Kari Maaren is a Toronto-based cartoonist, musician, writer, and university instructor who likes writing stuff about monsters and gets unreasonably upset when her students abuse the common apostrophe. She was born in British Columbia and would still like to go back there eventually because she misses all the trees.
She has a completed webcomic, West of Bathurst, and an active one, It Never Rains.  She writes and performs geeky ukulele music about Batman, genre literature, and various types of monsters, and in 2013, she won a Prix Aurora Award for doing so.  She has produced two CDs, the solo album Beowulf Pulled My Arm Off and the compilation (with the band Copy Red Leader) Pirate Elves in Space; she also maintains a ridiculously active YouTube channel. She has co-written a musical, Cross Purposes, for the Calgary Fringe Festival.