Artists bring elves, magic watches to life
The Mid-Missouri Comics Collective meets once a month to share work.
Published Nov. 6, 2007
The Cherry Street Artisan gets a little graphic on the first Sunday of each month.
Don't worry, though. It's totally clean.
This past Sunday, The Artisan played host to seven members of the Mid-Missouri Comics Collective, a group of comic book artists and aficionados in the Columbia area. But Josh Nichols, who has been a member for two years, said the group isn't as official as the name implies.
"We're just an informal group," Nichols said. "We don't pay dues or anything. It's just a chance to get together to draw and chill."
Nichols, who said he has been drawing since childhood, graduated from Missouri State University with a bachelor's degree in graphic design.
Nichols said his favorite thing about the coalition is getting to meet and work with other artists in the area.
"Usually, it's kind of an antisocial activity, but we make it social," Nichols said. "It's good to have peers to bounce ideas off of."
One of the ways the members of the coalition get to literally sketch out a unique idea together is through a sort of artistic relay they call "comic jam."
"Somebody draws a panel, passes it off and somebody draws the next one," Nichols said.
Two members of the coalition said they use the community to reach new creative levels.
Aaron Reese and Scott Schmidt, both students at Columbia College, make up an artist-writer duo that creates original graphic novels.
"We try to incorporate a lot of aspects from literature because we're English majors," Reese said. "We draw inspiration from anything from Master and Commander, or really any type of naval warfare, to things like Indiana Jones. We don't do superheroes."
This Sunday, Reese and Schmidt were working on an adventure comic entitled "Terra Incognita," which Schmidt explained means "unknown lands."
Schmidt writes the captions for Reese's art.
In "Terra Incognita," it seems as though Schmidt has to squeeze chicken-scratch text between the looming, almost monstrous characters.
"That's the biggest challenge you have," Schmidt said. "There's such a structure and there aren't 15 pages."
Schmidt and Reese said half of the story in a graphic novel is told through art.
One of the main responsibilities of the written story is to help with the passage of time.
"Say one block is your character right now and the next block is him 15 minutes later," Schmidt said. "You have to show what's happened in that span of time and confine it to the tiny space in a caption."
Just down the table, another member of the coalition, Kelly Major, was working on an original comic called "Elves Happen."
"It's about a high-school student who ends up with an elf living in her house," Major said. "Go figure."
Major said she first heard about the Mid-Missouri Comics Collective because her mom was an artist in the group.
Major recently participated in the 24 Hour Comics Day event with other members of the coalition.
The rules sound simple enough: 24 hours to make a 24-page comic from scratch. But Nichols, who worked with a fellow artist who simply goes by Winter, said it's not as easy as it sounds.
"We did it for 12 hours because we're wusses," Nichols said.
Nichols and Winter created a comic called "The Watch" that acts as a two-part flip book.
Both sides tell the tale of a magical watch that transports its owner to a desert, complete with talking animals and a cowboy with a vendetta against the innocent protagonist.
Nichols said the contest was more of an exercise in creativity.
"It's kind of a grueling session of comic creating because you start from scratch," Nichols said. "You're not gonna create anything award-winning per se."
Reese and Schmidt said they are also looking ahead to future contests to showcase their work.
The duo is working on a graphic novel to submit to Dark Horse Comics, the graphic novel publisher responsible for animated phenomena such as Sin City and 300.
"We're probably more confident than we should be," Schmidt said.