Jimmy Palmiotti

Jimmy Palmiotti’s story is the American comics dream, run in Brooklyn ink. Born in 1961 in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, he traveled from a Manhattan photo-retouching studio and eight years in advertising to the bullpen of Marvel’s 1990s boom, then on to co-founding a publisher that helped save Marvel and a company—PaperFilms—that lets him own everything he makes. Perfect for fans of the raucous creator-owned satire of The Pro, the street-level grit of his co-creation Painkiller Jane, and anyone who believes the best comics come from creators who own what they create.

Palmiotti started inking professionally in 1987, cutting his teeth on backgrounds and finishing art alongside Mark Texeira on Ghost Rider and Punisher War Zone before becoming Marvel’s go-to problem-solver on books like X-Force #1. When the Image Comics founders detonated out of the Big Two in the early ’90s, he was right there with them, inking early issues of Spawn and helping define the bold, heavy linework that made the era’s books unmistakable. As Bleeding Cool’s career-spanning profile put it, persistence and professionalism—“knowing when to leave the room”—were the keys to his success.

In 1993 Palmiotti and Joe Quesada co-founded Event Comics, publishing creator-owned titles like Ash and Painkiller Jane, the bulletproof NYPD undercover agent Palmiotti co-created with Quesada who went on to star in a Syfy television series. Five years later the pair partnered with Marvel on the Marvel Knights imprint—a gritty, creator-driven relaunch of Daredevil, Black Panther, and the Inhumans that Palmiotti says helped pull Marvel back from the brink. In 1999 he teamed with Gareb Shamus to launch Black Bull Media, whose debut title was Gatecrasher, a dimension-hopping super-team romp he co-wrote with Mark Waid and Amanda Conner.

Three years later, Palmiotti, Conner, and Garth Ennis dropped The Pro on Image Comics—an Eisner-nominated prestige one-shot about a superpowered single mother that torched the superhero genre with a grin. The book’s cult status was sealed in 2017 when Paramount Pictures optioned the film rights, as reported by Deadline. Around the same period he co-wrote the beloved Jonah Hex run with Justin Gray and Power Girl with Gray and Conner, digging deep into DC’s western and comedy seams.

The defining partnership, though, is with his wife. In 2013 Palmiotti and Amanda Conner relaunched Harley Quinn at DC, reframing the Clown Princess of Crime as a lovable, fourth-wall-breaking antihero and producing a run so successful its 2016 Rebirth debut topped the sales charts and reshaped the character’s look, merchandising, and even the Birds of Prey film. The duo received an Inkpot Award from Comic-Con International in 2014. Today, through PaperFilms—his multimedia company with Conner, Justin Gray, Frank Tieri, and Paul Mounts—Palmiotti keeps his creator-owned universe alive via a rolling series of Kickstarters, funding collections of 21 Down, the Sex and Violence anthology, and more Painkiller Jane, while recent titles like The Deadly Tales of the Gunslinger at Image and Fantasima keep the output unrelenting. In a 2020 interview with Comic Watch and a 2024 sit-down with Broken Frontier, he made his philosophy plain: connect with every character he writes, and keep creating—let the rest of the industry catch up. From Brooklyn newsstands to the top of the sales charts, Jimmy Palmiotti has spent four decades proving that a career in comics can be both wildly successful and entirely your own.