Mark Crilley is an author, illustrator, video maker, music creator and father. Mark Crilley started out as a child reading MAD Magazine and watching Monty Python movies. He drew satirical comics and impressed all the school children in his class. Crilley attended Kalamazoo College as a fine arts major, and that was the major turning point in his art career, he met David Small who was his mentor and a children’s book writer. Small pushed Crilley to step it up when he would put out mediocre work. After college Crilley found himself having a fascination for the far east, he then taught English in Taiwan and Japan for around five years. All while expanding his skill sets, studying Mandarin Chinese and Japanese. While he was in Japan, he found his wife and challenged himself to write an original story.
Akiko on the Planet Smoo was Crilley’s first story he wrote and illustrated completely on his own. He says, “It’s Wizard of Oz meets Star Wars” because of it’s fantasy and spacial location. It is about a girl who goes on many adventures through space. Once Crilley was back in the states, he made copies of Akiko and started to send it to publishing companies. Sirius took an interest and it was an instant hit. To this day there are nine comics and ten children’s books. Crilley’s next adventure was Miki Falls.
Miki Falls takes place in Japan and is about a high schooler just starting her senior year, but her plans are stopped she meets a boy named Hiro, who makes for an interesting twist throughout the series, but you’ll have to read them to find out for yourself. Crilley saw Miki Falls as a big challege because it was in the manga style, but learning new skills and tricks was only more exciting for him. There are four books in this series, each named for a season, spring, summer, autumn and winter. Currently Crilley is working on Brody’s Ghost, which yet another challenge.
Brody’s Ghost is set in a not to far off futuristic America. This more realistic style of manga is more of an action series than anything else of Crilley’s. Brody is a loser who just got dumped by his girlfriend, Nicole, and one day while playing guitar on the street corner, he sees something that changes his life forever. Talia is the ghost of a teenage girl who is trapped in purgatory until she can help others, the only way she can is through Brody. He has psychic powers that let him see Talia and communicate with her. Read along with these characters as they track down a serial killer who is claiming victims sooner than they can react, but is Talia on Brody’s side or something entirely different? Find out for yourself by reading on. There are currently three books out in this six book series.
Mark Crilley started promoting Miki Falls by posting YouTube videos, then found himself loving to teach others how to draw in the manga style. Now with 824,941 subscribers and 133,806,848 video views, he is one of the absolute best drawing gurus on YouTube. Teaching viewers how to draw everything from clothes, facial styles and crazy hair, to perspective and how to layout comic books of your very own. Crilley writes and illustrates all of his books completely by himself, while balancing the commitment of putting out a new “how to draw” video every friday. Every now and then, Crilley does a “message to my subscribers” video, in which he takes questions about anything and answers them while drawing or tweaking his own comic books. He really cares about his audience and he isn’t shy to say thank you to everyone who has supported him, either by buying his books or just watching his videos. If you are at all interested in drawing or the manga style, check out his videos or his books.
by Jacob Trahan