Capital Art Book Fair 2024 cartoonists in photos

 The event was today and continues tomorrow at the Eastern Market. These are only photographs of the cartoonist-type people with one ringer at the bottom because I really liked his chutzpah.

Lee Strawberry, local cartoonist

The Silver Spring member of Sun Store. Write to me!

NYC's Ferci Cipriani and her animation Learning to Float art book

 

NYC's Maggie Michel of Sun Store

Smogfrogg aka Leeanna Earp, Silver Spring, MD

 

Nami Oshiro, Falls Church, VA

Boxerbun, Washington, DC

 

 

NYC-based cartoonists Casper Manning and Ray Kao

 

 

There's some printed works from mainland China, including the 

Chinese version of the Beijing Underground. I bought 2 copies.

 

and finally the ringer, Bible story painter Sam Robertson. He's selling 300 copies of his illustrated Old Testament door to door, and podcasting about it at http://www.americasbible.com

 

There were several other people who's work I enjoyed including a couple from Brussels where the man, Hugo Bonamin, was working through some trauma issues by obsessively mixing pastel oil chalks in squares and seeing how they merged. He's online at http://bruitartbook.com

Also My Dead Aunt's Books store out of Hyattsville, MD and photographer John T. Allen of Permian Designs

DC Zinefest at MLK library

I spent a few hours at the MLK branch of the DC public library talking to local comics creators. IDs to come later as I'm posting from a phone.

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Meet a DMV Cartoonist: A Chat with Jeremy Vinar

by Mike Rhode

StoryBox Comics Fair, organized by Adam Griffiths, was held recently in a brewery in Silver Spring, MD. Along with some stalwarts of the DC Conspiracy, I met some local cartoonists new to me. Jeremy Vinar, and his wife Ashley of Perilous Adventures Studios were selling collections of their comics. Ashley is the writer of their new book, Roll Your Way, while Jeremy is the cartoonist behind it and the studio's other comics.

 What type of comic work or cartooning do you do?

 We currently self publish the Perils and Roll Your Way graphic novel series.  The Perils series starts with Perils Ahead with a story that follows Neil, a dungeon janitor of sorts, tasked with cleaning up after adventurers and resetting the traps by the mysterious dungeon master. Things change for  him after a certain adventurer enters the dungeon and stirs things up.  The sequel in the series is also available and titled Perils Below.

 The Roll Your Way series is a choose-your-own adventure style book, but instead of choosing you roll a 4-sided dice to determine what page to turn to at different points in the story.  There are currently two books, each self-contained stories about two different adventuring parties trying to complete their quest. Depending on how well the reader rolls, the characters may or may not get a good ending. 

 How do you do it? Traditional pen and ink, computer or a combination?

 I’ve switched it up a little for each book but it's always a combination of the two.  Typically drawn and inked on paper then colored in the computer.  For Perils Below I did ink washes on the paper as well.  It just kind of depends on what I’m into at the time. 

 I’m pretty sure for the next book though I will try full digital using Clip Studio.

 When (within a decade is fine) and where were you born?

 I was born in the 80’s in Maryland.  Raised in Germantown and later moved to Frederick. My wife and I now live in Frederick County, MD.  We both went to high school in Frederick (rival high schools) and met when we were teenagers working at a craft store.

 What is your training and/or education in cartooning?

 I went to the Savannah College of Art and Design.  Graduated in 2004 with a degree in Illustration, but originally went because of their sequential art program.

 Who are your influences?

 Being a child who grew up in the 90’s, that era of comics had a huge impact on me. It is the reason I love making comics so much.  Although stylistically I suppose I’m much more cartoony then traditional comics.

If you could, what in your career would you do-over or change?

 This is a tough one.  The thing I always think of first when I think of regrets is going into so much debt for art school.  It's been a massive weight on me for my entire adult life.  But it’s really hard to say how things would have been if I hadn’t.

 I also regret flip flopping my goals so much early on.  I went to art school to learn sequential art (comics) but half way through I thought I should do something that would have more of a chance for a paying job (since i was racking up so much debt).  So I switched to illustration, but even that didn’t really make sense.  What I actually ended up doing after college was working as a video game artist.  Ultimately after 11 years of that and layoff after layoff I decided that my dream was always comics and I need to refocus on that.

 So I have a regular day job now to make ends meet and work on comics in my spare time.

 What work are you best-known for?

 Ha I wish I knew!

