Larry Marder

American cartoonist and writer (born 1951)

Larry Marder (born May 29, 1951) is an American cartoonist and writer, best known as the creator of comic book Tales of the Beanworld, which began as an "essentially self published title" in 1984. Beginning in 2009, Dark Horse Books began to reprint Tales of the Beanworld, in two volumes, and then went on to publish two more volumes of new Beanworld.

Marder was educated at the Hartford Art School in Connecticut in the early 1970s, earning a BFA degree in 1973. Diana Schutz was set to edit the resurrected series, which would also be collected by Dark Horse.

Marder was involved with "the DLG – Direct Line Group – which [was] a coalition of fifteen retailers that was put together by Gary Colabuono of Moondog's [as] an opportunity for the large chain retailers to have a forum to discuss their problems and pool their resources to figure out how they can best help themselves in [comics'] new marketplace". Marder, speaking in 1992/3 suggested that "distributors are not focused much on helping the established comic book stores expand", and hoped that the DLG would aid in "promot[ing] environments that are going to help alternative comics grow". Working with Moondog's, Marder described the paradox of "a situation where retailers want the books, and the publishers have the books, but somehow they can't get them to more readers". Marder served as President of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, a non profit organization founded in 1986 chartered to protect the First Amendment rights of the comics community, from 2010 to 2018.