WILLIAM FOSTER
William H. Foster III is a retired professor of English at Naugatuck Valley Community College in Waterbury, CT. A longtime comic book collector and researcher, Professor Foster has been an expert commentator for both CNN News and National Public Radio. He was a consultant on the historical image of Blacks in both comic strips and comic books for the Words and Pictures Museum of Fine Sequential Art in Northampton, MA. He is the author of two collections of essays on Blacks in comics: Looking for a Face Like Mine and Dreaming of a Face Like Ours. He was an Eisner Awards judge in 2014.
MICHAEL T. GILBERT
In 2023, Michael celebrated 50 years in comics, writing and illustrating characters as diverse as Superman, Batman, Dr. Strange, Donald Duck, Spongebob, and Michael Moorcock’s sword and sorcery anti-hero, Elric of Melnibone. Since 1983, Michael’s signature character has been his intrepid monster-fighter, Mr. Monster. For the last 25 years, Gilbert has also written a column on comic book history (“Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt”) for Roy Thomas’s Alter Ego magazine. In 2014, he edited a book collecting Fiction House’s The Secret Files of Dr. Drew series for Dark Horse. More recently, he edited Tops, a Fantagraphics book reprinting a short-lived visionary Golden Age series. Michael was the recipient of an Inkpot Award from Comic-Con in 2014. He was an Eisner Awards judge in 1994.
KAREN GREEN
Karen Green is a Curator for Comics and Cartoons at Columbia University. Since 2005 she has been instrumental in building a collection and archive that now includes the original art and papers of Chris Claremont, Al Jaffee, Howard Cruse, Jerry Robinson, S. Clay Wilson, Wendy and Richard Pini, and Kitchen Sink Press, among others. Karen is highly active and visible at comics conferences and conventions, and she co-produced the documentary She Makes Comics (2014). In 2017, Nick Sousanis created the online comic “A Life in Comics: The Graphic Adventures of Karen Green” for Columbia Magazine. She was an Eisner Awards judge in 2011.
JIM THOMPSON
Jim Thompson is an independent comics scholar, a frequent contributor to the Comic Arts Conferences at Comic-Con and WonderCon and other popular culture media conferences and conventions, and a contributor to the Alter Ego comics fanzine. He was the faculty director of the Duke University off-site program at USC from 1999 to 2016, where he taught genre theory through comics and film, and was the co-founder of Duke’s Genre Matters undergraduate conference as well as the Comic Book Historian’s Podcast. In 2022 he formed A People’s History of Comics Facebook group for historians, scholars, and professionals. He was a 2021 Eisner Awards judge.
MAGGIE THOMPSON
Maggie Thompson describes herself as a “celebrity-adjacent award-winning pop-culture nerd.” She began collecting comic books when she was 4 years old and began co-editing the pioneering fanzine Comic Art with Don Thompson when she was 18. She has continued collecting, writing, and editing in the course of a career that has included 30 years of Comics Buyer’s Guide and a variety of other comics-oriented projects. Those include indexes of Fantagraphics’ Pogo reprints and a weekly post for Gemstone Publishing’s Scoop newsletter. She was an Eisner Awards judge in 2015, and she was inducted into the Eisner Hall of Fame in 2020.
ALONSO NUÑEZ
Alonso Nuñez is the founder of Little Fish Comic Book Studio, a comic arts–based educational nonprofit. He graduated from the School of Visual Arts in 2009, and he has taught and advocated for comics, in all its forms, for over a decade. He is the president of San Diego Comic Fest. Alonso was a 2021 Eisner Awards judge.
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