Steve Moore Books in Order

If you want the original sports cartoons: Born in the Bleachers: Sports Cartoons → Revolution in the Bleachers: More Sports Cartoons → The Best of In the Bleachers: A Classic Collection of Mental Errors
If you want his middle-grade fiction: No Fear! → Control Freak → Kicking & Screaming → Comeback Kid
If baseball is your best entry point: No Fear! → Back to the Bleachers: Baseball Cartoons → The Best of In the Bleachers: A Classic Collection of Mental Errors
If you are here for golf jokes: Where Golfers Buy Their Pants and Other Collected Cartoons: Sports Cartoons → Dibs on His Clubs!: An In The Bleachers Golf Collection

Steve Moore was born in Colorado in 1965 and grew up in Southern California. Long before movies, syndication, or middle-school sports novels, he was a kid who liked to draw, especially when math class got dull. For a while he even planned to become a veterinarian, not a cartoonist. That early mix of doodling, curiosity, and slightly sideways humor says a lot about the work that came later.

His career took a few turns before it found the bleachers.

Moore studied veterinary medicine at Oregon State University, then changed course and moved into journalism, eventually earning a master's degree. After college he worked in newspapers, including a stretch at The Maui News in Hawaii. While covering sports there, he came up with the idea for In the Bleachers, the single-panel cartoon that would become his signature. It launched in 1985 and turned everyday sports weirdness into something quick, visual, and very funny.

That same year, he joined the Los Angeles Times, where he worked as an editor and later became executive news editor. He was part of Times teams that won Pulitzer Prizes for coverage of the 1992 Rodney King riots and the 1994 Northridge earthquake. Even with that newsroom career moving fast, In the Bleachers kept growing. At its peak, the strip ran in about 200 papers, and readers kept coming back for the jokes about athletes, coaches, refs, parents, and fans taking games much too seriously.

In 1996, he left the newsroom to work in entertainment full time.

That shift opened the door to animation. Moore wrote the original story and served as an executive producer for Open Season, the 2006 film that grew in part from the hunting humor in his cartoon world. He later created, wrote, and produced Alpha & Omega, and stayed involved with several follow-up films. What connects those movie projects to his newspaper work is easy to spot, he likes fast setups, clean visual jokes, and characters who get themselves into trouble before they quite know what hit them.

He also wrote and illustrated the four-book King of the Bench series for middle-grade readers: No Fear!, Control Freak, Kicking & Screaming, and Comeback Kid. Those books keep his sports-comedy instincts, but aim them at school teams, friendship, embarrassment, and the strange honor of being a permanent benchwarmer. Readers who like Moore usually respond to the same thing in every format. He understands that sports are not only about winning. They are also about fear, ego, luck, rituals, and the very public disaster of messing up.

That has always been his sweet spot.

Moore moved from Los Angeles to Boise in 2002 because he wanted his kids to grow up in a smaller city, and Idaho has remained home base for later parts of his career. He has also taught and spoken about storytelling, including work with Boise State. After more than three decades with In the Bleachers, he eventually stepped away from drawing the strip because of essential tremor. Even so, the shape of his work stayed the same. Whether he was sketching a golfer in trouble, writing a nervous kid through baseball season, or helping build an animated movie, he kept looking for the human joke inside the competition.