EARLY CARTOON INFLUENCES
I have been a doodler most of my life. I loved the Sunday Morning Comics growing up (Berke Breathed’s Bloom County and Bill Waterson’s Calvin & Hobbes were a few of my favorites). I took a cartooning class at the University of Washington with my dad when I was in third grade. I was the only kid in the class. That gave me some good foundations as a budding cartoonist. I never got hooked on video games like a lot of my peers did. Instead I’d pass my time doodling renditions of Garfield and Snoopy at the drawing table in my room, when I wasn’t playing outside or involved in sports (I was a child of the 80’s after all and was banned from the indoors on a sunny day). I grew up in Seattle, Washington and lived in the same neighborhood as Gary Larson, creator of The Far Side cartoons. One day I knocked on his door to request an interview for an eighth grade English paper about the “3 most fascinating people in the world”. He told me he didn’t do interviews, but hey, I met the guy!
DRAWN TO SATIRE & CARICATURE
I was always drawn (pun intended) to the satirical caricatures of Mort Drucker from Mad Magazine. I don’t know if it was the smart aleck in me or just a fascination with how a cartoon could look so much like a celebrity I could recognize. Because I couldn’t think of a good concept for my own comic strip, I was led to start producing political cartoons: one panel gags with current events as a constant stream of daily cartoon fodder. As a freshman at Boston University I started drawing a weekly editorial cartoon for their daily newspaper, The Daily Free Press. I lampooned everything from campus life to our school president to Bill Clinton and international affairs. For my sophomore year, I transferred to Western Washington University in Bellingham where I drew two political cartoons a week for the next four years for WWU’s student newspaper, The Western Front. I decided to become a Political Science major to better understand what I was opining about with pen & ink and I minored in Art to refine my creative skills with my ambitions of making a career of political cartoonery. I won some first place state awards, was runner up in a national editorial cartooning contest and self-published a book of my drawings entitled Pulp Depiction, with a foreword written by the Seattle P.I’s syndicated and Pulitzer Prize winning David Horsey (another one of my early influences).
I would go back to Seattle for summer breaks. During my first summer break I met a caricature artist who liked my work. He hired me and mentored me in drawing live caricatures. It was terrifying at first, but once I got over my trepidation it became the coolest summer job ever. After a year of working with him, he suddenly passed away and so I took over his spot on Pier 57 for the remainder of my college summers. Then half way through college I became a Christian. That’s a longer story for another time and place. But I really began to wrestle with slinging so much mud when I was supposed to be loving my neighbor. Sure, I thought, having a voice as a political cartoonist is a cool platform, but most political cartoonists have to be pretty cutting to be successful at what they do. I thought, “Maybe I should spend more time praying for our leaders than just making fun of them.” I continued to draw political cartoons for my remaining two years at Western, but decided after graduation to lay down the political cartoons to pursue full time missions and ministry. I thought about a career in animation after the Prince of Egypt came out (“Look what can be done through cartoons” I thought), but the pull to ministry was stronger and I would spend ten years in college ministry, six years in prayer ministry, another six years in two church pastoral roles and four years in overseas missions. And all that time, while I still doodled constantly on napkins, I kept my caricature superpower hidden, lest I be called out at a party and asked to draw someone on the spot when I was out of practice.
NUDGES FROM GOD TO START DRAWING AGAIN
Around 2013 I received several prophetic words about cartooning again and prophetic drawing and twice received a prophetic word about a banner over my life that reads “prophetic comics” from a guy that didn’t know me from Adam. I’m still trying to sort out what that means, but suffice it to say, it got me drawing again. While serving in missions with an organization called Youth With A Mission, I attended a 6 month animation and cartooning school in Taiwan with my family.
In the animation school we produced a culturally relevant faith-based short film for the Yakutz people of Siberia. It was a great experience, but confirmed my suspicions that animation was more tedious than I had stomach for. It felt more like computer programming to me than art. I’m open to being repursueded, but at the time I felt led to start a 6 week school called the Frontier Comics Seminar. We ran this twice in my time with YWAM, gathering artists from all over the world and produced faith-based comic books for Mongolia and India.
The comic book school I ran caught the attention of a film producer who hired me to create a companion comic book as a marketing piece for a Supernatural Thriller TV series he was producing called Even the Darkness. The 32 page comic book got me noticed by our local newspaper and I made the font page (above the fold!) after 600 people showed up at the Tulip Casino for a premiere showing of the five episodes. It made me a local celebrity for a week but sadly the show has not yet landed a streaming platform yet and so there’s currently nowhere to watch the show and our initial run of 300 or 500 comic books have all been given away and they are not currently available for purchase anywhere. Hopefully that will change soon! It was a great experience but some long lonely days for an extravert like me to be working away in my studio to produce this project.
THE REAWAKENING OF A CARICATURE ARTIST
I stepped away from YWAM during the Covid era (good times, sorry to remind us all!) and I was looking for seasonal work and thought I’d see if they were hiring people for the Northwest Washington Fair that hits our little farm town of 12,000 people and turns us into a tourist destination for ten days straight. When I realized it only paid minimum wage, I thought about seeing if they were still taking new vendors, thinking, “I bet I can do better than that with my own booth.” And the rest is history. The NWW Fair proved to be a lucrative event and my business has grown ever since. I now find somewhere to draw every weekend and get hired for events through a website called The Bash. But if you’ve found me here just click the appropriate button on my home page to book me and I won’t have to give a percentage to the Bash. (I am grateful for the exposure the Bash has given me, but you already found me, so no need for a middle man).
I currently am also a school bus driver and lead a college ministry at Bellingham Technical College but find myself most alive meeting new people and turning them into cartoons through my caricature business. When you get paid doing something you love it doesn’t really feel like work. Howard Thurman once said, “Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive and go do that. Because what the world needs is people that have come alive.” I resonate with this quote especially when applying it to caricature art.
I think of that line from the movie Chariots of Fire about the life of Eric Lindell, Scottish Olympic runner and missionary to China, where he tells his disapproving sister, “God made me for a purpose… But He also made me fast. And when I run, I feel His pleasure…”. I know God has called me to make disciples wherever I am, but He has also made me good at drawing, and when I draw people, I feel His pleasure. I’ve decided that to not lean into this gifting and calling would be to dishonor Him. And so, I am looking to let my art business become my primary focus if I can do so. Since I don’t live in a tourist destination (barring the annual Fair), I’m looking to scale my business and my impact online to the whole world through coaching aspiring artists in how to get paid doing what they love, through selling my art online (working on that one) hosting Sip & Gogh parties and eventually telling more stories through more graphic novels. If you like my work, leave a comment or commission me for an artistic project or event you are hosting. Thanks for indulging this trip down memory lane with me! And let me ask you, what makes you come alive? Then go and do that.
JHK ART 