Girls With Slingshots debuted on October 1st 2004, both online and in stapled-paper form at SPX in Bethesda, MD. Since its humble beginnings as a twice-weekly black-and-white webcomic, it became a self-sustaining color webcomic that updated five times a week, Monday through Friday.

The strip's two main characters, Hazel and Jamie, sprung to life in a strip called Hazelnuts around 1996, an unintended prequel to GWS. The GWS title was based on a recurring request Danielle used to get at comic conventions to draw a girl with a gun (she sucked at drawing guns, so she drew them with slingshots instead).

GWS has been collected into ten books containing 200 strips each, which are available through TopatoCo. A hardcover collection of all of the strips (plus some bonus material) in color will be available in late 2017/2018.

Each strip was lettered and inked by hand, on paper, and colored in Photoshop. Danielle sells original GWS strips off and on at her Etsy page.

GWS wrapped up in 2015 and began being re-released the following update day from strip number one, now in full color by our fearless colorist Laeluu (see below!).  

Danielle Corsetto is the artist and creator of Girls With Slingshots. She created her first comic strip when she was 8, starting with a blatant rip-off of Garfield called Fat Cat. She started writing Hazelnuts in high school, and ran a semi-autobio comic about super-senior college kids called Ramblers in the student paper at Shepherd College (as well as Pop Image and World Famous Comics). She also briefly ran a comic called Larry and Caroline in the Hagerstown Herald-Mail newspaper.

In October of 2004, she began Girls With Slingshots, and by 2007, with the first print collection of GWS and other merchandise & art sales, she was doing the strip full-time. From then on it updated 5 times a week, always at some god-awful hour.

In addition to GWS, Danielle wrote and drew The New Adventures of Bat Boy for the Weekly World News, taking the reins from Peter Bagge. She's also written thre Adventure Time graphic novels for BOOM!

Danielle hails from Ijamsville, MD and now lives in Shepherdstown, West Virginia in a 230-year-old house with her two cats, Smudge and Ellie (aka Fluffy and Sprinkles). She loves drinking tea, hiking, traveling, cooking, gardening and eating local foods, because she is a filthy hippie. Danielle has taught illustration at her alma mater Shepherd University, and has been a guest teacher for the Graphic Storytelling students at The Animation Workshop in Viborg, Denmark. She is a lifetime Girl Scout.

Laeluu is the color-brains behind many a Girls With Slingshot strip! She started working on GWS as a coloring intern in 2013, and was hired on just after she graduated that year, because I couldn’t imagine doing this job without her after being pampered by her help. (The rest of these bios will be in first person, because I wanna brag about these people and it sounds weird to write "Danielle thinks she's great!")

Over the last year or two of GWS, Laeluu colored about half of the strips, giving me a much-needed break every week. You can tell when a strip was colored by Laeluu by checking for her signature somewhere near mine, or you can just assume it’s her work when you see exquisitely rendered textures or fabric!

Now that the strip has ended, Laeluu's been coloring each of the first 1,000 original strips, one by one, transforming them from black-and-white to color so that we can share them daily online here (we're calling them "the after party strips" or "chasers").

Laeluu can be found at laeluu.com, or as @MagicalBandaid on Twitter.

Stephanie Zuppo was Girls With Slingshots’ spring 2014 intern! If you’ve dealt with any aspect of the 2014 Slingshot Across America tour, you’ve probably swapped e-mails with Stephanie at some point.

Stephanie received MFA at the Center for Cartoon Studies in Vermont and worked for me remotely from there, mostly handling GWS-related e-mails, compiling lists, designing promo materials, and teaching me things that only people in their twenties seem to know.

You can see Stephanie’s work at stephaniezuppo.com or her Tumblr at aioazech.tumblr.com! She’s not just a paper pusher; she’s actually a very talented cartoonist in her own right!

Nicole Roberts was my fall 2014 intern! She's a Graphic Design student at Shepherd University, and will soon be experiencing a fall internship at Disney.

You can check out Nicole's work at readysetcreate.tumblr.com or www.ready-set-create.com  And you can follow her adventures in interning here at girlswithinternships.tumblr.com! Because she is a witty woman.

If you've learned anything from these bios, btw, I hope it's that if you're in college and you need an internship, many of us self-employed people could REALLY use the help! So just ask!