DUNE Art Show in Seattle
Seattle cartoonists of all stripes have been gathering at a little cafe for years. It’s been a mix of aspiring, emerging, professional, and enthusiast. Over time, this frenetic energy organized into a group that met once a month. For five years, the group met at Café Racer. They socialized, they drew, and the end result was a bunch of comics that were gathered up and turned into a comic book that was published the following month. That monthly comic book was known by the gallant and nerdy name of DUNE. It was a remarkable undertaking. Sadly, Café Racer recently closed its doors leaving the group without their routine creative outlet. To honor and celebrate their collective activity, there will be an art show of DUNE comics at a pub, The Leary Traveler. The show goes up January 18th and will run for a month.
If you are in Seattle, this is a wonderful opportunity to get a taste of some local cartoonist activity or the underground comix scene, per se. In fact, there is an unusually high concentration of cartoonists in Seattle and the Pacific Northwest. That’s a subject far beyond the scope of this post and we’ll pick up on it more and more as we have over the years here at Comics Grinder. Suffice it to say, this art show is one of those special treats not to be missed.
Contributors to DUNE include well established masters of the comics medium (Roberta Gregory), painters and illustrators (John Ohannesian), brilliant young upstarts (Tom Van Deusen), exciting new talents (Gillian Rhodes, Handa, Rachel Scheer), enthused amateurs, and sometimes a non-artist or two who stopped in for beer and bravely decided to join the drawers. Sometimes the artists with the least “polish” end up turning in the pages that are the most clever, funny, and/or emotionally raw.
This show was organized by Push/Pull of Ballard, David Lasky, and Maxx Follis-Goodkind. The show poster is by comix artist Mark Falkey, who has been with DUNE since the first issue. The Leary Traveler is located at 4354 Leary Way NW in Seattle’s ‘Frelard’ neighborhood (the urban sprawl between Fremont and Ballard). The DUNE art show opening, takes place on Thursday, January 18th, from 6 to 9 pm. Expect many artists to be in attendance.
