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About the artist
Julia Gfrörer was born in Concord, NH, in 1982. As a teenager she began self-publishing her art and writing under the imprint Thuban Press. In 2004 she earned a BFA in painting and printmaking from Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle, WA, and exhibited her work in galleries around the Pacific Northwest. Her first long-form horror comic, Flesh & Bone, was published by Sparkplug Comics in 2010.
Gfrörer has published three graphic novels with Fantagraphics Books: Black Is the Color (2013), Laid Waste (2015), and Vision (2020), as well as an Ignatz Award-winning anthology of her mini comics and shorter works, World Within the World (2025). Her comics have appeared in anthologies such as Kramers Ergot, Thickness (Youth in Decline), and The Graphic Canon (Seven Stories Press), and in magazines including Cicada, Arthur, and Fader. She has been featured in Best American Comics three times, and received a silver medal from the Society of Illustrators in 2016. She still self-publishes as Thuban Press.
She currently lives in Floral Park, NY, with her second husband, the writer and critic Sean T Collins. They have two children and a cat.
About Thuban Press
Thuban is an inconspicuous binary star system in the tail of the constellation Draco, the dragon. Its traditional name comes from the Arabic word ثعبان, or “giant snake.” Between about 4000 BC and 1800 BC, Thuban was the nearest star to the North Pole visible from Earth with the naked eye. It is the star toward which the Egyptian pyramids were originally aligned. Although Thuban has ceased hydrogen production and begun to die, it will return to its position as our Pole Star in 20,000 AD.
Since 1998 Julia has been publishing her zines, handmade books, and other miscellanea under the name Thuban Press. The name honors the role of art as a beacon across vast obstacles, helping us to navigate both the profound and the mundane. The Thuban Press Guide to Analog Self-Publishing, a free zine that teaches computer-free bookmaking techniques, exemplifies our dedication to preserving forms of self-expression that can exist beyond corporate oversight.
THUBAN PRESS 