Marcos Martín
Three-time Eisner Award-winning Spanish artist of Daredevil, Doctor Strange: The Oath, and The Private Eye — and co-founder of the DRM-free platform Panel Syndicate.
📍 Barcelona, Spain
Some artists draw the future of comics. Marcos Martín designed its business model too. The Barcelona-born artist became a star drawing Daredevil with Mark Waid in 2011 — a run that won the Eisner Award for Best Continuing Series and helped pave the way for off-beat Marvel gems like Hawkeye. Before that came Batgirl: Year One, Doctor Strange: The Oath with Brian K. Vaughan, and a celebrated stretch on The Amazing Spider-Man. Entertainment Weekly once described his visual storytelling as “magic.”
But Martín’s real legacy began in 2013, when he and Vaughan — with his partner, colorist Muntsa Vicente — launched Panel Syndicate: a DRM-free, pay-what-you-want digital publisher built to deliver comics directly from creators to readers, in multiple languages. Their first series, The Private Eye, a noir mystery about a world where privacy is a constitutional right, became a critical and commercial sensation — winning the 2015 Eisner for Best Digital/Webcomic and the Harvey Award for Best Online Comics Work — and proved that major creators could skip the direct market entirely. They followed it with Barrier, a bilingual sci-fi drama, and Friday with Ed Brubaker, plus The Walking Dead: The Alien, which gave the zombie saga its first story outside the US, set in his beloved Barcelona.
Martín’s signature is a constant, restless reinvention: the radical widescreen layouts of the Panel Syndicate books, the painterly restraint of his recent work on Absolute Batman and Friday, and his refusal to be a “gear in a clock” — as he told CBR. He’d rather own the page, the platform, and the relationship with readers. That’s why you can read his best work — The Private Eye and Barrier — today at panelsyndicate.com, priced by you. That’s the future of comics, drawn by the man who built it.
