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Bryan Lee O'Malley

O'Malley is the creator of the internationally successful graphic novel series Scott Pilgrim, along with other beloved works such as Lost at Sea, Seconds, and most recent work, a collaboration with Leslie Hung called Snotgirl

He went on to start in Film Studies at the University of Western Ontario, but dropped out before completing.

Prior to having his own material published, O'Malley illustrated the Oni Press miniseries Hopeless Savages: Ground Zero, written by Jen Van Meter. He also lettered many Oni comics, including the majority of Chynna Clugston's output between 2002 and 2005.

Rebecca Sugar

She simultaneously attended Montgomery Blair High School and the Visual Arts Center at Albert Einstein High School (where she was an arts semifinalist in the Presidential Scholar competition, and won Montgomery County's prestigious Ida F. Haimovicz Visual Arts Award), both of which are located in Maryland. 

While at Blair, she drew several comics which won first place for comics in the Newspaper Individual Writing and Editing Contest. "The Strip" ran a comic challenging MCPS's new grading policy from 2005. 

She went on to attend the School of Visual Arts in New York.

During her time at the School of Visual Arts, Sugar directed short animated films, including Johnny Noodleneck (2008).

In 2009, she wrote and animated Singles, in which frequent collaborator Ian Jones-Quartey acted as an assistant animator, assistant inker and voice actor on the project, while Sugar's brother Steven Sugar acted as an assistant colorist. Sugar completed this film as her thesis.

Sugar also played an important role in the creation of nockFORCE, a cartoon series created by Ian Jones-Quartey and Jim Gisriel and launched in 2007 on YouTube. In particular, she contributed to the cartoon's backgrounds and characters.

In 2010, Sugar published her first graphic novel, Pug Davis, featuring an astronaut dog and his gay sidekick Blouse.

Raina Telgemeier

Telgemeier studied illustration at New York's School of Visual Arts.

After graduating from the School of Visual Arts, Telgemeier began attending small-press festivals such as the MoCCA Festival, selling self-published autobiographical stories and vignettes from her life. She produced seven mini-comics issues in the Take-Out series.

In 2004, Telgemeier joined Girlamatic, a subscription-based webcomics site dedicated to female writers. Telgemeier has said that the disciplined structure and schedule of publishing a weekly webcomic encouraged her to develop the autobiographical story Smile.

Telgemeier said that she met an editor from Scholastic at an art gallery party in 2004 who mentioned that Scholastic was thinking of setting up a graphic novel imprint. After Telgemeier mentioned she had been a fan of Ann M. Martin's The Baby-Sitters Club series, they asked her to work up a graphic novel adaptation.