About the author:
DARRYL HUGHES is a writer from New York City, where he works and lives. Darryl’s literary influences include Dashiell Hammett, Stephen King, Edgar Allan Poe, Tennessee Williams, Mark Twain, and David Mamet, to name a few. Darryl’s creative ambitions began in high school in the mid 80's during an English class that turned out to be so much more. Darryl began his writing career in the early 90's, his talents running the creative gamut from short stories, to online columns and articles, poetry, to script writing and back again. Always a die-hard scifi fan, when Darryl entered the comic book industry in 2001 and decided to apply his writing talents to independent comic book creation, he drew on his life long love of classic 50's creature feature movies like “The Invaders from Mars”, 60's groovy ghoulie movies like “Monster Beach Party”, and 80's Steven Spielberg movies like “ET”, “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”, and “The Goonies” to serve as inspiration for his creation of “GAAK” with artist Monique MacNaughton.
About the artist:
MONIQUE MacNAUGHTON is an artist from the community of New Maryland, just outside of Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada. As an artist Monique wears many hats: comic book artist, cartoonist, self-publisher, portraitist, and graphic designer. Monique’s involvement in comics spans over two decades, with eighteen of those years as a professional. Chief amongst her self-publishing efforts are the “Arrowflight” series of graphic novels and the online comic “UNA Frontiers”. Monique’s artistic influences include the golden age masters Will Eisner, Walt Kelly, Hal Foster, Wally Wood, Alex Toth, and Steve Ditko, the old school manga-ka Osamu Tezuka, Shotaro Ishimori, and Leiji Matsumoto, and current innovators like Mark Oakley, Donna Barr, and Dave Sim. Diagnosed with high functioning autism (Aspberger’s Syndrome) early in childhood, Monique lends a hand to aiding the cause of autistic children and their families. “GAAK” is Monique’s first collaborative project with Darryl Hughes.