Mark Tatulli

Mark Tatulli is an American cartoonist, writer, animator and television producer, known for his strips Liō and Heart of the City and for his work on the cable reality television series Trading Spaces and A Wedding Story, for which he has won three Emmy Awards. His comics have appeared in hundreds of newspapers around the world.

Early life Tatulli grew up in Willingboro Township, New Jersey and started drawing in his youth, publishing his first cartoons in the pages of the Burlington County Times. A resident of Washington Township, Gloucester County, New Jersey, Tatulli began drawing in elementary school, where his cartoons first appeared in the school's newspaper. After he became a syndicated cartoonist, a former teacher of his told him that "I can't believe you're still doing the same crap you were doing in junior high, and now getting paid for it."

Heart of the City, which debuted in November 1998, features a girl named Heart who lives in Philadelphia.

Liō, which has been published since May 2006, is a "sweetly dark" pantomime cartoon without dialogue that was inspired by Tatulli's love of the horror movies he watched while growing up as a child in the 1970s. The title character is a "weird little boy" who inhabits a world occupied by aliens, monsters, robots and other strange characters. According to Tatulli, he came up with the name "Lio" because he "wanted a simple name to go with the simple, wordless concept. Just three letters."

Recognized in 2009 as "Best Comic Strip" by the National Cartoonists Society, his cartoons were being published in about 400 newspapers around the world by 2012. The last daily "Heart of the City" strip drawn by Tatulli was published April 25, 2020, with the last Tatulli-drawn Sunday "Heart" strip published May 17.

Filmography Trading Spaces (HGTV, post producer) A Wedding Story (Discovery/TLC, post producer)