Like many of his colleagues including Megan Kelso, Dave Lasky, Jason Lutes, Jon Lewis, and James Sturm, he was an early recipient of the Xeric Foundation grant for cartoonists.

Time magazine called Hutch Owen "A devastating satire [which] feels like a scalding hot poker cauterizing the open wound of American corporate and consumer culture.

[citation needed] In 2011, he and his cartoonist wife, Leela Corman, moved to Gainesville, Florida, and founded the Sequential Artists Workshop.

In January 2016 he published Rosalie Lightning, a memoir named after his daughter, who had died suddenly when she was almost two, and about his and his wife's grief and their attempts to make sense of their life afterwards.

Kirkus Reviews called the book, "A bracing, deeply saddening journey into death and loss whose wryly affirmative resolution, ‘joy breaking through the storm clouds,’ is nothing but hard won.