Creators for Creators Announces 2017 Award Recipient

At ImageExpo 2016, Image Comics and Iron Circus Comics announced “Creators for Creators,” a new grant set to award $30,000 to a creator or creative team to support their creation of a single work over the course of a year.

After taking submissions, the fund has announced that M. Dean’s project “I Am Young” is the first recipient of the grant.

"Ultimately, I want to tell stories about the foibles of youth, the mistakes and nuances, the people, places, and things that feel important. I realized a title like I Am Young reveals both naïveté and an acknowledgement that everyone grows older and changes," M. Dean said in an interview on the Creators for Creators website. "These stories take place beginning in the mid-century, go throughout the remaining 20th-century and end in the 2000s. By the end all the characters that were seen as teens would be middle aged or older, they have changed as the world has changed. And we as individuals and the world around us continues to."

Illustrator and cartoonist M. Dean currently works on two webcomics, The Girl Who Flew Away and Coming Soon: Regents Walk.

The Creators for Creators grant was founded by Charlie Adlard, Jordie Bellaire, David Brothers, Kelly Sue DeConnick, Nick Dragotta, Leila del Duca, Matt Fraction, Kieron Gillen, Jonathan Hickman, Joe Keatinge, Robert Kirkman, Jamie McKelvie, Rick Remender, Declan Shalvey, Fiona Staples, Eric Stephenson, C. Spike Trotman, and Brian K. Vaughan.

Find out more at creatorsforcreators.org.