 What work are you most proud of?

 Really any of the comics we’ve put out in the past 8 years.  I just love it.  The Perils series is very personal to me so I really like that one.  But the Roll Your Way series is special because it was my wife's idea and she writes it.  So we get to work on it together. It seems to be our best seller because it's such a brilliant idea.

 What would you like to do or work on in the future?

 I have a third Perils book idea I’d like to finish some day.  We also have a third Roll Your Way we have been on and off working on for years and would really like to get that going too.

Outside of our own work, it would be amazing to fulfill that childhood dream of drawing a comic for Marvel someday.  I imagine that is the dream of most people who are my age.

 What do you do when you're in a rut or have writer's block?

 Take a shower.  It’s the best place for your mind to wander.

 What do you think will be the future of your field?

 Gosh I don’t know.  I don’t know if it's a widespread trend or just me but I’ve gone back to buying mostly physical copies of books.  For a while it seemed like digital was going to be the new way to read comics, but for me that didn’t last.  And I like having a physical copy of a book to sell to people.  Something about it is just nicer.

 What local cons do you attend? The Small Press Expo, Awesome Con, or others? Any comments about attending them?

 We have done SPX a couple times in the past and it's been a very good show for us.  It's just hard to get into with vendors being chosen by lottery vs. being juried like most other conventions.  We have done Awesome Con and Baltimore Comic Con for many years.  They are usually okay for us, but it's hard to table at those types of conventions for self-published comic book sellers.  People there are mostly looking for the big properties they know and love and not new indy comics they’ve never heard of.

 What comic books do you read regularly or recommend? Do you have a local store?

 Lately I’ve been reading the new Gargoyles comic that picks up after the cartoon from the 90’s.  It's written by the creator of the show Greg Weisman and it's really fun.  That was a favorite show of mine from my childhood.

Do you have a website or blog?

  Our website is perilousadventurestudios.com

 How has the COVID-19 outbreak affected you, personally and professionally?

 At first it wasn’t really a big change for me because my regular day job was work from home already.  Sadly though it ended up being devastating as I lost my father to COVID in early 2022.

Meet a Local Cartoonist: A Chat with Adam Griffiths

by Mike Rhode

Adam Griffiths sent an announcement of a cartooning class he's teaching in to us, so I leaped at the chance to get the thoughts of another local cartoonist on record. 

What type of comic work or cartooning do you do?

Right now, I have been working on my first graphic novel, Washington White, a satirical right-wing beltway insider treatise concerning white America, translated from the narrative center of a fictional African-American right-wing viewpoint. For a naturally purple-minded African-American raised in Wilmington Delaware, simulating both this viewpoint and this narrative is incredibly taxing. It’s taken me 2 years to finalize a script that’s engineered solely to deprogram aspirant douches from their entitled sense of necessity in western society. The final work will be published in 2 parts, each about 300 pages long. In the meantime, I post one fully-realized full-color non-sequitur cartoon online each week to my Facebook and Tumblr pages. 

How do you do it? Traditional pen and ink, computer or a combination?


I use cheap ballpoint pens to make many of my drawings and cartoons. I color them digitally.

When (within a decade is fine) and where were you born?

I was born in 1982, at Takoma Park’s Washington Adventist Hospital, and it’s very weird that I live just around the corner from there now, considering I am the only member of my immediate member of family to move back to the DMV area. My parents were both police officers working in Southwest DC, and met on the police force.

Why are you in Washington now?  What neighborhood or area do you live in?
 
I came back to Washington because, probably, like many cartoonists, there is part of me that is largely invested in nostalgia. I got a Bachelor’s Degree in General Fine Arts with a concentration in Video Art at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore, then went into an administrator position with Provisions Learning Project in Washington D.C., a nonprofit devoted to arts and social change before Busboys and Poets even existed. I worked as a fine arts administrator for many years, sometimes for private galleries, also for Washington Project for the Arts. While in school, I was skeptical of students who mocked the practices of popular New York fine artists, so much so, that I declaratively NEVER wanted to be in New York. I worked in the fine arts world here for almost a decade before realizing that it was not the place for the kind of work that I wanted to make. My art is very much a reflection of that experience. I make drawings that are sometimes abstract, I make drawings that are sometimes symbolic within the realm of editorial cartoons, I make drawings that are sometimes on the fringe of mainstream comics. So I see myself as a cartoonist who inhabits a number of roles, but currently, I attempt to feed the fine arts world of DC while seeking to address cartoonists’ and comics concerns.

