Julian Lawrence

Julian Lawrence is a Canadian cartoonist, educator and comics scholar.

A longtime member of Vancouver's DIY independent art scene, Lawrence is also an arts educator and researcher, with a specialization in using hand drawn comics as a tool to improve literacy, develop storytelling techniques and form identity.

He currently resides in Middlesbrough, England, where he is a Senior Lecturer in the Comics and Graphic Novels B.A. Honours program at Teesside University.

Born in Portsmouth, England, Lawrence immigrated as a child with his family to Québec in the mid-1960s, during an era of intense anti-English sentiment in that Province.

To cope with the social rejection from his Francophone classmates, Lawrence turned to reading and writing comics for both entertainment and as a tool for improving his French language literacy.

In 1989, Lawrence moved to Vancouver, British Columbia, where he worked as an independent artist on a variety of projects, including: writer/illustrator for Fantagraphics (three issues of “Crucial Fiction”, a historical biography comic series); storyboard artist for the a.k.a. Cartoon animated series Ed, Edd n Eddy; character designer for the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network animated series Artie the Ant and Senior Editor at Zeros2Heroes Media.

In the spring of 1999, Lawrence co-created (along with Robert Dayton) the Drippy Gazette – a short-lived (12 issues) monthly two-color newspaper featuring comics from Vancouver artists, with each issue cover featuring an anthropomorphized raindrop named Drippy the Newsboy.

From this, Lawrence subsequently won a grant from the Xeric Foundation in 2000 which he used to help publish Drippytown Comics, an anthology series which grew out from the Gazette and served to showcase the work of each contributing artist.

Notable artists included Colin Upton and Jason Turner.

In 2007, Lawrence contributed artwork to The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam, a graphic novel documenting the life of a once famous Chinese vaudeville performer.

The book was named on the American Library Association's Top Ten Graphic Novels for Teens and won the Doug Wright Award in 2008.

Lawrence also worked on the animated film adaptation, produced by the National Film Board of Canada.

In 2014, Lawrence re-purposed his character Drippy the Newsboy as the protagonist for a comic book trilogy based on the writings of American author Stephen Crane.

Lawrence emulated Crane's literary narrative style by contrasting exceptionally detailed artwork with slang-filled dialogue.

Conundrum Press published three volumes of The Adventures of Drippy the Newsboy: Volume I: Drippy's Mama (2015); Volume II: The Red Drip of Courage (2015) and Volume III: The Dripping Boat (2020).

Lawrence was a founding member of Vancouver avant garde musical collective July Fourth Toilet.