Early life and career Kyle Baker was born in
Queens,
New York City, the son of
art director John M. Baker and high-school audiovisual-department manager Eleanor L. Baker. He has a brother and a sister, Edwin Baker and Cheryl Baker, and now, three daughters and a son - Lillian, Jacqueline and Madeleine Baker, and Isaac Baker. Part of his duties involved
photocopying, and he would take copies of
John Buscema penciling home on which to practice
inking. but dropped out after two years. After a handful of inking assignments on issues of
Transformers,
The Avengers Annual #14 (1985) and elsewhere, Baker made his professional story-illustration debut as penciler and inker of the publisher Lodestone Comics'
Codename: Danger #2 (October 1985), with a 23-page story written by
Brian Marshall,
Mike Harris, and
Robert Loren Fleming. Cover penciling and more interior inking for Marvel and occasionally DC followed. His first story penciling for one of the two major comics companies was the three-issue
Howard the Duck: The Movie (December 1986 - February 1987), adapting the 1986 film
Howard the Duck, and which he self-inked.
First graphic novel At the recommendation of freelance artist
Ron Fontes, an editor at the Dolphin
imprint of the publishing house
Doubleday expressed interest in Baker's sample strips of the character Cowboy Wally, "and asked if I had any more. I lied and said I did." He began scripting comics around this time: Baker penciled and inked
First Comics'
Classics Illustrated #3 & 21 (February 1990 & March 1991), adapting, respectively,
Through the Looking Glass and
Cyrano de Bergerac. While
Peter David scripted the latter, Baker himself wrote the adaptation of the
Lewis Carroll work. Baker said in 1999 he was writing a
Christmas movie for
Paramount Pictures, titled
U Betta Watch Out, and was animating a
TV-movie title ''Corey Q. Jeeters, I'm Telling on You''. He is credited with writing and storyboarding on the "Phineas and Ferb" television episodes "Candace Loses Her Head" and "Are You My Mummy?".
2000s Baker drew writer
Robert Morales' Marvel Comics miniseries
Truth #1-7 (January–July 2003), a
Captain America storyline with parallels to the
Tuskegee experiment. He also wrote and drew all but two issues (#7 and #12) of the 20-issue comedic adventure series
Plastic Man vol. 4 (February 2004 - March 2006), starring the
Golden Age of Comic Books superhero created by
Jack Cole for
Quality Comics. Baker contributed to the
Dark Horse Comics series
The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist, a spin-off of
Michael Chabon's novel,
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay.
The New York Times reviewed the 2009
trade-paperback collection of the first four issues, calling it "the harshest, most serrated satire of the
Iraq War yet published." In 2008, Watson-Guptill published
How to Draw Stupid and Other Essentials of Cartooning, Baker's art instruction book. That same year, Baker hosted the comics industry's
Harvey Awards. In 2010, he became regular artist on
Marvel Comics' mature-audience
MAX-
imprint series,
Deadpool Max. Most recently, he was inducted into the Eisner Hall of Fame at San Diego Comic Con on July 25, 2025. ==Bibliography==