Gary Panter is a highly influential comics artist, painter, illustrator, and designer. He helped shape the visual identity of the 1970s punk scene in Los Angeles and was a key contributor to Raw magazine in the 1980s. A three-time Emmy winner for his set designs for Pee-wee's Playhouse, he received the Chrysler Award for Design Excellence in 2000 and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant in 2014.

Ed Ruscha is one of the most influential American artists of the postwar era. Renowned for his experimentations with text and image and the repurposing of graphic design elements in his art, he lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.

Nicole Rudick is a critic and editor. She has written widely on art, literature, and comics for The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Artforum, the Poetry Foundation, and elsewhere. She was managing editor of The Paris Review for nearly a decade and edited two issues of the magazine as well as The Writer's Chapbook: A Compendium of Fact, Opinion, Wit, and Advice from The Paris Review Interviews.