James A. Owen founded Taliesin Press in 1992. The company's debut publication, a Dickensian comic book titled Starchild, sold poorly in its first two releases, 1200 and 800 copies, respectively. The entire company went into hiatus shortly after when he crushed his drawing hand in a car accident, but rebounded with the release of Starchild #0, a book James laid out left-handed and had finished by other better known artists. It eventually sold 45,000 copies, firmly establishing the book and Taliesin in the marketplace.
To date, in addition to numerous illustration and design projects, James has written and illustrated two dozen Starchild comics and books and has almost one-half of a million publications in print; and those books, prints, and licensed items are sold all over the world. The comic books remain in print as the six-volume Essential Starchild set. The first book in a series of prose novels written by James titled Mythworld (Kai Meyer's Mythenwelt in Germany) won the 2003 AI award for Best Novel, and was nominated alongside books by Stephen King and Michael Crichton for the prestigious Phantastik Preis for Best International Novel. An illustrated twentieth-century fantasy novel called Here, There Be Dragons is going to be published by Simon & Schuster in the Fall of 2006, and at least four more books are in the planning stages.