"Hidden Dominion" early looks

Working to create a robust sense of visual place

Working as a freelance cartoonist is an uneven life, to say the least. When it comes to earning a living, there are times of the year where there are more options, and other times when things go quiet. The Summer is obviously pretty quiet in terms of school visits, as well as what interaction I have with the publishing industry, but this year that suits me just fine, as I am knee-deep in work on my new middle-grade graphic novel, The Hidden Dominion of Geordie James, and lots of time to spend working on drawing pages is exactly what I need.

While I am a long way away from being capable of giving the good “elevator pitch” on this story without sounding like a raving lunatic (it’s one of the hardest things for me), I do know clearly that this is a story about our places within various worlds (in the context of the book, the main character spends as much time in a complex virtual world as he does in the real one), and depicting rich and robust environments to surround him is what I’m working hard to pull off.

It’s a bit of a challenge for me, because while I consider myself a perfectly capable cartoonist, drawing richly detailed complex environments isn’t what I often do in my comics. Most of my shorter cartoon essays are purposefully sparse, I generally lean in to the idea that you don’t have to worry so much about perfecting your time-consuming craft to make comics, I often espouse the idea that you only have to put in enough sweat and tears into your drawings as will make them read clearly to your reader. But for this story, a concrete sense of place is important, and I’m having to push myself to get there. I am pleased with how some of these drawings are coming out, but also reminding myself that I still have the coloring phase of the project to really bring these environments to life.

Cartooning Lessons with Mike Dawson

I found a little time this past week to give my School Assemblies and Cartooning Workshops website a little bit of a face-lift. I am currently booking events for the 2024-2025 school year. This will be the third academic year where I am traveling out to speak to elementary and middle-school students, and this is definitely the first time I’ve actually got quite a few events lined up before the end of Summer has even arrived. Usually the bulk of what I do is scheduled on a rolling basis, with media specialists and PTA chairs reaching out as the year progresses. It’s nice to feel like word of mouth has been solid enough that I’m now putting things on the calendar so much further in advance.

Speaking of Cartooning Workshops, I believe I mentioned in a previous update that I took part in a great day-long comics festival at the Metuchen Public Library earlier in the Summer. Book-agent extraordinaire, Janna Morishima was the person behind organizing that event, and she wrote a fantastic blog entry about that experience for Kids Comics Unite: How To Organize a Library Comics Fest. It’s very inspiring and has me thinking about maybe trying to put something similar together myself.

The photo above was taken on the day of the fest, and features me alongside comics-makers Steve Metzger, Brian Schatell, and Debbie Fong. The photo particularly delights me, as we’re standing in front of a painting that I made back during my Mason Gross days, a pop-art inspired appropriation of a Walt Simonson comic book panel taken directly from an old issue of Fantastic Four (#339 to be exact). It’s a very art-school piece, you can see I’ve cropped off poor Thor’s head other appendages, the idea being that I am “objectifying” him in the way female comic characters would have been objectified in comic books published at the time. It cracks me up that we are all posing in front of the piece.

Thanks as always for reading along!

Mike