Tag Archives: Illustration

November 10, 2025 · 2:30 pm

Dalton Webb (1972-2025) cartoonist and illustrator

Dalton Webb

It’s the hardest obit to ever write, that of someone you’ve known for more years than you care to count, a beloved kindred spirit, my friend in life and forever, Dalton Webb. There’s a whole other world out there beyond social media and the internet that we touch, feel and experience. Not so long ago, we used to be in that world so much more than we seem to be now. Go further back, and the world becomes more and more real. In our youth, or relative youth, Dalton and I navigated a more real world. Yeah, I think it’s safe to say that. I was the older guy, by a decade or so, but, whatever. Our paths crossed, and once they did, we became fast friends. Dalton, being younger, perhaps was more prone to want to be a part of whatever the next big thing was at the time. I guess that was mastering that new up-and-coming Adobe graphic design software. We met as students of an illustration class. This, of course, back then, was in-person. There wasn’t any other option back at the start of the 21st century. We were both coming from different backgrounds and circumstances but, at that time, we were both living life by the seat of our pants, hanging on by our fingernails, on budgets so tight it could make your head spin. We got to talking and then more talking. It turned out that we had a lot in common, like an interest in the metaphysical and supernatural. And we were both Texas boys who decided to seek our fame and fortune in what was still then the wild and untamed hipster universe of Seattle, circa 2000, still trembling over what grunge had wrought. I’d originally moved to Seattle back in 1993. Kurt Cobain was still among us. In those years, I’d already lived a lot of life, even leaving Seattle for Spokane for a while. Anyway, we got to chatting and discovered we both were grappling, in very different yet very similar ways, with finding success as artists, or, at the very least, making our lives more artful! We both loved art in all its many forms and we had a keen interest in the comics art form. Lucky for us, Seattle was, and still is, a hotbed of activity for all kinds of creative people: musicians and writers; painters and photographers; and, most definitely, cartoonists.

Wally Mammoth, written by Corey R. Tabor and illustrated by Dalton Webb

The history of comics in Seattle is a whole thing all to itself and I can tell you that Dalton and I found our way into the very thick of it all. We stood our ground, we were part of it all and we evolved. We both created zines, comics, illustrations and did our fair share of networking. Fast forward a couple of decades and we matured as serious contenders. More recently, in more receptive times for both of us, we each got picked up by publishers. Very different books and set of circumstances but we could both say that we’d arrived. I have had a very busy year and I think that partly explains why I’d been so out of the loop with Dalton lately. I am thrilled about the new book (written by Corey. R. Tabor, illustrated by Dalton Webb) that just came out, Wally Mammoth: The Sled Race, published by HarperCollins, and I will provide a full review soon. I knew Dalton for so many years that, when he grew his hair long again, it wasn’t a surprise to me, as it was to newer friends. I’d known him back when it would have been a surprise to suddenly see him with short hair. I knew all sorts of things about him, and he knew all sorts of things about me. The point is that we knew each other well beyond the surface level. Heck, we were roommates for a time. We witnessed countless triumphs and failures between the two of us. So, when I moved away from Seattle a few years ago, it was hard to say goodbye and face the inevitable drifting apart. When I got a phone call from a family friend letting me know that Dalton had passed away, it hit me like a mack truck. What?! Where was this coming from? The last I’d heard about Dalton was from an Instagram post announcing the Wally Mammoth book, part of a new series. I just assumed this was the beginning of some well-earned career milestones. If I kept up with Facebook, which I do not, I would have learned that Dalton had been facing health issues. Sadly, we live in a world where it is assumed that everyone is connected to Facebook. It has been baked-in and there’s no going back, unless we really want to. Well, like a number of people, I don’t subscribe to the Facebook hive mindset and so I guess I miss a few things, but I never imagined Dalton was in such a bad situation. I’m thinking this wasn’t news that he would have readily shared with anyone. But I can only speculate about this most recent period. And it hurts that I somehow fell out of the loop.

illustration by Dalton Webb

Dalton was no hack artist, and neither am I! That distinction goes to the heart of our bond. He truly loved the whole art of problem-solving, the entire process. Yes, amen to that. We were a few years apart in age but essentially coming at things from a Gen X ethos: keep it authentic and don’t take any guff from anyone. Now, Dalton had the gift of gab and he could shop talk with any and all industry folk. I can too but I really do best with intimate and real conversation. And I know Dalton preferred that too, that’s why we got along so well together. Dalton, at the end of the day, genuinely enjoyed talking and sharing. He adored vintage illustration techniques and would pore over a book about a legendary illustrator for hours and then, all inspired, proceed to draw for hours. He loved such illustrator-artists as Walt Kelly, Eric Carle, Carl Barks and Maurice Sendak. Dalton just needed some more time. He was well on his way.

