Josh Elder is an award-winning cartoonist, a nationally recognized advocate for the use of comics in the classroom and the founder of the educational nonprofit Reading With Pictures.

As a comics scribe, Josh has contributed to the superheroic sagas of Batman and Superman and the sci-fi phenomenon StarCraft. He is nonetheless best known for co-creating (along with artist Erich Owen) the nationally syndicated comic strip and certified awesome graphic novel series Mail Order Ninja. The series was named one of the 25 Best Graphic Novel Series for Children by School Library Journal and the comic strip was syndicated in over 40 newspapers nationwide including The Boston Globe, The LA Times and The Denver Post.

However these days, Josh spends far more time in the classroom than at the keyboard. In order to promote the use of comics in education, Josh gives cartooning workshops to thousands of students each year at schools, libraries and literary festivals across the country. He has done workshop events with the Chicago Public School System, the New York Public Library, Northwestern University and the Novello Festival of Reading among many others. Josh has also provided professional development services for or on behalf of numerous clients including the Illinois State Library, the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis and DePaul University. He has also given conference presentations on the role of comics in education to organizations such as the International Reading Association, the San Diego Comic Con, TEDx, and the American Library Association.

A graduate of Northwestern University and a National Merit Scholar who took college courses while still in middle school, Josh has always credited comics for his academic successes. He taught himself to read at age four by using comics, and they have been his scholastic “secret weapons” ever since. Now he wants to share that secret with students in every city, every school and every classroom.

In 2009, Josh joined with a group of likeminded individuals to found Reading With Pictures. Josh is honored and privileged to serve as the organization’s Executive Director and President, guiding Reading With Pictures’ efforts to get comics into schools and get schools into comics by developing educational resources, cultivating academic research and publishing high-quality curriculum materials.

Josh makes his home in the small, Midwestern town of Chicago, Illinois.