Ryan Claytor

Claytor is a comics artist and professor living in Lansing, Michigan. He has taught Comics Studio courses at both Michigan State University and the University of Michigan Flint. In 2007, he earned his Master of Fine Arts degree from San Diego State University with an emphasis in multimedia, researching autobiography in comics. Claytor's achievements have included a Cartoonist in Residence position at the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco, California; visiting lecturerships at the Dallas Museum of Art and Michigan State University; an internship with Marvel Comics in New York City; and judging the Will Eisner Spirit of Comics Retailing Award in 2007. In 2009 the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco featured an exhibition of his work and Claytor began teaching the first "Comics and Visual Narrative" course ever offered at Michigan State University. 

As a creator, Claytor is most widely known for his self-published, autobiographical comic book series And Then One Day. Although the series has undergone several format changes and incarnations since its inception in 2004, And Then One Day readers are consistently treated with Claytor's thoughtful and entertaining personal anecdotes immaculately packaged with a designer's eye for production detail. In the summer of 2008, he released a republication of his master's thesis on autobiography in comics, Concatenations.

Claytor was also an artist and event organizer for the first 24 Hour Comics Day (24HCD) in 2004. Subsequently, his twenty-four hour comic about relationships with passed relatives was chosen from hundreds of worldwide submissions as one of the best stories of the day and included in the first internationally distributed 24HCD anthology, 24 Hour Comics Day Highlights 2004. Since this then he has participated in two other 24 Hour Comics Days.

During the summer of 2007, Claytor embarked on the most ambitious tour ever organized by a self-publishing comic book artist. This North American In-Store Signing Tour took Claytor to eighteen states and two Canadian provinces where he signed books, spoke about his work, and held art exhibitions at fifty different museums, bookstores, libraries, and comic book specialty shops. To date, he has held signings in over half the states across America.

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Ryan Claytor