Judd Winick (born February 12, 1970) is an American comic book, comic
strip and television writer/artist and former reality television
personality. Winick first gained fame for his 1994 stint on MTV's The
Real World: San Francisco, before finding success with his work on
comic books such as Green Lantern, Green Arrow, and Pedro and Me, his
autobiographical graphic novel about his friendship with Real World
castmate and AIDS educator Pedro Zamora. He also created the animated
TV series The Life and Times of Juniper Lee for Cartoon Network, which
ran for three seasons. For DC Comics, he wrote the Batman storyline
Under the Hood, which resurrected Jason Todd (the second Robin)
following his murder by the Joker in the storyline A Death in the
Family, in which he became the anti-heroic Red Hood following the
"Infinite Crisis" storyline. He would also write a prequel miniseries
Red Hood: The Lost Days, detailing the exact nature of Jason's
resurrection. He would also write the animated movie Batman: Under the
Red Hood, which adapted his original story.Winick was born February
12, 1970 to a Jewish family, and grew up in Dix Hills, New York. In
his youth Winick initially read superhero comics, but this changed
when he read Kyle Baker's graphic novel Why I Hate Saturn, which
Winick said in a 2015 interview he still reads once a year. Winick
also cites Bloom County: Loose Tails by Berke Breathed as the first
collection of that strip that changed his life, one which prompted him
to spend the next ten years "horribly aping" Breathed's style.Winick
was born February 12, 1970 to a Jewish family, and grew up in Dix
Hills, New York. In his youth Winick initially read superhero comics,
but this changed when he read Kyle Baker's graphic novel Why I Hate
Saturn, which Winick said in a 2015 interview he still reads once a
year. Winick also cites Bloom County: Loose Tails by Berke Breathed as
the first collection of that strip that changed his life, one which
prompted him to spend the next ten years "horribly aping" Breathed's
style.Winick graduated from high school in 1988 and entered the
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor's School of Art, intending to
emulate his cartoonist heroes, including Breathed and Garry Trudeau.
His comic strip, "Nuts and Bolts", began running in the school's
newspaper, the Michigan Daily, in his freshman year, and he was
selected to speak at graduation. The University published a small
print-run of a collection of his strips called Watching the
Spin-Cycle: The Nuts & Bolts Collection. In his senior year, Universal
Press Syndicate, which syndicates strips such as Doonesbury and Calvin
& Hobbes, offered Winick a development contract.After graduation,
Winick lived in an apartment in Beacon Hill, Boston, Massachusetts,
with fellow writer Brad Meltzer, struggling to develop Nuts and Bolts
for UPS, while working at a bookstore. On January 1, 1993, UPS decided
not to renew Winick's strip for syndication, feeling it could not
compete in the current market. Winick was unable to secure syndication
with another company, and was forced to move back in with his parents
by the middle of 1993, doing unfulfilling T-shirt work for beer
companies. Winick had Nuts & Bolts in development with the children's
television network Nickelodeon as an animated series, even turning the
human characters into mice, and proposing new titles like Young Urban
Mice and Rat Race, but nothing came of it. Judd Winick Top Movies & Young Movies