Martin Wagner

Martin Wagner (born April 27, 1966) is an American artist, cartoonist, and filmmaker. Career Comics While a student at the University of Texas at Austin, Wagner began Hepcats as a comic strip in the college newspaper The Daily Texan in 1987. Starting in 1989, he self-published it as a black-and-white comic book series and it gained more exposure with the assistance of Dave Sim, who allowed Wagner to submit a page to his bi-weekly reprints of Cerebus. To help support the comics financially, Wagner also offered sketches to fans who sent him cash in the mail. Although the series received critical praise, the combination of poor sales, Wagner's lack of business experience, and his divorce in 1991 contributed to financial difficulties. Along with Jeff Smith (Bone), Colleen Doran (A Distant Soil), James Owen (Starchild), Larry Marder (Beanworld) and Sim, Wagner was one of the prominent self-publishers of the 1990s, but a hectic schedule eventually led him to cease publishing the series altogether following issue No. 12 in 1994. In 1996 he made a deal with Antarctic Press to republish the existing material, to be followed by new issues, but the only new material published was a special "#0" color issue. Wagner also developed the Snowblind story-line as part of the Hepcats series which would be re-printed into a novel, but it never continued past part one.