Faculty

Brian Michael Bendis

Brian Michael Bendis is an award winning comics creator, New York Times bestseller and one of the most successful writers working in mainstream comics. For the last fifteen years, Brian’s books have consistently sat on the top of the nationwide comic and graphic novel sales charts.

Kacy McKinney

Dr. Kacy McKinney is a critical geographer and Instructor in the Toulan School of Urban Studies and Planning, where she is focused on the undergraduate program in Community Development. She is also an illustrator and cartoonist and graduate of the Certificate Program in Comics from the Independent Publishing Resource Center. She served on the Board of Directors of Sisters of the Road from 2018 to 2021, and continues to serve on the Board’s Leadership Development Committee. Her current research: Changing the Narrative Through Collaborative Comics is funded by PSU’s Homelessness Research and Action Collaborative, is in partnership with Street Roots and the Independent Publishing Resource Center as well as PSU’s Comics Studies Program. This research uses an ethnographic comics approach that brings together the stories of PSU students who have experienced homelessness or housing instability with comic artists from Portland and beyond to create comics that seek to disrupt harmful stereotypes and to change how we think and teach about poverty and homelessness.

Shannon Wheeler

Shannon Wheeler is an American cartoonist best known for creating the satirical superhero Too Much Coffee Man, and as a cartoonist for The New Yorker.

Susan Kirtley

Susan Kirtley is a Professor of English, the Director of Comics Studies, and the Director of Rhetoric and Composition at Portland State University, where she is developing the Comics Studies program. Her research interests include visual rhetoric and graphic narratives, and she has published pieces on comics for the popular press and academic journals. Her book, Lynda Barry: Girlhood through the Looking Glass, was the 2013 Eisner winner for Best Educational/Academic work; she is currently working on a new book on comics.

Diana Schutz

Diana Schutz is an award-winning editor who has worked in comics since 1978. In her 25-year tenure at Dark Horse as senior/executive editor, she shepherded Frank Miller’s Sin City and 300, Matt Wagner’s Grendel, Stan Sakai’s Usagi Yojimbo, Paul Chadwick’s Concrete, Larry Marder’s Beanworld, and Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor. She also served as editor to authors Michael Chabon, Neil Gaiman, Harlan Ellison, and Will Eisner. Schutz is an adjunct instructor of Comics Studies at Portland State University and the first woman to be inducted into the Canadian Comic Book Creator Hall of Fame. Semi-retired, she now works as a literary translator of European graphic novels.

David Walker

David Walker currently writes the "Shaft," "Luke Cage," and "Cyborg" comics and is the Director of the Portland Black Film Festival, a former film critic for Willamette Week, a filmmaker, and the author of essay collections and YA novels. Walker has taught at PNCA and the NW Film Center.

Douglas Wolk

Comics writer, critic and journalist Douglas Wolk is the author of the Eisner- and Harvey Award-winning Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean, and the host of the podcast "The Voice of Latveria." A National Arts Journalism Program Fellow and USC Annenberg/Getty Arts Journalism Fellow, Wolk has written about comics, graphic novels, pop music and technology for magazines, newspapers and sites including the New York Times, Rolling Stone, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The Believer, Slate and Pitchfork. His forthcoming book All of the Marvels is about his experience reading 27,000 Marvel superhero comic books.