What is your training and/or education in cartooning?

I am mostly self-taught, I started drawing when I was four years old, and started art education formally through weekend classes at the Delaware Art Museum at age nine. Later when I was in college, I thought I was going to work with communities in Baltimore to make publicly-engaged murals and video art; I considered this kind of work to be of the utmost decency in its political intent, the least condescending. Lucy Lippard and Jane Jacobs were my heroines, but the graduate program for Community Arts did not exist yet, I moved on.  Independently, I do my own research and reading. I reach out to cartoonists whose work interests me. Because the university system offers safe entrance to artistic validation, I’ve simultaneously embraced it because of the talented artists there, but also rejected it, because I abhor elitism. The university system is not successful at reorganizing society, our democracy, as it should. I am ambivalent about my own capacity to sustain cartooning as a career, but I recognize that education can bestow an individual with the necessary embers of autodidactism.

Who are your influences?

I read non-exclusively. I am at home with popular comics writers and artists, editorial cartoonists, graphic novelists, zine cartoonists, small press publishers and creators, and mainstream publishers, philosophers and I suspect that many other creators read the same way. It’s disingenuous for me to give you a list because I continue to read, allowing myself to be inspired, superseded, and bought into admiration by accomplishments in contemporary art, art history, comics history, and current comics being made world-wide.

To be influenced is to accept the presence of others. I’m very non-competitve because I think artists, above other professions, recognize that they generate peace through an active engagement with their respective societies. I look to creative people for community, whether living or dead, because something they’ve generated strikes me. My list for now: Barry Windsor-Smith, Stephen Bissette, Whit Taylor, Simon DeBeauvoir, John Chad, Josh Bayer, Sabin Cauldron, Phillip Zimbardo, Adam Polina, Chris Bachalo, Joseph Silver, Garth Ennis, Ashley Woods, Marshall McLulan, Howard Cruse, Victor Hodge, Charles Burns, Adrian Tomine, Dan Nadel, Alison Bechdel, Elizabeth Beier, Lee Lai, Kara Walker, Danny Simmons,  Jessica Abel, Italo Calvino, Jim Mahfood, Jessica Abel, Mimi Pond. Also, there are some very interesting minicomics being made in New Zealand right now. When I am working, I ignore other creative people, it’s a mistake to look to them for ideas.

If you could, what in your career would you do-over or change?
 
When I wasn’t even in high school, I remember sending an inquiry to the Joe Kubert School of Cartooning in Newark, New Jersey for more information. I presented the brochure that I received back to my father, who told me that this school wasn’t ‘good enough’ for me. I ended up in fine arts school which was nice, but I didn’t belong, art-wise -- even the illustration department was too fancy. I’ve always been very interested in the popular arts but unfortunately my life experience has mutated me beyond that ever being a possible destination for my work. I’ve confronted the reality that there is nothing I can change about these experiences, and I am content with making it up from here on.

What work are you best-known for?

My first major gallery show was about drinking and adulthood, and happened in DC. I made a series of paintings, a sculpture, and a video about the life of Candice “Candy” Lightner, the founder of Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD). This was really a journalistic endeavor. I spent months talking with Candy over the phone so that I could create paintings that would define the era and time in which the anti-drunk-driving movement was formed, and how it came to be a typical Washington non-profit special interest institution in all its surreality. It was an odd show that I enjoyed thinking about and conceiving, and I only sold one painting, ha! Otherwise, I’m increasingly known for posting noticeably sick, yet compassionate cartoons online.

What work are you most proud of?
 
This question is beyond my personal self-awareness. Is dignity worth a lifetime of appearances?

What would you like to do or work on in the future?

I would like to have a daily comic somewhere, which I am already developing. There are also several other shorter graphic novels I’m trying to complete in addition to Washington White, but of course those aren’t real until I’ve executed them.

What do you do when you're in a rut or have writer's block?
 
I sing loudly and dance, probably because I’m so queer. This is a lesson that I learned from cartoonist Alec Longstreth’s very useful manual “Your Comics Will Love You Back.” He is an instructor at the Center for Cartooning Studies in White River Junction, Vermont who is very dynamic, who gives it all away. Not an inch of Miles Davis within him.
 
What do you think will be the future of your field?

