PRESS RELEASE:
MTV REAL WORLDER TO WRITE BOOK HONORING PEDRO ZAMORA

Judd Winick, known to the fans of MTV's The Real World as the nice Guy cartoonist from the show's third season based in San Francisco, has signed with Henry Holt and Co. to publish a moving memoir about his friendship with fellow cast member Pedro Zamora, who died of an AIDS-related illness the day after the show's last episode aired.

Zamora was a nationally recognized AIDS activist and educator who achieved vastly greater recognition after he began appearing on the MTV real-life soap opera in 1994. In the year after Pedro's death, Winick and fellow cast member Pam Ling (then a medical student, now a doctor) picked up Zamora's mantle and lectured on his behalf around the country.

Now, Winick tells the troubling and inspiring story of their friendship, his education, and the loss of his close friend in an unorthodox book done entirely in the form of cartoons and illustration.

"It's essentially a graphic novel, words and pictures." Winick says, though he acknowledges that, unlike most other graphic novels, this one is non-fiction. He admits that he was devastated by his friend's death. "It took me a number of years to find the proper distance, and be able to write about this, and as the fifth anniversary of Pedro's passing approached, it felt like the right time." Of course he turned to the form of writing that came naturally to him.

"The great thing about Judd's story is that it is simply a great story. If it were prose, it would be a powerful memoir." Said Marc Aronson of Henry Holt and Co.. "His talent as an illustrator only makes it that much more accessible and immediate. It is a great privilege for me to work on the book with him." Placement of the book with Henry Holt and Co. was handled by Jill Kneerim of The Palmer & Dodge Agency.

PEDRO AND ME has been slated for release in fall 2000.

Winick has spent the last two years writing a syndicated comic strip, Frumpy the Clown, but ended the strip in favor of doing graphic novels and comics.

"I found daily comic strips to be limiting, not just in length and size formats or language, but creatively. I just didn't find the strip fulfilling. Working on this book about Pedro clarified that. I wanted to be a story-teller."

His current work, the critically acclaimed comic book mini-series for IMAGE COMICS, will be on the shelves this March, April, and May. The Adventures of Barry Ween, Boy Genius is the continuing tale of a foul-mouthed ten-year-old with a 350 I.Q. A follow-up comic mini-series of Barry Ween is in the works as well.

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