Dalton at an art show we organized.

Dalton was a lot of things: down-to-earth, stubborn, competitive, whimsical, kind, gentle, mysterious, and, did I mention stubborn? Well, let’s see, here’s a story. We, now and then, would do a road trip out to take part in a comics festival with our latest works. There was the time we drove from Seattle to Vancouver, B.C. to take part in an indie comics gathering. We stayed for the after-show dinner with various cartoonists. It was getting late, and it would have been so easy to just stay the night at a hotel, but Dalton was determined to drive back the three hours to Seattle. Against my better judgement, I agreed and hopped into the driver’s seat of my car. We were making steady progress on I-5 when Dalton insisted he wanted to give me a break, let me sleep, as he drove the rest of the way. I didn’t feel especially drowsy but I relented. Once I was riding shotgun, I let myself relax and doze off. No sooner was I in a deep sleep than I was awoken by a police siren and flashing lights. It turned out that Dalton had gotten drowsy and was weaving along as he was driving. By some miracle, the police officer let us go with just a warning! Even when he wasn’t trying, Dalton seemed to always charm his way out of things. I know he’s laughing at this.

Grasshopper by Dalton Webb

Well, as I was saying earlier, Dalton, the younger one of us, was a bit more eager to keep up with the latest trends. I did what suited me but was content to, more or less, miss the boat on some things, like Facebook, which, I love to point out, was originally intended as a way for fraternities to organize keggers. It wasn’t meant to be taken seriously as part of someone’s day-to-day activity but that is what it has become because we just don’t live as much of our lives in the real world as we once did. Anyway, when I got that phone call from a family friend letting me know that Dalton had died, I wasn’t struck with a need to post about it anywhere, let alone Facebook. You know why? Well, I just got a special phone call intended for certain people, right? In the real world, you readily appreciate the chaos and pain in a time of grief. What you do is let family lead the way and just wait. But, once news got out about Dalton’s death, it managed to make its way into the Facebook ecosystem. And, you know, worst things have happened. Dalton loved Facebook and, I imagine, he probably could get a chuckle out of the buzz of activity about him. But, he’s on a higher plane of existence now. And he most likely would get a chuckle over how utterly irrelevant so many things really are. Facebook is what it is. Maybe I’m supposed to embrace it more in the future–or maybe not. Dalton, I’m sure, is laughing his ass off that I’m freaking out over Facebook in the first place and he’d be right. He was, and remains, right about so many things.

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Tagged as comics, Dalton Webb, Entertainment, Illustration, Media, Obituaries, Pop Culture, Publishing

May 21, 2024 · 7:41 am

Mark Twain’s War Prayer, Illustrated by Seymour Chwast book review

Mark Twain’s War Prayer, Illustrated by Seymour Chwast. Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2024. 96pp, $22.99.

Guest review by Paul Buhle

The literary-political Establishment fairly well managed, for three or four generations, to hide or to minimize Mark Twain’s later-life antiwar devotions. The beloved writer, considered by readers and critics alike as the creator of the singular US classic, Huckleberry Finn, devoted much of his prose energy in later years to denouncing wars in general and the vastly murderous American assault on the Philippines in particular.

It was no doubt the Vietnam War, with the vast military assault and chemical warfare sidebars against large parts of Southeast Asia, that brought to light Twain’s writings previously considered marginal, old age ramblings. Twain knew what he was writing about, and he knew how to say it in painfully funny ways.

“The War Prayer,” actually written in 1905 but unpublished, remained in family archives after his death in 1910 as dangerous for his literary reputation. It reached readers rather obscurely in 1916, tacked onto another Twain essay, and took on a new relevance when narrated for PBS viewers in 1981. It has emerged repeatedly in short films since then, but most notably as an animated short in 2007, narrated by actor-activist Peter Coyote and starring no one less than the Beat poet and bohemian antiwar champion Lawrence Ferlinghetti, as the war-mongering parson.

