Jonathan Vankin

Biography

Jonathan Vankin is an author, comic book writer, screenwriter and journalist. His work has received numerous awards and honors, while his books have been translated into nearly 20 languages.

He has won three New England Newspaper & Press Association awards. His screenplay The Tripwire was a semi-finalist in the 2010 Creative Screenwriting magazine AAA competition and another screenplay, Stay Forever, was twice picked as a finalist in the Sundance Screenwriters Lab selections. The Big Book of Bad was nominated for the comic book Eisner Award and his superhero comics debut, The Search for Swamp Thing, became one of DC Comics' bestselling titles.

He was commissioned by French production company Des Films to pen the screenplay Dragon's Fin Soup, which he completed with Takashi Miike (Audition, 13 Assassins) attached to direct.

Vankin's first book, Conspiracies, Cover-Ups and Crimes, was the first comprehensive journalistic investigation of America's conspiracy-theory underground, foreshadowing the current state of sociopolitical affairs by two decades. That book and its follow-up, The Greatest Conspiracies series, co-authored with John Whalen, went on to become the most influential books on the subject and led to Vankin's numerous media appearances on such networks as CNN, MSNBC, CNBC, FOX, the BBC and the CBC as well as hundreds of radio stations.

Most recently, he published The World's Greatest Conspiracies, the fifth installment in the Greatest Conspiracies franchise. He also wrote the graphic novels Tokyo Days, Bangkok Nights (which is currently in development for a feature film) and Tasty Bullet (with Arnold Pander). His other books include Based on a True Story (But With More Car Crashes) and The Big Book of Scandal. He wrote the DC/Vertigo Comics series The Witching, and an episode of the TV series The Crow: Stairway to Heaven (based on the Brandon Lee film).

As a Senior Editor at DC/Vertigo Comics from 2004 to 2011, he was responsible for such series as The Exterminators (optioned by Showtime), Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere and Testament (by controversial media critic Douglas Rushkoff), as well as the graphic novels The Quitter written by Harvey Pekar, The Alcoholic written by Jonathan Ames and How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less by writer/artist Sarah Glidden, among many others.

He spent time as a sportswriter/editor at the Daily Yomiuri in Tokyo, Japan. His writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Wired, Salon, L. A. Weekly and numerous other publications.