Antony Johnston

Career

Despite an early interest in comics and role-playing games, Johnston started his career as a graphic designer. He began his writing career with work for role-playing magazines before the Mark Salisbury-edited Writers on Comic Scriptwriting (Titan Books, 1999) rekindled his interest in comics. Drawing on his design skills, he now designs many of his own comics and graphic novels.

In May 2001, Johnston was one of the three founding editors of NinthArt.com, an attempt at taking a literary and critical approach to the comics medium designed to act as a journal and aimed at "the discerning reader". Between 2001 and 2004, he contributed a mostly-monthly editorial entitled "Cassandra Complex", and for five years formed one-third of the infrequent "Triple A" discussions, including the last (on 19 June 2006).

His fiction debut, Frightening Curves, was an illustrated horror novel with artwork by Aman Chaudhary, published by now-defunct Cyberosia Publishing in 2001. The book won the Best Horror Award in the 2002 IPPY awards at Book Expo America. Johnston would also produce a graphic novel – Rosemary's Backpack – and a contribution to the first PopImage anthology for Cyberosia in 2002.

Johnston's early comics work consisted primarily of non-serialised graphic novels for Oni Press, and authorised comics adaptations of prose and poetry works by Alan Moore for Avatar Press.

In 2002, he began his association with Oni Press by writing the five-issue miniseires Three Days in Europe (with art by Mike Hawthorne). After this initial mini-series, Johnston penned a number of graphic novels for Oni Press – Spooked (with Sophie Campbell), Julius (with Brett Weldele) and Closer (with Mike Norton) released between February and May 2004; The Long Haul (with Eduardo Barreto) and F-Stop (with Matthew Loux) released in February and April 2005.

Wasteland

In 2006, Johnston and Christopher Mitten launched Wasteland (2006), an ongoing post-apocalyptic series, for Oni Press. It ran for 60 issues and concluded in April 2015.

Other projects

In 2006, Johnston adapted Anthony Horowitz's Alex Rider series for Walker Books., beginning with Stormbreaker: The Graphic Novel″. Johnston also wrote Wolverine: Prodigal Son, a Marvel Comics-licensed original English-language manga version of Wolverine, . Other Marvel work by Johnston included several Daredevil″ comics.

In 2008 Johnston wrote the script for the video game Dead Space as well as a comic book prequel to the Electronic Arts videogame.

In 2013 Johnston began publishing with Image Comics, starting with the "dark fantasy" Umbral in November 2013, and sci-fi/crime series The Fuse in February 2014. In 2015, he launched Codename Baboushka, an espionage thriller.

Johnston worked with doom metal band Waves of Mercury on their 2013 EP As Seasons Fleet. In 2015 he started two podcasts: Unjustly Maligned at The Incomparable network, and the independent heavy-metal podcast Thrash It Out. That year he also launched a dark ambient/drone music project, SILENCAEON.

The Coldest City and Atomic Blonde

In 2012, Johnston wrote The Coldest City, an original hardback graphic novel in the Cold War espionage genre, intended to be the first in a series of books all set in Berlin during the Cold War. A prequel, The Coldest Winter, was released in 2016. Both titles were published by Oni Press.

At the Cannes Festival 2015, Focus Features announced they had acquired North American distribution rights to The Coldest City. Starring Charlize Theron and directed by David Leitch, the film, retitled Atomic Blonde, premiered in March 2017 at the South by Southwest festival.

Awards

Johnston's 2001 novel Frightening Curves won the 2002 American Independent Publishing (IPPY) "Best Horror" award at Book Expo America.

Additionally, Johnston has been nominated for the following awards: