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Credits
Vertigo Comics

2003 to 2009 - Fables, by Vertigo Comics - creator / writer / pencil work
2008 - Thessaly: Witch for Hire - writer
2002 - 1001 Nights of Snowfall - writer / pencil work

Film

2010 - The Others - screenplay / director
2009 - Coraline (animated) - screenplay
2009 - Hostel - screenplay / director
2008 - The Princess Bride - still photographer
2007 - Stardust - screenplay / assistant art direction
2006 - The Hills Have Eyes - screenplay / director
2004 - Shaun of the Dead - still photographer
2001 - Donnie Darko - still photographer

Music Videos

2008 - The Sacrament, for shepherd
2007 - Oh My God, for shepherd

Awards

2006 EISNER AWARD FOR BEST SERIALIZED STORY
Fables #36–38, 40-41: "Return to the Homelands"

2005 EISNER AWARD FOR BEST SERIALIZED STORY
Fables #19–27: "March of the Wooden Soldiers"

2003 EISNER AWARD FOR BEST SERIALIZED STORY
Fables #1–5: "Legends in Exile"

2003 EISNER AWARD FOR BEST NEW SERIES
Fables

2002 EISNER AWARD FOR BEST ANTHOLOGY
1001 Nights of Snowfall

Biography

Sofian McBride never set out to write comics. Throughout grade school, it was movies that were his passion, and film was the nurturing force behind his budding artistic talents. Most children watched films mindlessly, without giving much thought to what was behind them. Sofian, inquisitive from an early age, was immediately full of questions: How did one become an actor? Were the neighbourhoods real places? What was a film camera? How did they sync the voices and picture together?

He asked so many questions that his parents, an electrician and a receptionist from Pottstown, Pennsylvania, had to start reading up on film themselves, to answer their son's inquiries. When Sofian started the first grade, his reading comprehension skills were years ahead of his classmates', from all the high school and college level film textbooks he spent his time flipping through. Of course, he hardly understood any of what he was reading, yet, but that only made him more determined to learn.

In the second grade, while Sofian didn't understand what made a screenplay different from any other piece of poorly conceived writing a seven-year-old could come up with, he had latched onto the idea of storyboards. All his work in his art classes became series of scribbled rectangles, filled with flip-book style tales. Though the art teacher complained that he refused to adhere to the class's projects, and tried her best to suggest he might have some sort of obscure learning disability, his parents embraced their son's interests, and covered an entire wall of his bedroom in white drawing paper, which they changed out, each time he filled it to his satisfaction.

The rest of Sofian's school career continued in much the same way. When he was ten, his father bought him his first video camera, and from that moment on, all school projects, including most of his book reports, were presented in video. In 7th grade, when his teachers' complaints grew too ferocious, Sofian's parents pulled him out of school and enrolled him in a home schooling umbrella program. The school to which the McBride's presented their son's work for grading held an equally nurturing view towards his fondness for film. Rather than refuse to allow him to incorporate it into his school work, as long as he showed sufficient evidence of satisfactory completion of the curriculum, the umbrella school encouraged Sofian to use film and drawings to present his material.

From seventh grade on, Sofian's love for storytelling continued to snowball. His parents bought him home editing equipment for his computer, and throughout the remainder of middle and high school, his videos became more sophisticated, and grew to include the acting "talents" of many of his friends from public school. Upon graduating from high school, Sofian's application materials for The Art Institute of Philadelphia included over half an hour of comedy sketches, a fifteen-minute short dramatic piece, and a five-minute stop motion animation short. He had no trouble getting his foot in the door.

Unfortunately, he did have some trouble keeping it there. After the incredible freedom Sofian had lived with since his enrollment with the umbrella school, college life was a hard thing to acclimate to. From the outset, he was not only having trouble arriving to class on time, but failing to be punctual in turning in any of his class assignments. Despite the fact that he was set to major in Film and Communications, there were still general studies credits to contend with, and on the whole, Sofian considered his own projects to be of higher worth than those the school wanted him to produce.

