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The Guardians of the Galaxy as drawn by Valentino.

Jim Valentino aka Valentino, (born October 28, 1952 in The Bronx, New York), is an American writer, penciler and editor of comic books.

He began his career in the late 1970s creating small press and mostly autobiographical comics which sprung out from him having literally sold pages laid out on the sidewalk while he leaned against a storefront. This is depicted in this early work. One of his first self published books was the self-titled Valentino. The early-mid 1980s saw Normal Man which first appeared as a back-up story in Aardvark-Vanaheim's Cerebus, Dave Sim creator and Gerhard inker. Aardvark-Vanaheim's Dave and Deni (Dave's wife at the time) began publishing normalman as a 13 issue limited series but only did so until #8, when Deni began her own Renegade Press which finished the series.

In the late 80s he began working for Marvel Comics on their super-hero titles. His most notable work for the company was as writer and artist on the future-set super-hero series Guardians of the Galaxy.

He left Marvel in 1992 to co-found Image Comics with Erik Larsen, Jim Lee, Rob Liefeld, Todd McFarlane and Marc Silvestri. Valentino originated several projects at Image, which he published through his own "Shadowline" imprint. Unlike at Marvel, where Valentino worked on characters owned by that company, the original "Shadowline" titles were all creator-owned.

Cover to What If ...? #25. Pencil art by Valentino.

Of these the titles the most notable was the super-hero series ShadowHawk, on which he was both writer and artist. He began another series in black and white called A Touch of Silver that was a semi-autobiographical novel about a boy coming of age and comic books in the 1960s. However he stopped work on it soon thereafter. Also during this time he repackaged most of his earliest autobiograpical work into a trade paperback wich an introduction by Dave Sim.

In the late 1990s, he became the executive director of Image Comics. Under his directorship the company moved away from super-hero centric books, instead shifting focus towards independent properties. The results were mixed. On one hand, Valentino's efforts led to the discovery of a number of talented creators, including David Mack and Brian Michael Bendis. On the other hand Image Comics saw a significant drop in overall sales.

In 2003, Valentino was replaced as director of Image by Erik Larsen, another co-founder of the company. Since then Valentino has illustrated a few covers and serves on the board of directors of comic industry charity A Commitment To Our Roots.

• Valentino homepage [1]