Amanda Conner

Amanda Conner is the rare artist whose work looks like pure joy on the page—expressive, kinetic, and bursting with personality—and whose career has spanned indie cult classics, the highest peak of the mainstream, and everything in between. Trained at the Joe Kubert School in the mid-1980s, she spent her early years drawing Marvel’s Barbie line and Disney’s Gargoyles while moonlighting as a commercial illustrator for New York ad agencies. Perfect for fans of Darwyn Cooke’s mid-century elegance, Frank Cho’s expressive figure work, and anyone who believes superhero comics should be fun again.

Conner’s breakout arrived on Vampirella for Harris Comics, where she penciled 24 issues opposite some of the era’s boldest writers, including Grant Morrison, Mark Millar, and Warren Ellis—work that Lambiek’s Comiclopedia credits with defining her clean, expressive style. It was there she cemented the penciller/inker partnership with Jimmy Palmiotti that would become a lifelong personal and professional partnership, now run through their multimedia company PaperFilms, where she maintains her official bio and gallery.

In 1999 Conner co-created Gatecrasher with Mark Waid and Jimmy Palmiotti for Event Comics’ Black Bull Media imprint, a creator-owned, dimension-hopping super-team adventure that DC Comics still lists among her creator-owned projects. Three years later she and Garth Ennis teamed with Palmiotti on The Pro, a raucous, Eisner-nominated creator-owned satire for Image Comics about a superpowered working single mom who refuses to play the hero game by anyone’s rules. The book’s cult status was confirmed in 2017 when Paramount Pictures optioned the film rights, as covered by Deadline.

Alongside her own creations, Conner built a legendary run of work-for-hire at DC, where she and Palmiotti reinvigorated Harley Quinn with a hugely successful ongoing series that reframed the Clown Princess of Crime as a lovable, fourth-wall-breaking antihero—the blueprint for her breakout pop-culture fame. Earlier, her beloved Power Girl run with Palmiotti and Justin Gray turned a perennial punchline into a fan favorite, and she drew the acclaimed Before Watchmen: Silk Spectre series co-written with Darwyn Cooke.

The industry has recognized her again and again. Conner received an Inkpot Award from Comic-Con International in 2014, and in 2019 she was named the recipient of the Joe Kubert Distinguished Storyteller Award, honoring artists who exemplify Kubert’s talent and community spirit. In 2022 she returned to her roots with Hot & Messy: The Art of Amanda Conner, a career-spanning Kickstarter art book that she discussed at length with The Beat, covering everything from a long-lost Bettie Page story to her first convention.

From the satirical bite of The Pro to the sunny chaos of her Harley Quinn, Amanda Conner’s art has also found its way onto TV’s The Big Bang Theory, ABC’s Nightline, the New York Times, and MAD Magazine—proof that her brand of warm, funny, gorgeously expressive cartooning travels far beyond the comic shop. Whether she’s writing her own worlds through PaperFilms or drawing yours, her work is an invitation to smile.