Colleen Doran - Career

Career

She landed her first professional assignment for an advertising agency at age fifteen. While still in college, she was a full-time professional artist who was able to add her professional work to her college art curriculum for credit.

She broke into the comic book industry when still a teenager, in the 1980s. A Distant Soil was originally published in a number of fanzines, and was scouted by Donning/Starblaze before being contracted by WaRP Graphics, where it was later published. Doran subsequently left the company due to an acrimonious dispute with WaRP, which attempted to claim copyright and trademark on her work. The WaRP version of the story has never been reprinted, despite its unusual all-pencil style, although Colleen Doran did reprint a short Distant Soil story that had appeared in a WaRP anthology.

After leaving WaRP, Colleen went on to completely rewrite and redraw the entire A Distant Soil series from scratch, self-publishing it for some years before moving on to Image Comics where it is now in multiple printings as a series of graphic novels. The first volume had four printings, and it is now in its fourth collected volume. It has sold, collectively, more than 700,000 copies. The story centers on a young girl who is born heir to an alien religious dynasty, and explores issues of politics, gender identity and tolerance. Its strong characterization and unique art style has inspired the Young American Library Association to profile the book in their quarterly journal, and it has been nominated for the Spectrum Award for Best Science Fiction in the Other category in 2001. The series has been on hiatus since 2006. Doran recently announced that the A Distant Soil's archives were accidentally destroyed by the printer, and an extensive restoration process is now in progress. The series is expected to return to print from Image Comics in 2013.

The character Thessaly in Neil Gaiman's Sandman is based on Doran, and she illustrated two issues of that series (#20 and #34) in the early 1990s.

She has exhibited at many shows and lectured widely at venues such as World Science Fiction Conventions, San Diego Comic Cons, The Singapore Writers Festival, and Comics Masterclass in Sydney Australia, as well as many The Lord of the Rings conventions including Ring*Con, ELF, and ORC. She is also featured in the films Ringers (a documentary about The Lord of the Rings fans), Scenes From the Small Press: Colleen Doran by Rich Henn, and Sex, Lies and Superheroes.

Doran's more recent comics-art projects included The Book of Lost Souls, a modern fantasy written by J. Michael Straczynski and published by Marvel's Icon imprint in 2006.

"Gone to Amerikay" a graphic novel drawn by Doran and written by Derek McCulloch was released in 2012 from DC/Vertigo. It is a "multi-generational Irish saga." It received numerous positive notices and was profiled in The Wall Street Journal, Boing Boing and Irish Echo. "Gone to Amerikay" themed cover art was featured in the St Patrick's Day edition of Irish Echo, which was then presented to President Obama by Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness of Northern Ireland.

Doran also illustrated best-selling young adult novelist Barry Lyga's first graphic novel for Houghton Mifflin, "Mangaman" in 2011. It received a coveted starred review at Kirkus, as well as awards at the New York Book Show and New England Book Builders of Boston. She will complete the long awaited Stealth Tribes graphic novel with Warren Ellis for Vertigo in 2012, and is working with Neil Gaiman on a new graphic novel for Dark Horse for 2013.