Chwast is a fascinating and formidable artist to take on the task of illustration, in what must be regarded as an act of devotion to Twain. A mainstream illustrator publishing in the “slicks” while still in his teens, Chwast did work for the New York Times and Esquire among other places, also creating a plethora of commercial designs from packaging to magazine covers to Broadway show posters. He and a sometime workmate at Esquire, Edward Sorel (himself later a Nation magazine regular) started their own operation, Push Pin Studios, in 1957 along with rising stars Milton Glaser and Robert Ruffins. It would be too much to say that Push Pin transformed exhibit advertising, but not too much to say that together with other artists, this team moved commercial art into new zones, more playful, more interesting than before.

Ever on the progressive side, Chwast took on the present task without adding a single comment of his own. All Twain Text and not so much of that. After an excerpt from the famous caustic essay “The Lowest Animal” (a date of the essay might have been helpful but might artistically intrusive, and anyway remains uncertain even to scholars), we have a hundred pages of quotes running from a few words to a short paragraph.

Chwast has evidently thrown himself into the work with abandon. Early pages look like circus posters, announcing wars proudly like the American war posters of old, with wordless, cartoony facing pages. Later, he passes heavily into pastels, the voice of the prophet (seen bearded) in suggesting what the “voice of the prophet” means for those who pray for military victory.

What follows, for almost the rest of the book, is Chwast’s drawings of war and destruction, predominantly in stark blacks and whites. Then more color pages of war’s victims looking to the heavens, “imploring thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it—for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord. Blast their hopes, blight their lives…” (pp.72-77) and so onward.

This is Twain’s explanation or exploration of religion as basically a cheat, especially Judeo-Christian religion for the reason that he knew it best. A cheat in many things, but above all in the praises of war, the warriors, humanity in war, and so on. We could add, into the endlessly terrifying night of our present world, as a particular kind of Jewish artist might see the misuses of religion now.

This is something new for Twain-illustrated books, despite the many earlier illustrations of his works. We see again, in Twain’s spare prose that no better American writer has ever emerged. A novelist who still makes vaunted modernists like Saul Bellow read like amateurs, and whose caustic attack on falsities finds an equal only in the best moments of Kurt Vonnegut.

Chwast has a past dossier of recaptured and reworked images from a thousand sources that have crossed his eyes. Never has his political energy been on display so clearly and with so much concentrated energy. Mark Twain’s War Prayer is a book horribly relevant, horribly significant in its art and for today’s world.

Paul Buhle

Hurricane Nancy: A JOYFUL and FUN Holiday Season

Let’s Have a Great 2024! Color by Henry Chamberlain.

This just in from the news desk at Comics Grinder, our intrepid artist friend, Hurricane Nancy is here to report that all is well and is wishing you all a great new year and holiday!

Visit Hurricane Nancy here and pick up some art soon! Let’s try to keep it trippy and real in 2024!

Have a JOYFUL and FUN Holiday season!!!

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Tagged as Art, Artist, Christmas, comics, Comix, Drawing, Entertainment, Holidays, Hurricane Nancy, Illustration, Pop Culture, Underground Comix

November 25, 2023 · 2:45 pm

Anatomy of a Painting: Big Girl in Woods by Henry Chamberlain

Gaining a foothold on a new work.

***

Getting Closer to What You Want.

Here are a couple of process samples of a painting I’m working on. The idea is of a lone figure running away. She is a looming figure. The landscape is desolate and foreboding. Will she make it to her destination? Ideas come to us when we least expect it. I love the figure in all its aspects. Whenever possible, I will draw from life. I’ve been a model too and having that experience, I think, helps to elevate the work. After a certain point, you have developed so much muscle memory of drawing that you often will simply draw from memory and that results in some of the most spontaneous and authentic work.

With that in mind, I’m always open to commissions and have work for sale, either originals or prints. Just contact me for details. You can contact me here. And you can see some more of what I do here. I’m still considering what to sell and what not to sell. This project I’m showing you now will eventually be turned into a print. I will be busy next year, and the following years, with more comics and art conventions in the works. I will definitely be selling comics as well as prints at these events, etc. It just seemed a good time to post something about this activity and get the ball rolling some more. I continue to write, draw comics and make paintings!

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Tagged as Art, Artist, comics, Entertainment, graphic novels, henry chamberlain, Illustration, Media, Painting, Pop Culture, Publishing

September 16, 2023 · 9:20 am

Nick Abadzis interview: The Cartoonist Life

Meet Nick Abadzis. He’s a guy who has basically been a cartoonist all of his life, in one form or another, or maintaining that connection one way or another. Making comics, worthwhile stuff, is never a simple cakewalk. Success in comics, on the professional level, involves persistence, passion and a bit of luck.

