John Porcellino (born September 18, 1968, in Chicago, Illinois) is a popular creator of minicomics. Porcellino's self-published, photocopied, mostly autobiographical series King-Cat Comics is among the best-known and longest-running minicomics produced today. Porcellino created King-Cat in May 1989, and to date has self-published 79 issues. Career For several years Porcellino had his own music and comics distribution company, Grinding Wheels Enterprises (evolving later into Spit and a Half), but he eventually abandoned it and went back to just publishing his own work. In the '90s Porcellino did some stories about his struggles to find a publisher for his work, and reprinted several of the rejection letters that criticized his drawing skills. He was briefly in negotiations to do an entire Trail Watch book, but that project fell through. Porcellino still mostly publishes himself, although now this is apparently mostly by choice. In recent years other publishers have been publishing collections of his work, including the graphic novel Perfect Example, chronicling his teenage struggles with depression. La Mano, Zak Sally's publishing venture, released Porcellino's Diary of a Mosquito Abatement Man, collecting various King-Cat stories about Porcellino's experiences as a pest control worker. The book won an Ignatz Award at the 2005 Small Press Expo in Bethesda, Maryland. Porcellino was the subject of the 2014 full-length documentary, Root Hog or Die. The film, produced by Dan Stafford of Kilgore Books & Comics, was shot over a five-year period and includes footage of Porcellino on a tour of the southern United States following the release of his collection, Map of My Heart. Many of Porcellino's comics' contemporaries are interviewed in the film, including Jeffrey Brown, Ivan Brunetti, Noah Van Sciver, and Zak Sally. The film premiered at the Small Press Expo in 2014. Style Porcellino's graphic style is simple and spare, sometimes to the point of abstraction. He works almost exclusively in black and white, representing people, the natural world, and the built environment with a minimum of lines. Describing the subtle maturation of Porcellino's style over the many years of King-Cat, critic Paddy Johnston notes that "the essence of Porcellino's art, and of his visual storytelling, remains the same: sparse black and white lines simply detailing moments from his life with particular emotional resonance." Personal life Porcellino lived in Denver, Colorado, from 1992–1998. He acquired his beloved cat Maisie Kukoc in March 1992 (the cat died in 2007). He married his longtime