Dudley Mallinson
Co-workers Ryan Metlen and Dudley Mallinson were working at their jobs as project managers for a landscape company when they came up with an idea for a comic strip: an orphaned little girl goes to live with her grandfather in a retirement home -- but only she can see the Grim Reaper who dwells there. Thus the genesis for Hope & Death was born.
Ryan, a graduate of the California Institute of the Arts, who has had editorial cartoons appear in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, was set to draw it. London-born Dudley, a graduate of Sheffield University with a love for all things creative and techy, would color the strip. They then brought in a sitcom writer acquaintance of Ryan’s, Steve Gabriel (“Will & Grace,” “Home Improvement”), to write it. Unbeknownst to either Ryan or Dudley, Steve had spent his college years working in a retirement home, so he had plenty of material from which to draw.
