, she’ll offer to draw a picture of your dog if you provide a picture, which just sums her up right there, really.

So with that in mind, I shouldn’t have been surprised that her contribution included a dog. But she was absolutely right in selecting just what the good things in life are, here.

I often tell people that I can’t draw. Their response is, “Oh, come on, everyone can draw. You can draw stick figures, right?” But the sad reality is that thanks to Matt Feazell‘s brilliant stick-figures, I’m not even sure I can claim that.

It’s funny, because his art is deceptively simple looking, but he’s able to bring so much in the way of motion and life to his little figures that… well… I’d say it’s just not fair, but that’s certainly not the case. He’s just that good, that’s it pure and simple.

From now on, whenever anyone drinks, the sound-effect “Gla Gla Gla” needs to be used, incidentally.

When I first met Mike Norton, he was about to take over the art for Sean McKeever’s The Waiting Place, a book that really launched both of their careers (and rightfully so) with its stories of teenagers in a midwestern town.

Since then, he’s drawn all sorts of books, from the creepy horror of Closer and the gigantic robots of Jason and the Argobots (both from Oni Press) to superheroes such as Gravity, Runaways, and currently the All-New Atom.

But back in 2001, it was still all about The Waiting Place, and that’s exactly what I got in my sketchbook. An aunt of mine unabashedly drinks Boone’s Farm wine (if one can really call it wine), and every time she triumphantly holds it up (there’s a vile-looking blue one in particular that she likes) I can’t help but think of this drawing, chuckling to myself.