Now in its 12th year, the annual Short Run Comix Festival, which takes place on Nov. 2 at Seattle Center’s Fisher Pavilion, celebrates the fusion of art and literature in the ever-expanding medium of comics.
Free and open to the public, Short Run showcases hundreds of emerging and established artists from the Pacific Northwest and beyond, and has become a much-anticipated yearly event for Seattle-area comics readers and creators. To give you a sense of the variety of stories and artistic styles, we’re highlighting recent work by six artists who will exhibit this year.
Born and raised in Seattle, Megan Kelso developed her craft in the city’s thriving indie comics scene of the 1990s with her Xeric grant-winning comic “Girlhero.” Kelso draws her characters with soft, rounded curves, but her keen understanding of human frailties is razor-sharp. Her latest collection of stories, “Who Will Make the Pancakes,” from local comics publisher Fantagraphics, explores the tricky terrain of parenthood, longing and love with nuance and empathy.
The joys and burdens of caregiving feature prominently in several stories, including “Watergate Sue,” which was serialized in The New York Times Magazine’s Funny Pages section in 2007. The story toggles between the present day, where Sue, a young woman trying to get pregnant, presses her mother, Eve, for details on her conception and birth, and 1973, where Eve, a young mother, is obsessed with the Watergate hearings and ambivalent about a second pregnancy.
“Arctic Play,” an anticipated new release from local artist Mita Mahato, is years in the making, inspired by Mahato’s experience with an artist’s residency through the Norwegian Arctic by sailing ship. Mahato, a Black Earth fellow, thinks deeply about environmental destruction and our ailing earth.
Building stories through layered patterns of collected papers, tissue, plastic, carefully selected cut paper images, line drawings and text, she propels you into a very active reading experience. The book is divided into three sections, like theatrical acts, with descriptions of the ship, water and everything she sees and hears. The final act features a polar bear, the heavy symbol of the disappearing landscape. Mahato writes, “ … I am always remembering from a state of loss.”
Like Mahato, Sarah Leavitt uses comics to explore difficult topics. Dealing with the loss of her partner of 22 years via medically assisted death in “Something, Not Nothing: A Story of Grief and Love,” she draws, writes and allows herself to play among panels, looking to order and process her grief. How does grief show itself? How does one draw it?
Sarah, the curly-haired emotive character, moves us through the story, but there are also panels of dramatic color changes, jagged angry lines and a simply drawn horse. As Leavitt shares her grief through abstract visual language, she enlists the reader to see it through to the end.
Director of the groundbreaking documentary “Afro-Punk” and a co-founder of the Afropunk Festival, James Spooner has uplifted Black punk musicians and fans for decades. But the vibrant, thriving Black punk community he helped document and build wasn’t always easy to find.
In his gritty, strikingly illustrated graphic memoir, “The High Desert,” Spooner describes his search for mentors and connection as a young biracial punk growing up in a small California town in the late 1980s. Casual racism was an everyday occurrence inside and outside the tiny local punk scene, but Spooner built relationships that would shape the course of his life.
Ahn’s delicately drawn illustrations, colored with moody, single-hued washes, evoke the tensions that Ahn experiences between his family’s expectations of financial success, and his desire to help the low-income, multiracial communities most impacted by climate change.
Based on research and her own experiences drawing with kids of all ages, art teacher and comic artist Cara Bean’s “Here I Am, I Am Me” illustrates ways for youth to better understand their changing brain chemistry during adolescence.
Through clean lines and expressive illustrations, Bean explains words that get thrown at kids, like “trauma,” “coping” and “stigma,” and offers strategies for understanding stress in the body and calming yourself. This book has the power to help kids through a confusing time in their lives with knowledge they might not know how to ask for.
Leave a Comment