Excerpt from Laika.

Nick got his name on the map, at least in the United States, with the publication of his graphic novel, Laika (First Second). It is the story of the first Earthling (dog) to be sent into outer space. Laika was launched into Earth Orbit aboard Sputnik II on November 3, 1957. The story of this Soviet dog cosmonaut is poignant to say the least and certainly just waiting to be adapted into a thoughtful and inventive graphic novel. Laika went on to in win a number of awards, including the coveted comics industry Eisner Award in 2008 for Best Publication for Teens.

Nick chats about the early days, circa 1980s-90s, going back to his first major work in comics, Hugo Tate. It’s a story that grows darker and more interesting as it unfolds. You won’t easily find it in the States without a bit of digging but that may change soon enough. Nick thinks it might be due for a revisit and reprint. Remembrance of things past led us to the glory days of British comics and comics journalism as exemplified by Escape magazine, founded by Paul Gravett and Peter Stanbury.

Our conversation also covered a bit of shop talk about the world of graphic recording. It’s not as simple and easy as just drawing pictures of a business meeting. But, if you are a particular kind of cartoonist, one who really knows how to pare down to the essentials and, most important, knows how to listen, you may have a future as a graphic recorder. That said, if you have the stomach for that, then maybe you have the stamina to pursue one graphic novel after another. I always find it a little amusing, perhaps even troubling, that some people think they might someday take up the goal of creating a graphic novel. Honestly, your odds are maybe better that you’ll follow through on writing a prose novel rather than a proper full length graphic novel. But live and learn I always say. Anyway, we have a bit of fun chatting about the curious world of visual storytelling.

A sneak preview of the new book!

Last, but not least, Nick provides us with a sneak preview of his new and forthcoming graphic novel project. It is about race and it has been years in the making. What began as an idea to explore the life of a mixed race couple evolved into a give-and-take discussion of how to expand the narrative. Initially, the book was inspired by the relationship between Nick and his partner, Angela. Nick is of Greek heritage; Angela is of African heritage. The editorial process took over. There were numerous discussions about combining the subject of race with immigration and that led to a number of drafts. Ultimately, the book came back to the original concept. This particular project evolved over the course of 14 years, about as long as Nick has been a graphic recorder. In fact, during the editorial discussions, he would graphic record them. Just goes to show you how important persistence and passion are in this business!

Find Nick Abadzis here.

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Filed under Comics, First Second, graphic novels, Graphic Recording, Interviews

Tagged as British Comics, Cartoonists, Comics Grinder, Comix, Entertainment, Graphic Recording, henry chamberlain, Illustration, Interviews, Media, Nick Abadzis, Pop Culture, Publishing

August 7, 2023 · 12:00 pm

ALISON by Lizzy Stewart graphic novel review

Alison. By Lizzy Stewart. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 168pp, $24.99.

Guest Review by Paul Buhle

This quite wonderful comic is a match for Armed with Madness: The Surreal Leonora Carringon (also published this year, by SelfMadeHero). Both books are by British artists/scriptwriters. They belong together for at least one intriguing reason: the young women artists in question find their fate, at least in the first phase of creative effort, by hooking up with famous middle-aged fellows who take them as lovers/mistresses but also urge them to practice their developing craft. In the end, the women need to make their own way.

Armed With Madness is a real-life story, with rich-girl Leonora Carrington both aided and exploited by the famous surrealist painter Max Ernst, during the 1930s. Carrington leaves England for Spain, suffers multiple breakdowns as the Spanish Civil War explodes around her, and ends up in Mexico, an elderly lady re-discovered by new generations. Alison offers us a fictional version two or three generations later. A young woman growing up in Devon takes and then abandons a husband, at the invitation of a visiting, also romantic and famous, middle-aged painter. She goes on, with his sponsorship, to her artist’s life in London.

Lizzy Stewart, a professional illustrator of children’s books, would not have been considered a comic artist a few decades ago. Walls have broken down since then, obviously, and the use of sequential panels to convey a story easily makes the grade as comic art. Actually, the result here looks more than a little like the drawings of Jules Feiffer in various recent works by the veteran artist. But I digress.

