Wiley Miller, who signs his work simply Wiley, was born in Burbank, California and grew up in Hollywood. He went to high school in Virginia, where he started drawing cartoons for the school's newspaper. He studied at Virginia Commonwealth University and got a job as editorial cartoonist at a North Carolina newspaper in 1976. Two years later he moved to California again, where he got a comparable job at The Press Democrat, a Santa Rosa newspaper.
By sending drawings he did on cocktail napkins (which he called "Bartoons") to Playboy, Wiley made his breakthrough. In 1982, he created his first syndicated comic strip, 'Fenton', which ran for three years, after which Wiley returned to editorial cartooning. In 1991, the newspaper comic strip 'Non Sequitur' was born. He used the single-panel format for creating a sequential comic, which was so unique that the strip was soon picked up by newspapers all over the country and gained great popularity. Wiley has helped innovate newspaper comics, not only by experimenting with the comic format, which allowed editors more space to use comics, but also by helping newspapers find a new way of coloring, which made the Sunday pages look much more vivid.
