Justin Robinson Hall (born February 14, 1971) is an American cartoonist and educator. He has written and illustrated autobiographical and erotic comics, and edited No Straight Lines, a scholarly overview of LGBT comics of the previous 40 years. He is an Associate Professor of Comics and Writing-and-Literature at the California College of the Arts.[1]
Career
Cover of Hard to Swallow #2, cover by Justin Hall
Hall began creating comics in 2001.[2] His first published work was A Sacred Text, about seeing the Dead Sea Scrolls in Israel, published with funding from a Xeric Grant. He followed this with True Travel Tales, an anecdotal series about more of his international backpacking experiences.[3] Next he and Dave Davenport produced Hard to Swallow, a 4-issue series of gay erotica[4] that was later collected into a single volume by Northwest Press in 2016.[5]
He served as the talent relations chair for the LGBT advocacy organization Prism Comics.[3][4] He published Glamazonia about a caricatural trans superhero, in 2010;[6] it was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award.[4] His work has been published in the San Francisco Bay Guardian, The Book of Boy Trouble, The Best Erotic Comics series, and Best American Comics 2006.[4]
He began teaching comics at the California College of the Arts in the early 2010s; in 2014, he added instruction for a Masters-level degree in the subject.[8] In 2016 he received a grant as a Fulbright scholar to guest lecture at Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic.[9]
Beginning in 2015, he has co-organized – with Jennifer Camper – "Queers & Comics", a biennial conference of international LGBTQ cartoonists, academics, and other professionals, focusing on LGBTQ themes in comics and LGBTQ comics creators.[12][13][14]
Personal life
Hall is married.[1] He and his husband live in San Francisco.[1]
