Carol Tyler is one of the most enduring cartoonists of her generation. Debuting with the short story ""Un-Covered Property"" in Weirdo in 1987, she went on to contribute to other anthologies of the era like Street Music, Twisted Sisters, Wimmens Comix, Drawn & Quarterly, and Zero Zero. Her debut book, The Job Thing (Fantagraphics, 1993), collected stories that examined the intersections between working-class labor, artistic expression, and misogyny. Her second collection, Late Bloomer (Fantagraphics, 2005), spanned her career to date, and showcased her facility with vibrant color alongside her expressive pen-and-ink brushwork.
In 2009, her three-volume series You'll Never Know serialised a biography of her father, tracing his return from WWII and the way the trauma of war and expectations of masculinity, affect soldiers' families and reverberate through generations. The first volume won Tyler nominations for the Eisner Awards for both Best Writer/Artist and Best Painter/Multimedia Artist. The series was expanded and compiled as Soldier's Heart (Fantagraphics, 2015).
Tyler delved further into her own history for the 2018 Fab 4 Mania, referencing her own 1965 diary for a memoir of a 13-year-old girl's life as focussed through obsession with the Beatles, culminating in attending their final Chicago concert. In recent years she taught in Sequential Art at the University of Cincinnati's College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning between 2006 and 2019, and moved to integrate the teaching, creative, practical, and caregiving aspects of her life via the Ink Farm, a Kentucky retreat for cartoonists to work. In 2023, Married To Comics, a documentary about Tyler's life with husband and fellow cartoonist Justin Green (1945-2022), premiered at the American Film Institute's Silver Theatre. She is completing her next memoir/graphic novel, The Ephemerata: Shaping the Exquisite Nature of my Grief, to be published in 2025 by Fantagraphics.