Tom Hart began making mini-comics while living in Seattle in the early 1990s. Like many of his colleagues including Megan Kelso,
Dave Lasky,
Jason Lutes,
Jon Lewis, and
James Sturm, he was an early recipient of the
Xeric Foundation grant for cartoonists. His Xeric-winning book, ''Hutch Owen's Working Hard'' was 56 pages and self-published in 1994. Hart returned to the Hutch Owen series and published a first collection of stories with
Top Shelf Productions in 2000. Later books in the series have also been published by Top Shelf.
Time magazine called
Hutch Owen "A devastating satire [which] feels like a scalding hot poker cauterizing the open wound of American corporate and consumer culture."
Hutch Owen was also distributed as daily print and
webcomic strips, and Hart is a former editor of and contributor to
Serializer.net. One of the original comics on Serializer was
Trunktown, a Hutch Owen spin-off drawn by Hart and written by
Shaenon Garrity. His strip version of
Hutch Owen, ran in the
Metro newspaper in New York and Boston for a year and a half from 2006-2008. In 2008 his comic strip collaboration with
Marguerite Dabaie, ''Ali's House'', was bought and syndicated by
King Features Syndicate. The strip is now archived at
GoComics. Tom Hart is also an experienced teacher, having taught for more than ten years at New York's
School of Visual Arts,
Parsons, the Education Alliance, Young Audiences, numerous places across the country and all over
New York City. In 2011, he and his cartoonist wife,
Leela Corman, moved to
Gainesville, Florida, and founded the Sequential Artists Workshop. In 2012 he published
Daddy Lightning, about his experiences as a father. In January 2016 he published
Rosalie Lightning, a memoir named after his daughter, who had died suddenly when she was almost two, and about his and his wife's grief and their attempts to make sense of their life afterwards. ==Personal life==