{product_snapshot:id=568,true,false,false,left}Ted Stearn was born in Massachussets in 1961 as a small baby, but soon grew up to be a very short child. He loved to draw, so when he grew a little more he decided that he wanted to be an artist. In 1979 he went to Rhode Island School of Design and majored in painting. His senior year he spent in Rome, Italy, where he was blown away by seeing the real thing, instead of all those fuzzy slides in art history class. He was also blown away by the fact that he was losing his hair already.
After graduating he moved to New York. He painted a lot of odd paintings that garnered responses like “That’s so surreal!” and “I don’t get it.” He figured he didn’t know enough about art, so in 1992 he went back to school to get his graduate degree at the School of Visual Arts. He drew a lot, built kinetic sculptures and created installations, as fine art graduate students tend to do.
But Ted also became influenced by comics at this point, especially early American comic strips and contemporary comic artists like Gary Panter. Ted also realized how much cheaper it was to make comics rather than paintings or sculpture. He drew his first comics for David Mazzucchelli’s Rubber Blanket. Inevitably animation, that more lucrative cousin of comics, attracted Ted’s attention. So it was off to MTV Animation, where he drew storyboards for all sorts of cartoons, such as Beavis and Butthead.
{product_snapshot:id=1521,true,false,false,right}Ted continued to go bald and to draw comics, most notably Fuzz and Pluck, which was published as a collection in 1999. His comics have managed to garner responses like “That’s so surreal!” and “I don’t get it.” In 2001 Ted took a three year break from the animation industry to teach at the Savannah College of Art and Design, where he was exposed to the mangled results of the manga fad on impressionable students. This inspired him to develop comics and animation curricula that could be applied to any style or genre.
Ted now lives in Tinseltown, USA, drawing comics whenever he can and working as a storyboard artist for various shows such as Futurama, King of the Hill, Drawn Together and Squirrel Boy. His series Fuzz and Pluck in Splitsville was nominated for an Ignatz Award for “Outstanding Comic” twice. He’s never won any awards, but that doesn’t bother him. Really. A Splitsville collection was released in 2008 and earned yet another Ignatz nomination, for “Outstanding Anthology or Collection.” The newest Fuzz & Pluck serial, “The Moolah Tree,” currently runs in the pages of Fantagraphics’ acclaimed Mome anthology.