Kevin Huizenga attended Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he started drawing the influential mini-comic Supermonster. He is the creator of two comic book series Or Else and Ganges. He taught in the Comic Art program at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design from 2015-2019. His graphic novels include Curses, The Wild Kingdom, and Gloriana. He has won five Ignatz awards and been nominated for Harvey and Eisner awards. In his latest book, The River at Night (Drawn and Quarterly) a man has trouble falling asleep and reflects on his life, marriage, and time itself. The River at Night flashes back, first to satirize the dot-com boom of the late 1990s and then to examine the camaraderie of playing first-person shooter video games with work colleagues. The story explores the simple pleasures of a marriage, like lying awake in bed next to a slumbering lover, along with the less cherished moments of disappointment or inadvertent betrayal of trust. Huizenga uses the cartoon medium like a symphony, establishing rhythms and introducing themes that he returns to, adding and subtracting events and thoughts, stretching and compressing time. A walk to the library becomes a meditation on how we understand time, as Huizenga shows the breadth of the comics medium in surprising ways. The River at Night is a modern formalist masterpiece as empathetic, inventive, and funny as anything ever written.