Electronic media has been directing the future of comics so far. I think comics artists embrace their medium as interactive media already, and will likely figure out how to ingratiate their creative practice into the administrative structure, which ultimately, is where all art needs to go. Being in the fine arts world, I couldn’t focus on what was important because fine arts criticism is very palace intrigue, meditating about what decisions people in museums are making, which doesn’t help working artists at all. Constantly artists are accused of being useless because executives in private enterprise are close-minded, and historically, editorial cartoonists have largely been employed by newspapers in order to help their audiences and covertly, their own journalists quantify information about current events. However, they will soon realize that employing cartoonists as consultant creators will help them to make better decisions.

What local cons do you attend? The Small Press Expo, Intervention, or others? Any comments about attending them?
 
I have attended the Small Press Expo in Bethesda religiously for years, meeting many interesting artists and zinesters, reading their work. I am looking forward to two cons in Ohio: the Sõl-Con: Brown/Black Comix Expo and Cartoon Crossroads Columbus, which is hosted by Ohio State University, home of the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum. I went up there recently with John Kinhart, a filmmaker who dedicates himself to making films about indie comics legends, to help record interviews with cartoonist Carol Tyler and minicomics godfather Justin Green. I can honestly say that Ohio feels like a place where the mid-western independent and mainstream audience for comics can convene without any tricky media-engineered divisive politics intervening.  It’s that ecclesiastic spirit and enthusiasm for comics that I am always seeking, which begins with people.

self-portrait

What's your favorite thing about DC?

DC comics artists are uncommonly mainstream, even if their comics are not considered so, and even though there is no mainstream comics studio based in DC (we need one). When it comes to subject matter in DC, everything is welcome, and educating through comics is revered, in addition to humor and drama, and weirdness. I admire webcomics artists like Carolyn Belefski, dynamic comics shop managers like Esther Kim, organizers like Andrew Cohen and Matt Dembicki, and obsessive makers like JT Wilkins and Rafer Roberts, who are going to do what they will, regardless of whether an audience exists for their work or not. Comics remain relevant because of the risk-takers, not because of comfortable virtuosos.

Least favorite?
 
The comics community of DC doesn’t seem to interface with many other facets of the creative community here, and especially so with the editorial cartoonists, who only seem to want to run with other journalists and professionals within major news-worthy publications or at awards banquets (though, the Library of Congress rocks). As someone who worked in the non-profit art world of DC for many years, I want to say that uniqueness, flavor, and funkiness should be a DESIRED standard because of that cross-pollination, because, CULTURE. I wish I knew more actors. I wish I knew more writers, I wish I knew more in-house economists, graphic designers. What is the point of being in a city if all these worlds are frozen, incestuous?

What monument or museum do like to take visitors to?
 
The World War I Memorial. It’s quiet and you can have a conversation with one or two good friends on a swampy summer DC weekend afternoon.

How about a favorite local restaurant?

It’s very expensive to eat out in DC. My husband and I eat at home because fabulousness eludes us. Obviously, we are shameful homosexuals. 


In a rare instance of consistency in restaurant-going on my part, I’ll be hosting a SKETCH SHARE event every Thursday at 6:30pm, from October 19th to November 12th at Petworth Citizen , as part of 4-session class that I’m teaching at Upshur Street Books next door (http://www.eventbrite.com/e/comics-djinn-drawing-and-storytelling-by-you-led-by-adam-griffiths-cartoonist-tickets-18546345619)). You don’t have to be enrolled in the class to attend SKETCH SHARE, it open to the public, so bring your supplies and come draw with us!

Do you have a website or blog?

http://www.adamgriffithsart.com

New website links for local creators

As I'm getting ready for some new City Paper interviews, here's some links to local creators sites.

Molly Lawless' Hooray For Mollywood blog: http://tyrnyx.wordpress.com/ Come meet Molly at Busboys and Poets on November 17th.

Editorial cartoonist Clay Jones' Toon Talk blog: http://blogs.fredericksburg.com/toontalk/

Cartoonist Jamie Noguchi's Yellow Peril comic strip at http://ypcomic.com and blog at http://angryzenmaster.com

Oct 24: DC Counter Culture Festival 5

This Sunday, the DC Counter Culture Festival 5 will see a lot of cartoonists hanging around downtown, many of them with the DC Conspiracy. Click here for a list of attendees.

This Sunday, October 24th
12 noon -- 8pm
RFD's
810 7th St NW
Washington DC 20001