J. David Spurlock

Jess David Spurlock (born November 18, 1959) is an American author, illustrator, editor, and artist's-rights advocate best known as the founder of Vanguard Productions, a publisher of art books, graphic novels, and prints.

J. David Spurlock was born on November 18, 1959, in Memphis, Tennessee. He moved to Dallas, Texas in 1973.

He has taught art at The University of Texas at Arlington, the Joe Kubert School, and the School of Visual Arts in New York. He has served as a president of the Dallas Society of Illustrators.

As a comic book artist, he co-penciled and inked the alternative press comic Sparkplug #1 (March 1993), from Heroic Publishing's Hero Comics imprint, credited as David Spurlock. The following year he contributed a text page to a Dallas, Texas, tribute comic honoring industry legend Jack Kirby, who had recently died.

Spurlock founded Vanguard Productions in 1993, although he had used that name, in conjunction with Sparrowlake Enterprises, to self-publish the comic book Badge #1 in 1981. The company initially had been founded to publish a comics anthology, Tales from the Edge, with 15 issues released as of 2010. The company then moved into art books, biographies and eventually graphic novels, including Neal Adams' Monsters (2003), (originally serialized in the comics anthology series Echoes of Future Past, published by Adams' Continuity Studios), with four additional story pages plus additional Adams material. DC Comics editor Julius Schwartz, an architect of the Silver Age of Comic Books, said "Spurlock's line of books serve as the vanguard of Silver Age comics histories." Other comics magazines and collections published by Vanguard beginning in 2001 include Space Cowboy, Jesse James Classic Western Collection, Steve Ditko: Space Wars and Wally Wood's The Complete Lunar Tunes and The Wizard King.

In an article on the Fort Worth, Texas, comics artist Pat Boyette, Don Mangus, who assisted Spurlock during this time, wrote of the early Vanguard comics that,

David was showcasing top-flight magazine illustrators and comic book talents in his Tales from the Edge comic book title[, in which he] either reprinted underexposed, hard-to-find 'gems', or debuted intensely personal (and thus unseen in the staid, traditional illustration markets) projects that the creators were eager to see displayed for public distribution. The initial concept ... was to combine the modern, cutting-edge illustrators such as Barron Storey, Marshall Arisman, Bill Sienkiewicz, George Pratt, etc., legends in the editorial realm of magazine illustration, with the more traditional and mainstream graphic storytelling by comic book veterans such as Pat Boyette, Wally Wood, and Howard Nostrand (often through reprints). Bridging this mix was to be David Spurlock's own quasi-retro, 1950s-styled space-western [feature], "Rick Montana, Space Cowboy", which he would draw in a genre-appropriate [Al] Williamson/'Fleagle'-homage art style.

Spurlock co-created the Wally Wood Scholarship Fund with Wood's brother, Glenn Wood, for students of the School of Visual Arts. In a joint venture with Marvel Comics and Diamond Comic Distributors, Vanguard Productions in 2002 sponsored artist Jim Steranko's "The Spirit of America" benefit print, created to fund an art scholarship "for victims of anti-American terrorism". There is no public record of recipients, if any, of these grants or scholarships and it is unknown if they're still being offered.