Home

"If you can fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds worth of distance run..."

"If" by Rudyard Kipling

"If" is a guide of virtues to aspire to as a human being in society. This one poem stuck with me from that very young age on and remains my guidepost through even the toughest of times.

I've been running non-stop since, trying to pack as much into that "unforgiving minute" as humanly possible. My distance run brought me to copywriting, academia, comic book history, journalism, and even acting--and I feel like I'm still just waiting for the starting pistol to go off.

My work as a comic book historian and journalist has been published in the books Leaping Tall Buildings, The Blue Beetle Companion, Conversations: Larry Hama, Conversations: Mike Allred, and several magazines, from Comics Buyer's Guide to The Comics Journal and (my greatest magazine work) Comic Book Artist. My most recent book, Cliffhanger: Cinema's First Superheroes, is a comprehensive look at comic book history and the low budget movie serial world of the 1940s and sold out within a year.

Christopher Irving came into media studies through comic book journalism and history. While earning his BA in Art Education from Virginia Commonwealth University in 1999, he was already interviewing comic book creators. Soon after, he was contributing to industry magazines such as Comics Buyer's Guide, Alter Ego, and the award-winning Comic Book Artist (where he served as Associate Editor). While in the MA program for Comparative Literature at Brooklyn College in 2012, Irving expanded his studies to include media with his thesis "A Succession of Masks: Batman's Evolving Sexuality," which analyzed the Batman comics and TV show from the 1940s through early '70s against the public perception of homosexuality.

Creatively, Irving has crowdfunded a series of merchandise of Michael Allred's indy comics superstar Madman, and created the branding for the "Madmaniverse" of characters in everything from custom yo-yos to 3-D trading cards to an action figure. He also is a story architect of the Eagle Force toy line (from Fresh Monkey Fiction) and has written several pulp novellas while also creating character profiles and backstory.

He keeps one foot firmly in the comic book industry as a moderator for the GalaxyCon convention, which sets up around the country, and still occasionally writes historical and journalistic essays for publications like ComicScene or his own Madmania essays on Allred's Madman comics.

Irving continues to seek out new ways to view both a history and analysis of different media while a student of the Media, Arts, and Text PhD program at VCU.