The situation was only made worse by the fact that Sofian had recently discovered two new loves: the horror genre, and comics. For the past two years, without a screenplay, he had been storyboarding a theoretical fantasy film about a werewolf detective, living in a modern-day version of fairy tale society. It hadn't occured to Sofian on his own, but while moving into his new dorm room at the Art Institute, his room mate, Matt, made a keen and painfully obvious observation: Sofian had been writing a comic book.

Though a still photographer, and not a film student, Matt had a special sort of affection for gritty, low-budget horror films. He introduced Sofian to the genre, and late one night, over a couple of stolen bottles of vodka, an idea was hatched: What was the most horrible they could make a film, on a budget of nothing?

The answer, after a couple of brainstorming sessions and half a notebook worth of Sofian's sketches, was Pretty Horrible. Armed with stolen time on school equipment, three friends (and one girlfriend) for actors, an incredibly real and incredibly illegal switchblade, and nine pints of fake blood, Sofian and Matt set out to create the grittiest piece of offensive cinema they could muster: a thirty-minute, X-rated, staged snuff film.

The elation that followed the film's completion didn't last long. After completing the film, and editing it in their dorm room, the next step for Matt and Sofian was to copy it onto as many VHS tapes as they could get their hands on for free, and disseminate it across campus. Theoretically, it was a beautifully-executed plan. In actuality? It caused an uproar.

While a willing participant, the girl in the video was just a few weeks shy of eighteen, when the film was shot. The video passed through so many hands on campus, it was only a matter of time before both the faculty and the girl's family were alerted, and mere days afterwards, the school was facing a hefty lawsuit from the family. The matter was eventually settled out of court, but the school couldn't simply turn the other cheek, when it came to the students who had created the problem for them. Sofian and Matt were both expelled, and while Matt went home to face the wrath of his parents...Sofian thought it suited him just fine.

He took what money he had from a part-time job at an off-campus bookstore, and made his way up to New York, where he had no connections, but knew exactly what he wanted to do. Staging the snuff film, with all its grime and fake gore, had given him a sudden feeling of being In his Element. Studying was well and good, but the way Sofian saw it, he had been studying his entire life. He needed to be making films, and he thought he knew just the place to do it: Troma Productions, masters of the B-grade, gore-fest horror genre.

When he arrived at Troma Studios, Sofian was upfront with them: aside from his parents' house in Pottstown, he was homeless. He had been expelled from school, with just enough money to travel to New York and spend a night or two in the diviest hotel he could find. But, he had his tape with him, and a couple of other tapes of his student material, as well. What could they do for him?

Sofian spent the next six hours in the Troma offices, while the tapes were played, his references called, and his background checked. At the end of the day, he had a job, and providing he could run a few office errands by the time the office supply stores closed, he would have twenty dollars. He made it, with minutes to spare, and was able to scrape together enough money for another night in his hotel.

The next day, Sofian went back to work at Troma, where he continued to work in their special effects department until 2000, when he was introduced to Donnie Darko's director of cinematography, at a New Year's Eve party. A week later, he had a new job as still photographer on the Donnie Darko set. It didn't pay much, and Sofian kept his doors at Troma wide open, but the experience of working on a higher budget film for the first time in his life was an unparalleled high. Sofian knew he had been right, all his life: the film industry was where he needed to be.

But, as they say, one thing leads to another, and you never quite know where you're going to end up. The connections at Donnie Darko led, in a roundabout way, to connections at Vertigo publishing, and after some cajoling from both friends and Lloyd Kaufman of Troma fame, Sofian was convinced to offer Vertigo a formal comic book pitch: a spruced up version of the story about the werewolf detective he had been working on since high school.

