Jim Valentino was born in the Bronx, New York. Valentino began his career working on mini-comics in the early eighties. These stories, many of them later collected in the book ‘Vignettes’, were mostly autobiographical, inspired by underground comix masters R. Crumb and Vaughn Bode. He changed directions a few years later when he signed on to do his fondly remembered superhero parody ‘Normalman’ for Aardvark-Vanaheim. Valentino began working for Marvel in the late eighties and early nineties on series like ‘What If?’ and ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’.
Then, in 1992, Valentino left Marvel when joined together with Todd McFarlane, Rob Liefeld, Whilce Portacio, Erik Larsen, and Jim Lee to form Image Comics. As one of their artists, he has been involved with Image from the start. He put out a small line of superhero books through the company, including his own ‘ShadowHawk’ as well as the notorious Alan Moore-headed ‘1963’. Five years later, Valentino reevaluated his creative interests and returned to his roots with his emotional, semi-autobiographical comic ‘A Touch of Silver’ and other alternative comics.
In 2003, Valentino was replaced as the publisher of Image Comics by Erik Larsen, another co-founder of the company. Since then Valentino has resurrected Shadowline, his own arm of Image, and has published a wide variety of books including a revived ShadowHawk series, The Collected normal man, a new auto-bio book, Drawing From Life as well as creator-owned properties including Bomb Queen, After the Cape and Sam Noir. He also serves on the board of directors of the comic industry charity The Hero Initiative and on its Disbursement Committee. In 2008 Valentino created Silverline Books, an all-age imprint for original graphic novels.