Mark Finn

Biography

Finn's earliest published work was a series of comic book stories that he wrote and drew for Absolute Comics, notably the “Punk” series he created with William Traxtle and Shane Campos, among others, from 1991 to 1994. He left comics in the mid-90’s to concentrate on fiction writing. He also wrote a number of essays and articles for Playboy’s online website before establishing his own weekly self-distributed column, “Finn’s Wake.”

Finn worked for Chessex Manufacturing for a year, serving as their editor-in-chief, where he worked on a number of product lines including Lost Worlds, Sherlock Holmes, Consulting Detective, and helped design a variety of ancillary game product tie-ins for Vampire: the Masquerade, Call of Cthulhu, and others.

Finn returned to Texas in the late 1990s and formed Clockwork Storybook with fellow writers Chris Roberson, Matthew Sturges, and Bill Willingham. Their monthly shared world anthology of urban fantasy centered on the fictitious city of San Cibola, California, and the magical inhabitants that lived side-by-side with the normal citizens. From this collective, Finn published the novels Gods New & Used and Year of the Hare, the first collection of stories revolving around Sam Bowen. Finn later became a contributing editor for RevolutionSF.com and wrote a number of articles and reviews to the website.

Finn served as the creative director for the Violet Crown Radio Players, an audio theater troupe based in Austin, Texas, from 2002 to 2007. He has written several original scripts to critical acclaim and also adapted novels and short stories to an old time radio format, most notably “The Adventures of Sailor Steve Costigan”, and “King Kong”, which was nominated for a B. Iden Payne award.

He has been active in Robert E. Howard studies since 2002 and is now considered to be a scholar in the field. His biography of Howard, Blood & Thunder: The Life & Art of Robert E. Howard (Monkeybrain, Inc.), was released in November 2006 at the World Fantasy Convention and was a finalist for the 2007 Locus Awards for Best Non-Fiction. For his work on Blood & Thunder, Finn was nominated for the 2007 World Fantasy Award in the Special Award Professional category. Finn won the 2005 Cimmerian Awards for Outstanding Achievement, Best Essay (for “Fists of Robert E. Howard” from The Barbaric Triumph), and the Emerging Scholar plus the 2007 Awards for Outstanding Achievement, Book By A Single Author (for Blood & Thunder) and Outstanding Achievement, Website (along with Leo Grin, Rob Roehm and Steve Tompkins for The Cimmerian blog).

In 2013, 2014 and 2016 Finn was named one of the top movie critics in Texas by the Texas Associated Press Managing Editors awards.

Finn is a managing editor for Skelos: the Journal of Weird Fiction and Dark Fantasy. He is also a founding member of the Gentlemen Nerds podcast.