Greg Evans (born November 13, 1947) is an American

cartoonist A cartoonist is a visual artist who specializes in both drawing and writing cartoons (individual images) or comics (sequential images). Cartoonists differ from comics writers or comic book illustrators in that they produce both the literary and ...

and the creator of the syndicated

comic strip A comic strip is a sequence of drawings, often cartoons, arranged in interrelated panels to display brief humor or form a narrative, often serialized, with text in balloons and captions. Traditionally, throughout the 20th and into the 21st ...

'' Luann''. He received the 2003 National Cartoonists Society

Reuben Award The National Cartoonists Society (NCS) is an organization of professional cartoonists in the United States. It presents the National Cartoonists Society Awards. The Society was born in 1946 when groups of cartoonists got together to entertain the ...

for the strip. He has been nominated four other times for the same award.

Career

In ''100 Years of American Newspaper Comics'', Dennis Wepman wrote that Evans "taught junior and senior high school art in his native California, worked as promotion manager and graphic artist for a TV station in Colorado, and entertained with a robot at trade shows and fairs before he sold ''Luann'' to News America Syndicate in 1984." Evans wrote a musical based on Luann, ''Luann: Scenes in a Teen's Life'', which debuted March 2008 at

Palomar College Palomar College is a public community college in San Diego County, California. The main campus is in San Marcos and three centers and four education sites are located elsewhere throughout north San Diego County. The largest of these by student ...

in San Marcos, California. It was directed by Dana Case. Prior to ''Luann'', Evans published the comic strip ''Fogarty'', distributed free to high school newspapers. It featured the character Mr. Fogarty, who continues in the same role as a character in ''Luann''. In 2005, Evans was awarded the

Inkpot Award The Inkpot Award is an honor bestowed annually since 1974 by Comic-Con International. It is given to professionals in the fields of comic books, comic strips, animation, science fiction, and related areas of popular culture, at CCI's annual conv ...

. Evans is a graduate of

California State University, Northridge California State University, Northridge (CSUN or Cal State Northridge) is a public university in the Northridge neighborhood of Los Angeles, California. With a total enrollment of 38,551 students (as of Fall 2021), it has the second largest u ...

Personal life

Evans lives in San Marcos, California, near San Diego. With his wife Betty he has three children, including daughter Karen, whose own experiences as a teenager influenced ''Luann''. One of Evans' children, Rhonda, born around the time Evans had met his wife in college, was put up for adoption. 30 years later, Rhonda discovered that she was adopted. When reading the Sunday comics, she realized that an artist's name matched the name on her adoption papers. She contacted Evans, who was shocked. Evans and his wife eventually met Rhonda, whose story was told in an episode of the

PAX-TV Ion Television is an American broadcast television network owned by the Katz Broadcasting subsidiary of the E. W. Scripps Company. The network first began broadcasting on August 31, 1998, as Pax TV, focusing primarily on family-oriented entert ...

series, '' It's a Miracle''.

References

External links

''Luann'' at United Feature Syndicate
1947 births American comic strip cartoonists Inkpot Award winners Living people Reuben Award winners People from San Marcos, California {{comic-strip-creator-stub