Colleen Doran (born July 24, 1963) is an American writer/artist, film conceptual artist, and cartoonist. She has illustrated hundreds of comics, graphic novels, books and magazines, and dozens of stories and articles, including works written by Neil Gaiman, Clive Barker, Anne Rice, J. Michael Straczynski, Peter David and Tori Amos, including The Sandman, Wonder Woman, Legion of Superheroes, Teen Titans, Walt Disney's Beauty and the Beast, and her own fantasy series, A Distant Soil.
At the age of five, Doran won an art contest sponsored by the Walt Disney Company. Doran created her comic book series, A Distant Soil, at the age of twelve.
She landed her first professional assignment for an advertising agency at age fifteen. While still in college, she was a full-time professional artist who was able to add her professional work to her college art curriculum for credit. Overwhelmed with assignments, she left college early.
She broke into the comic book industry when still a teenager, in the 1980s. A Distant Soil was originally published by Wendy and Richard Pini's WaRP Graphics, publishers of Elfquest, but Doran subsequently left the company due to an acrimonious dispute with Richard Pini, whom she alleged was attempting to claim copyright on her work. The WaRP version of the story has never been reprinted, despite its unusual all-pencil style, although Colleen Doran did reprint a short Distant Soil story that had appeared in a WaRP anthology.
After leaving WaRP, Colleen went on to completely rewrite and redraw the entire A Distant Soil series from scratch, self-publishing it for some years before moving on to Image Comics where it is now in multiple printings as a series of graphic novels. The first volume had four printings, and it is now in its third collected volume. It has sold, collectively, more than 500,000 copies. The story centers on a young girl who is born heir to an alien religious dynasty, and explores issues of politics, gender identity and tolerance. Its strong characterization and unique art style has inspired the Young American Library Association to profile the book in their quarterly journal, and it has been nominated for the Spectrum Award for Best Science Fiction in the Other category in 2001.
The character Thessaly in Neil Gaiman's Sandman is based on Doran, and she illustrated two issues of that series (#20 and #34) in the early 1990s.
She has attended multiple World Science Fiction Conventions, San Diego Comic Cons, The Singapore Writers Festival, and many The Lord of the Rings conventions including Ring*Con, ELF, and ORC. She is also featured in the films Ringers (a documentary about The Lord of the Rings fans), Scenes From the Small Press: Colleen Doran by Rich Henn, and Sex, Lies and Superheroes.
Doran's more recent comics-art projects included The Book of Lost Souls, a modern fantasy written by J. Michael Straczynski and published by Marvel's Icon imprint which began in December 2005.
The upcoming Gone to Amerikay graphic novel to be drawn by Doran and written by Derek McCulloch was announced as a 2010 release from DC/Vertigo. It was described as a "multi-generational Irish saga."