Though there were obvious reservations about the idea of accepting a pitch from a complete unknown, the story eventually won the executives at Vertigo over. In the story's new version, the detective was no longer a werewolf, but a wolf in human clothing, so to speak, acting as sheriff for a hidden community in New York City, comprised of refugee characters from fairy tales and fables, who had been chased out of their homelands by an unnamed adversary bent on, in classic villain fashion, domination of the entire fairy tale world. The series was to be called Fables, and just as soon as Sofian had managed to worm his way into real movie production, he was also being flung headlong into creating his first comic book.

To be sure, he had bitten off quite a mouthful, but Sofian was determined not to allow it to be more than he could chew. He hated to admit it, but despite the good opportunities his ejection from college had handed him, he was embarassed that he had handled the college experience so poorly. This was not going to defeat him. Every second of his day not spent sleeping (which he did little of) or working on the Donnie Darko set, he was sequestered away in the small hotel room, transforming his revamped storyboards into real comic scripts, sketching layouts, and drawing the final images. It was grueling work, work that would normally have been handled by two or three artists, but the Fables venture was a risky one for Vertigo, and they couldn't afford to hire an inker for the young man.

In 2002, the first Fables book, 1001 Nights of Snowfall, a collection of one-shots meant to set the scene for the upcoming (providing the book did well in stores) series, was published. Sofian's friends at Troma and in the Donnie Darko production team had been doing their best at a guerilla marketing scheme to build hype for the book, before it hit shelves. Whatever they had done (Sofian was never sure exactly what it entailed), it worked. The book did surprisingly well for itself, and Sofian was invited to join a few panels at that year's Comic Con, in San Diego.

It was at the convention that Sofian met Rhys Lowe, author of the noir series, Sin City. The two were speaking on a panel together, and, as they say in Chicago, hit it off right away. While he never had specific occasion to be very vocal about it, Sofian had never exactly been secretive about his homosexuality, either. A chance question from an audience member at the panel led to his speaking up about it, and a strange-veined conversation and quite a bit of alcohol led to Sofian and Rhys sharing a hotel room that night. Things, as that ambiguous "they" also say, would never be the same.

Not long after the convention, Sofian and Rhys began sharing an apartment in California, out of which they brainstormed and both produced their books (Vertigo having gladly greenlit Sofian's proposal for the extended Fables series). There was no formal arrangement between them, no talk of starting a relationship, or what their official status was. Their friendship had solidified fast, over the course of the convention, and the fact of the matter was, Sofian was homeless. His lease was up in New York before he left to work on Donnie Darko, and who knew where his gaffer friends had gone off to?

In 2005, Sofian was offered his first shot at writing and directing for a major film project, a remake of The Hills Have Eyes. His old college friend, Matt, had ended up faring just as well for himself, and after his ejection from the Art Institute, his father had sent him to California, to work as an assistant for a cousin, who was in the production business. Once again, through a stroke of luck, Sofian managed to have the right connections, and through Matt's cousin, was contacted with the prospect of heading the horror project. Their foray into faux-snuff had finally come full circle.

In October of 2007, Sofian and Rhys made an attempt at a real relationship. It got off to an extremely rocky start, and never quite recovered. Not quite a year later, Sofian abandoned Rhys for his ex, with whom he spent an unhealthy six weeks in New York City. Afterwards, he drifted for several months, before finally confessing feelings for his friend Oliver Shepherd (feelings which had made a major contribution to the ruination of his relationship with Rhys). Much to his surprise, Oliver felt positively about making a change in their friendship, and being with Sofian, romantically. As of April 2009, Sofian is anxious that it won't work out, and he'll lose another best friend in the process, but for the time being, he's found himself in a comfortable, happy place, which feels like a wonderful rarity, after the stress of the past two years.

Fables continues to do quite well for itself, and has won Sofian a total of five Eisner awards since 2003, including three awards for Best Serialized Story. He is the author of three major Hollywood screenplays, and recently released Hostel, a horror film set to arrive on DVD in the summer of 2009. Currently, he is refining the screenplay for another, more psychological horror film, The Others.