Ken Steacy

Ken Steacy is a Canadian Air Force brat who decided at age eleven to become a professional comic book artist and has gone on to become one of Canada’s leading comic artists with a career spanning over thirty years. He graduated at the Ontario College of Art in the mid-1970s where he studied Photo/Electric Arts and drove all of his profs crazy by turning in comic strips for assignments instead of the film or video requested. They finally figured out what he was up to and awarded him a pile of scholarships, including the Lieutenant Governor’s Medal. He pursued his intent to become a comic creator until the magic moment occurred in 1974 with the publication in ORB Magazine of Super Student, a two page strip that he wrote, penciled, inked, and lettered. This holistic approach has been a hallmark of his work ever since, true to his belief that specialization is for insects, not artists.

He has since contributed to numerous comic books and magazines, such as Epic Illustrated, Marvel Fanfare, Jonny Quest and Iron Man. Steacy also worked a lot for the Star Wars series, making comics, trading cards and children’s books and collaborated with comic writers such as Harlan Ellison on the graphic novels ‘Night and the Enemy’ and Dean Motter on ‘The Sacred and the Profane’ along with numerous collaborations with author Douglas Coupland. Ken Steacy was the writer/artist of the 1990 comic series ‘Tempus Fugitive’, published by DC comics. In the early 1990s, he worked on an interactive CD-ROM for children, called ‘The Awesome Adventures of Victor Vector and Yondo’, and made a comic series starring the same characters and later created ‘Brightwork’, a book celebrating classic car ornamentation. He also produced all of the display artwork for the Space Place gallery at Edmonton’s TELUS World of Science, designed the sets and promotional material for a production of West Side Story, and painted stacks of World of Warcraft, Marvel Masterpieces, and Indiana Jones gaming cards. He was the recipient of a 1990 Inkpot Award and currently runs Ken Steacy Publishing, an on-demand publishing house for comic creators.

With paintings in the permanent collection of the National War Museum in Ottawa and two recent exhibits at art galleries in BC Ken Steacy has had a distinguished and very prolific career in the graphic arts, creating innumerable illustrations and covers for comics and for many productions outside the comic field, and he continues to this day producing his unique and distinctive brand of artistic magic.