At Home in the Crowd

When Charlie Stickney was preparing to graduate Vassar College in upstate New York in the late 1990s, he foresaw two futures. "It was one of those Sliding Doors moments: am I going to go down to New York and work in comic books or am I going to go to L.A. and work in film?" Stickney says. "Then I got a phone call, and I had a job offer in Los Angeles-so that took me down that path for a long time."

For nearly two decades, Stickney wrote, produced, and developed for screens big and small, including an animated adaptation of the Horrible Histories series of British children's books, and the 2012 ragtime documentary, The Entertainers, which he edited and executive produced. But Stickney felt called to come back to a different kind of creating.

"I was reaching a point in the things I was doing in Los Angeles where I didn't feel quite as fulfilled," Stickney says. "I was looking to return to comics," he adds, "which was my first love."