The story is drawn and told quite wonderfully, with the occasional, stunning color page or pages set off from the grey wash of most of the book. It is easy to be convinced that this young woman is flattered to be asked to sit for a portrait, first clothed, then other portraits unclothed, as a relationship develops. It is equally easy to be convinced that she is one of a considerable line of young women falling into the waiting arms of an academic painter at the peak of his BBC-level respectability. He had promised to guide her development as an artist, and for all his drawbacks, he remains determined to do so. He also pays her rent.

Throughout, and this is certainly the feminist angle, Alison is seeking—fumbling and stumbling along the way—to realize herself in every sense. That she had been a hopelessly bored (and childless) housewife in Devon, became a frustrated if developing artist in Bloomsbury and a woman making her own way step by step, is all wonderfully conveyed. Born in 1959 and gone to London in the early 1980s, she finds herself in the midst of radical politics, anti-war, anti-nuke and anti-racist movements, not long before Margaret Thatcher comes to power, ruthlessly crushing all opposition. Worse, Thatcher so successfully converts the political system that even future, corrupted Labour Party leaders accept “privatization” and the practical eclipse of the caring social state as a finality. What can art mean here?

The brevity of the young artist’s wider, militant political commitment may offer insight into the artist-in-progress. Or perhaps we see Lizzy Stewart’s own observation of changing radical politics at a certain moment of time. Serious commitments to art, including the teaching of art to younger generations, merge into the critical concerns in the era of AIDS. She watches as disease and death march through her new milieu. A desperate politics of caring emerges as a considerable portion of the London art world literally finds community through the struggle for life.

It should not give away too much about Alison to reveal that she finds her own companion in a same-sex relationship that is also interracial and global in its connections. Perhaps our protagonist was going in that direction all the time, without realizing her own path. All this is conveyed by Lizzy Stewart with such painstaking care that we find ourselves flowing along, discovering and rediscovering the narrative as the artist discovers her talent and herself. Near the end, she is the learner who has become the renowned teacher.

Alison’s return in something like middle age to her own Dorset is wonderfully visualized and narrated here. Temperamentally a million miles from London, she experiences a return to the natural beauty that she now appreciates afresh, within her own sense of art in the world and in her world.

There is a great deal more to be said here about the young artist’s path. We learn at one point that her older lover, for instance, had the upper-class background to have his talent recognized in childhood, to be trained in formal terms all the way along. By contrast, Alison must undertake a crash course and find another path to realize her talents. Perhaps this detail offers us the secret of Lizzy Stewart herself, a children’s book illustrator, using comics for story telling. Like others today, she is struggling to create something fresh through a merger of forms that become recognizable through the work of the new generations of artists and comics.

Paul Buhle’s latest comic is an adaptation of W.E.B. Du Bois’s classic Souls of Black Folk, by artist Paul Peart Smith (Rutgers University Press).

Hurricane Nancy: Keep Dancing!

#453 “When they put you down keep on dancing.”

Hurricane Nancy honors us once again by sharing some of her art. This is #453, entitled, “When they put you down keep on dancing.” All sorts of people can try to put us down. They think they can mistreat others just for the fun of it. That’s when it takes those of us with grace and dignity to persevere, and keep on dancing.

Colorized version!

Be sure to visit Hurricane Nancy’s website where you can purchase her art!

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Tagged as Art, Artist, comics, Comix, Entertainment, Fine Art, Hurricane Nancy, Illustration, Media, Pop Culture, Publishing, Underground Comics

May 7, 2023 · 3:25 pm

Pop Culture Super Sleuth: Episode 1

This is the first installment of . . . Pop Culture Super Sleuth . . .

“I’ve been a blogger for almost as long as I’ve been a cartoonist. And then I became a pop culture super sleuth . . . “

I’m building up steam on this new project. And maybe a little shy. You’ll have to tell me what you think. The character isn’t necessarily me, per se, but a sort of alter ego. It’s fun and it’s all possible in the wonderful world of comics. Am I right? You betcha, I’m right!

Hurricane Nancy: Love is Love

#443 Kisses for Valentines.

Hurricane Nancy presents a beautiful work of art on the subject of love. In her own words: “I was taught as a child only to love and kiss those in my body type and social group, then in the ’60s I became a hippie and could kiss anybody, then later realized I am a spirit, not the body, so kissing and love is unlimited.”

I will sometimes add a splash of color to Nany’s black & white art and this one gets a tint of pink!

Be sure to visit Hurricane Nancy’s website where you can purchase her art!