Chris Giarrusso is a native of Upstate New York, and comes from an artistic family. His mother actively pursued arts and crafts as a pastime, his father enjoys photography, his brother Matt is a musician, and his older brother Dave, like Giarrusso himself, enjoys drawing. Giarrusso looked up to Dave in particular, and names him as the primary creative influence on his art style and career. As a child, Giarrusso, an avid fan of Marvel Comics, would go to a comics shop every weekend with his mother, although his father was not as pleased with his son's choice of reading material. Giarrusso also enjoyed drawing, but did so intermittently, because he lacked confidence in his abilities, often becoming frustrated with his work and destroying his drawings. He was also influenced the newspaper strips he and his brother read, most notably Charles Schultz's Peanuts. Others included Garfield, B.C., For Better or For Worse, Heathcliff, Marmaduke, Dennis the Menace and Beetle Bailey. His first comic book was Transformers, which he began reading when he was 9 or 10 years old. Giarrusso attended Binghamton University.
Career
During Giarrusso's last summer ofcollege at Binghamton University, he worked an internship at Marvel Comics, performing tasks such as making photocopies and addressing envelopes. This led to a position in the company's production department, where he worked on scanning art and assembling and formatting files for print. Giarrusso created the all-ages Mini Marvelsin 1999 for Marvel Comics, which star child-sized versions of notable Marvel characters. Mini Marvels eventually became a regular feature of Bullpen Bulletins pages seen in nearly every Marvel book. The first Mini Marvels digest, Mini Marvels: Rock, Paper Scissors, was released in July 2008, and after selling out, required a second printing. Giarrusso is also known for writing and illustrating G-Man, an all-ages series by Image Comics featuring a young superhero who gains the powers of super strength, super endurance, and flight when he wears a magic cape. The series has been collected in two volumes, G-Man, Volume 1: Learning to Fly and G-Man, Volume 2: Cape Crisis. The series, which has been characterized by the Los Angeles Times as "Jack Kirby meets Charles Schulz", was conceived by Giarrusso when he was in high school, around the time of Image Comics' formation. G-Man and the other characters in the story are heavily inspired by Giarrusso and the experiences of his youth, and the main character's name is the nickname Giarrusso's friends gave him in high school. G-Man began as a series of single-page back-ups stories in Erik Larsen's series Savage Dragon, before it graduated to its own series.
