How did you get into cartooning?
First thing is I guess I’ve been drawing my whole life. I can’t remember a time where I wasn’t. I think I had a very active imagination as a child. Back in my day when we grew up, the only way to take the thing from your brain and put it on the page was by drawing. I realized that that was something I liked doing as a way of externalizing the knots and tangled mess that exists up in my brain. Also, my mum has always been an elementary school teacher so the arts have always been a cornerstone of my upbringing and always probably were going to be. It was never like my parents were like “Austin you have to draw you have to paint”. It was never like that, it was like, I already liked doing that stuff and I had the great fortune of being able to go to museums all the time for free so I was exposed to art history from the get go and contemporary art and all kinds of things. Anytime we took a vacation we would be going to museums.
The way I got to cartooning though was, all my favorite artists as a kid were like James Gurney or Tony DeTerlizzi. Classic fantasy or sci fi illustrators who had a very realistic style that was beautifully rendered. The lighting lavish. Shit looked real. That was what I aspired to as a kid when I had images in my imagination. How can I make it seem real or tangible? I never could draw like that. I never could figure out value. I could never figure out anatomy. This was as a kid. I didn’t know there were ways to get better. So my whole way of learning how to draw was drawing cartoons because that was my only approach that I could feel satisfied with because i couldnt do a photo real portrait. Now I’m super happy that I never went down that rabbit hole of practice because that kind of work doesn’t excite me as much. I mean, you’ll see a kickass fantasy illustration or sci fi illustration, you know anything beautifully rendered and you’ll say that rips for any number of reasons but i think, and i think a lot of cartoonists will feel this way, but the over emphasis on good art being realistic art is a fool’s errand. You are not going to actually push an envelope that way or do exciting things.
Who are your biggest influences?
Branching off what we were just talking about, I wanted to be James Gurney or Tony DeTerlizzi or like a Magic: The Gathering style artist. The things that I was really reading and absorbing the most that really fucked my shit up, gotta be Tintin by Herge and Jeff Smith’s Bone because both of those were given to me when my brain was perfectly plastic and moldable and theyre the first comic comics I read. They’re just masterclasses in cartooning.
The other one is Adventure Time. I had never seen anything like that before. It felt like this rising energy in what a cartoon could be. How its tone could feel and just how the drawings looked. I was a PBS and Cartoon Network kid. I was allowed to watch more PBS than Cartoon Network. Sometimes I could get away with being at my grandma’s house on vacation being allowed to watch Cartoon Network more. So I was raised on Cartoon Cartoon, Dexter’s Lab, Powerpuff Girls, Craig McCracken stuff. All this shit. We gotta pay respect to Genndy Tartakovsky. But Adventure Time just looked totally different. I didn’t exactly go “I want my drawings to look like that” but I started experimenting. I was a young teenager at the time so I was kind of forming somewhat of an identity for myself. What I knew I liked and didn’t. So I was like I’m going to dip my toe into drawing cartoons like that. If you look at my art a lot of my character will have big toothy grins and dots for eyes. Their anatomy will be super super simplified, pliable. I think that’s where that comes from for better or for worse. I’m actually more of a regular show fan. Thats the one i actually watched all the way through and actually relate to those characters but Adventure Time just totally rocked my world stylistically. There’s no way to escape it honestly. Being a budding cartoonist at that time. PENDELTON WARD, HERE’S TO YOU.
Oh god, I didn’t mention Archie. I read a lot of Archie. Interpret that how you will. None of anything that I do, it doesn’t really come out. But that’s another very solid basic communicative comic if that makes sense. I was trying to draw but I didn’t understand rendering. What else do I know? I know that archie is made out of a couple of rectangles and a checkerboard.
Can you talk about Smiling City at all?
Smiling City is an illustrated book. Less a comic. It’s like an illustration with text with it. It was a world building exercise. One page is the illustration, the other page is the text that goes along with it. It’s about an infinite city where it’s always night. There’s a moon with a pointed nose. Its not a nose, it’s a big really pointy mountain that looks like a nose when you’re on the ground. Its filled with character portraits with little bios about them. Usually they’re not the most important people in the world that I made. Then locations and then things that happen in this city. No history, more just like a vertical slice. It’s black and white. It isn’t 100% in its style reminiscent of Gustave Doré, like the classic engraving artists, but it’s definitely influenced by them in how I was thinking about the construction of images. I was thinking about in a design sense using just basic values for that. It’s a fun book. One of the reasons Luna Moth Zine Fest is so great is because it encourages me to finish projects that have been in the chamber for a long time. A lot of these drawings are like two years old and so they’re finally getting out there. I did this big elaborate cover for it that is like a city scape that’s pretty detailed two years ago and I was like I gotta chill out but it has this fun form factor to it. It’s kind of like, remember when you’d get those Garfield compilations and it would be in the shape of a comic strip. It would be kind of wide but short. That’s the form factor for it so that’s fun.
What’s your next project?
There’s a larger book I’m working on. It’s actually very similar in its practice, black and white illustrations. They’re larger and the book is basically exploring from a western, American specifically, point of view of what it would be like to be invaded. In an abstract sense, because the dominant strain of American culture hasn’t really had to grapple with that when we have imposed that act the world over. My position in full society is predicated on that and now more than ever is a time for reflection.
This is your second year at Luna Moth Zine Fest. Why’d you want to come back?
I had a good time the first time and also I love New England. Its where im from and I think the more shows we have in New England the better. I think it’s well organized and organized by people that are very dedicated to the craft and the game. It’s a very authentic show.
What’s your favorite thing about New England?
I’m so excited to eat some clams this summer. There’s so many things. I like our weather here. I like the ocean. It smells nice. I lived in the midwest for like six years and I missed the ocean and I missed the clams. It’s spooky here so that’s cool but also malicious and maybe malignant. It’s where I’m from. I’m very proud of it. I’m proud of its place in our history, that’s fraught obviously but its core to my identity. You can just put clams if you want.
Any local artists that you want to shout out?
Okay so the life of a cartoonist can often be so isolating and cloistered but I have an answer to this! There’s an artist, their tag on instagram is @j4acob22. Not only is their work very unique and interesting to me, it’s super grimy and off-putting but it’s very well drawn in that way where you look at an off-putting drawing and think the only way you could draw something like this is if you know your shit. Either through practice or you just got it. I saw somebody drawing on the train and went “Yo I love drawing what are you working on?” They showed me their drawings and we had a back and forth and I haven’t seen them since in-person. We’ve corresponded a little bit but their work is also really interesting and to everybody: when you see somebody drawing in public ask them about it because generally I think people like talking about their artistic practice and you’ll probably make a friend and, especially if you are interested in drawing and doing it, it’s always good to be around other artist. You don’t have to like them but it’s good to be around people practicing in various different ways, it’s going to inform what you do.
Do you have any advice for first time zine makers?
Just make the shit. Don’t worry about it. It’s not gonna be perfect. Plus zines are actually great because everybody likes a scrappy zine. That’s the whole point of them so like if you get your thumbprint on the xerox machine or an edge is ragged when you cut it, people are probably going to like that. Ive spent a lot of fucking time, my whole life, trying to make things look perfect or just right. That’s impossible so just make the thing so that the thing is done and you can move on to the next thing having known you made something already. Honestly, it’s pretty fun to redraw things after you’ve upped your skills or have a different approach. That can be fun. But before you can redraw something you gotta draw something. And whatever technique works for you, your zine doesn’t have to look any specific way as long as it made sense for you to make it and you have a finished product that’s cool.
Luna Moth Zine Fest 