Chances are, you've seen his work before. His are the boldly colored illustrations in The New Yorker (accompanying reviews of shows such as 8 Days Later and movies such as Bon Voyage), Time (a story earlier this year about European dance music), TV Guide (a piece about the Fox series 24) or The New York Times Magazine (a cover last year about North Korean teenagers escaping to the south). He uses much shadowing and light play and draws figures with large, expressive eyes. Yet, chances are that unless you look carefully at the fine print beneath the picture, you have no idea who Tomer Hanuka is.

Introducing him is a tricky task: He has two titles: during the day, he is one of the leading illustrators working in New York City and the recipient of the national Society of Illustrators' gold and silver medals. At night, he is a comic book artist, drawing, together with his twin brother Assaf who lives in Israel, a critically acclaimed comic book titled Bipolar, which garnered him a nomination in the best cover artist category for a Harvey Award, the comics industry's equivalent of the Oscars. He is also an outsider, an Israeli living in New York, a foreigner working in a quintessentially American art form.

He was born 30 years ago, in a suburb of Tel Aviv dominated, like much of the rest of Israel, by the yellowish tint of sand and sun-scorched grass. When he was 6; however, color was introduced into his life, literally, when an aunt living in California came to visit, bringing with her a pile of comic books. Hanuka and his twin brother were infatuated with the chromatic bursts on the pages, with Superman's blue cape and Spiderman's red suit. They were also taken with the world the comic books offered, a world of superheroes and arch-villains.

"In Israel," Hanuka said, "a hero is someone like Yosef Trumpeldor, a guy with no hand. I read the comics, and there was Superman, a guy with the strength of 100 men. I was hooked."

The two brothers, not yet able to read English, spent hours looking at the drawings, imagining their situations, their own texts, to replace the ones they couldn't understand. This, Hanuka said, was what drew him to comics. "It's all about the gutters," he said, referring to the white spaces in between the drawn frames. "You have to complete the story from frame to frame, the story is all yours."

Soon, Tomer and his brother began drawing their own comics, and the stories they made were closer in spirit and content to Superman's "Metropolis" than they were to their own, sleepy suburban existence. They continued drawing through high school and the army, gradually drifting away from the mainstream comics and towards the more realistic, artistic genres of the medium, such as Art Spiegelman's Maus, a comic book about the Holocaust that portrays Nazis as cats and mice as Jews.

When the two brothers completed their army service, they felt staying in Israel was no longer an option; the country had no comics scene to speak of, and regarded anything less than pensive tomes concerning the social or security situation as hardly worth printing. Here, however, the brothers split: Assaf went to France, to study in one of that country's elite schools for comics and animation, and Tomer, determined to make it big in the United States, came to New York.

He enrolled at the School of Visual Arts, working at a hummus factory to support himself and drawing incessantly. Coming to New York, he said, helped him achieve just the right measure of detachment necessary to make great art.

"I love this feeling of detachment," he said. "I felt it in Israel, where everybody travels in groups, searching for common denominators and ideological symbols. But New York is different; New York is the perfect place to feel detached and objective."

Soon after graduation, however, Hanuka became a little less of an outsider. He had won the Society of Illustrators' top two medals for the year, and immediately began receiving job offers from magazines, newspapers, comic book publishers, record companies and publishing houses.

"He is incredibly hard working," said Owen Phillips, The New Yorker's illustration editor, of Hanuka, explaining his success. "He is also incredibly nimble in his mind in imagining his way around the space. The way he lights a room can make it look very attractive, makes it feel like you want to be there. He's able to give a lot of life to the work he does."

Still, a career as a successful illustrator was not enough to satisfy Hanuka. He needed to create his own comics. Instead of letters, he would send his brother illustrations, ideas, comics panels. From France, and later on from Tel Aviv, Assaf would do the same. The brothers came up with Bipolar, publishing it three years ago, first on their own, and later with Alternative Comics, an independent publisher.

The name was a less-than-subtle reference to the brothers' shifting artistic sensibilities. Assaf created a comics series based on a book by Israeli author Etgar Keret that deals with an alternative universe in which people who have committed suicide — from Palestinians who blew themselves up in Jerusalem's cafés to morose youth from Tel Aviv — congregate. But Tomer's art took a different twist. He began writing and drawing short stories, deeply personal, often bordering on the abstract, always about young men who are lost in unfamiliar surroundings and are trying desperately to communicate with themselves and their loved ones. It was for the cover of Bipolar's most recent issue that he was nominated for the Harvey, to be awarded this weekend in New York as part of the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art show. The cover features a bony young man, dressed in black, clutching the wall behind him as the Persian rug he is standing on turns to a gushing stream of burgundy-colored blood.

Despite, or perhaps because of the personal nature of his comics, the Comics Journal, the industry's paper of record, praised Bipolar as a major work; the author concluded the 2003 article with uncharacteristic bravado for the journal's nearly academic tone, urging the readers to "Check 'em out. Catch up. Forge ahead."

And still, few outside of the comics industry know his name. When Hanuka speaks in schools, which he does often, telling children about the creative joys of illustration and comic book art, people are often shocked to learn that he was a scruffy Israeli man and not a dainty Japanese woman. "They're sure my name is pronounced Tomoko Anuka," he said with a smile. "Imagine their surprise."