About Eugene R. Young

“Think Wayne Barlow meets Alex Schomburg (not his comic work, but his painted work, and book covers) meets Luis Royo meets Giger, but all filled, fueled with an aesthetic, a meaning, a story, a richness that is uniquely his.” — Purple Mag

Eugene Randolph Young is an artist, illustrator, graphic designer and educator based in the San Francisco Bay Area, in California. He produces independent science fiction and fantasy illustration and comics inspired by indigenous lore, cyberpunk and Afrofuturism. 

His Afromancers IP is an exploration of world-building and cultural narratives based on the aesthetics, customs, and technologies of African and African-American hair.

His recent HXMP mech design series came out of a fascination with the design of Japanese mecha that started in the early 80s with model kits and toys from Japan. Local retailers such as R.A. Martin’s (El Cerrito), Iron Horse (Berkeley), Toy World and Kay-Bee (Richmond/Hilltop Mall), and Hood’s Hobbies (Richmond) and Kimono My House (Emeryville) were among the first in the East Bay to sell the imports from Japan. Long hours building and painting the kits added a lot to his design vocabulary and spatial reasoning skills.

Science fiction and fantasy illustration in the 80s was known for the occasional mix of eroticism with hyper-realism through the use of the airbrush, photo reference, and traditional media. The covers of Heavy Metal Magazine often featured dangerous women with weapons vanquishing their enemies. By age 18, Eugene was already experimenting in his parent’s garage with airbrushing. His only guides were library books, tutorials in his Hajime Sorayama pin-up albums, and a set of H.R. Giger postcards. He also studied the techniques of Boris Vallejo, Chris Foss, Peter Jones, Jim Burns, Julie Bell, Olivia De Barardinis, Patrick Woodroffe, and several others. While his work remained unseen and at an amateur level, learned a lot about brushes, painting technques, and other mediums just through hours of trying.

After completing is BFA in graphic design, the dot-com bubble had burst, leaving a lean job market for recent grads in its wake. His friend and collaborator Perry D. Clark introduced Eugene to Elfwood, an online gallery based in Sweden. Elfwood was unique in that it was moderated by a team of volunteers. It also had sections for science-fiction, high fantasy, horror, and fan art. It was there that Eugene began to explore his art and ideas further, but in a supportive and relatively public online space. The site attracted a global audience that introduced him to artists in Europe, Asia, Canada, South America, Oceania and other parts of the United States. Later, posting on Epilogue.net, which had slightly higher standards for submissions, led to a series of 32 commissions for the Ophidian 2350 CCG for Fleer.

From around middle school through high school, Eugene drew his own comics. In 1990, he won the regional competition for the NAACP Afro-Academic, Cultural, Technological and Scientific Olympics (ACT-SO) in the drawing category with his comic Def Squad X. The win led to an opportunity to compete at the national NAACP conference in Los Angeles that year. In 1994 he collaborated with writer Perry D. Clark on the Guila: The Dark Stranger 4-issue mini-series. In 2017 Jared Rosmarin on Jet Powers: Ghosts from the Past for the Not Forgotten public domain superhero anthology and has a few other titles based on Jared’s scripts in progress.

As of the fall of 2023 he is an Assistant Professor of Design Visualization in the School of Design at San Francisco State University.