David Lapham (born 1970) is an American comic book writer and artist who wrote the comics Predators: A Predatory Life and Predators: Surviving Life for Dark Horse Comics. In the comics field, Lapham is best known for his long-running crime series Stray Bullets, which won him the industry's leading award, The Eisner, in 1996 and 1997.
Biography[]
Lapham started his comics career in 1990 as a penciler at Valiant Comics. He went on to join Valiant editor Jim Shooter's off-shoot company Defiant Comics where they co-created the Warriors of Plasm series in 1993. Lapham then set up his own publishing company, El Capitan Books, in 1995 to publish his self-produced Stray Bullets. The attention from the project earned him the attention of Miramax film studios, who then hired him to write and direct a feature film that never came to fruition. Taking a break from Stray Bullets in 2000, he produced the nine issue period murder mystery Murder Me Dead.
From 2005 onwards, Lapham began accepting more mainstream comics work. He wrote a storyarc for Top Cow Comics' The Darkness, a 12 part Batman storyline in Detective Comics for DC Comics, and he wrote and pencilled the six part Daredevil Vs. Punisher: Means And Ends limited series for Marvel Comics.
In late 2006, Marvel released Giant-Size Wolverine #1, with a 34 page Lapham story illustrated by David Aja, and DC began releasing Tales of the Unexpected with an 8 issue arc starring the Spectre which was also written by Lapham. Vertigo published the original graphic novel Silverfish in July 2007 and his interpretation of Terror, Inc. was released under the Marvel MAX line. He then wrote the Vertigo series Young Liars and took over from Garth Ennis as writer on Crossed.
Lapham's choice to do more mainstream work led to the near-abandonment of Stray Bullets (with one issue left in its last story arc), as well as a planned self-published futuristic science fiction limited series entitled The Parallax Man, which was never released. The series was announced to debut in 2005 but Lapham had less time to devote to it, and issues have never been solicited. He has expressed that he is still interested in both projects, but is unsure when he will be able to complete them.
In March 2010, it was announced that Lapham would become writer for the Predator franchise for Dark Horse.