Barron Storey is a multi-talented American illustrator, graphic novelist and educator with a career spanning decades. He is famous for his illustrations and fine art, as well as for his teaching career which began in the 1970s. Currently, he works as a faculty member at San Jose State University.
Storey has had a successful commercial illustration career since the 1960s, working with major magazines such as Boys' Life, Reader's Digest, and National Geographic. Some of his most notable works include cover portraits for Time of Howard Hughes and Yitzhak Rabin, which hang in the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery. His painting of the South American rainforest is displayed at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, while his 1979 rendering of the space shuttle commissioned by NASA is showcased at the Air and Space Museum on the National Mall.
In addition to his commercial work, Storey has also made a name for himself as a book illustrator. He has done cover illustrations for the Franklin Library classics, War and Peace, The Good Earth and Stories by Sinclair Lewis, as well as Fahrenheit 451 for Del Rey/Ballantine and the 1980 reissue of Lord of the Flies. He has also published numerous comics and graphic novels, including The Marat/Sade Journals, which was nominated for an Eisner Award, and Neil Gaiman's The Sandman: Endless Nights, which won an Eisner.
Storey has won several prestigious awards throughout his career, including the New York Society of Illustrators' Gold Medal in 1976 for his portrait of Lotte Lenya and the Eisner award for The Sandman: Endless Nights. He has also had his work featured in numerous exhibits across the United States and Europe, including at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery and the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco.
Storey's influence extends beyond his own work, with several of his students, such as Scott McCloud, Peter Kuper, and Dan Brereton, becoming leading figures in the graphic novel field.
