Ryan Claytor is an Assistant Professor at Michigan State University where he teaches Comics Studio courses and spearheaded the development of the Comics Art and Graphic Novel interdisciplinary minor between the Art and English departments. In 2007, he earned his Master of Fine Arts degree from San Diego State University with an emphasis in multimedia, researching autobiography in comics. Claytor’s achievements have included four S.P.A.C.E. (Small Press and Alternative Comics Expo) Prizes for his work in comics, a Cartoonist in Residence position at the Cartoon Art Museum, visiting lecturerships at the Dallas Museum of Art, The Center for Cartoon Studies, and The Savannah College of Art and Design, an internship with Marvel Comics, and judging the Will Eisner Spirit of Comics Retailing Award. In 2009, Claytor had a featured exhibition of his work in San Francisco’s Cartoon Art Museum and Claytor began teaching the first “Comics and Visual Narrative” course in Michigan State University‘s history. He has also served as the Director of the Michigan State University Comics Forum, an event for scholars, creators and fans, since 2009, as well as Host and Producer of the MSU Comic Art and Graphic Novel Podcast since 2016.

As a creator, Claytor is most widely known for his self-published, autobiographical, comic book series And Then One Day. Although the series has undergone several format changes and incarnations since its inception in 2004, And Then One Day readers are consistently treated with Claytor’s thoughtful and entertaining approach to autobiographical comics immaculately packaged with a designer’s eye for production detail.

Claytor was also an artist and event organizer for the first 24 Hour Comics Day (24HCD) in 2004. Subsequently, his twenty-four hour comic about relationships with passed relatives was chosen from hundreds of worldwide submissions as one of the best stories of the day and included in the first internationally distributed 24HCD anthology, 24 Hour Comics Day Highlights 2004. Since this time he has participated in two other 24 Hour Comics Days.

During the summer of 2007, Claytor embarked on the most ambitious tour ever organized by a self-publishing comic book artist. This North American In-Store Signing Tour took Claytor to eighteen states and two Canadian Provinces where he signed books, spoke about his work, and held art exhibitions at fifty different museums, bookstores, libraries, and comic book specialty shops. To date, he has held signings all 48 contiguous states across America.

(quoted from Elephant Eater Comics/About: http://elephanteater.com/about)