Comic book culture rocks artists
Characters and themes of comic book culture inspire three local artists
JON Garner’s art pulls people in like a tractor beam.
The Houston artist frequently draws a crowd at his Comicpalooza booth. People are caught first by the art itself: bright spray-painted pop culture iconography spread across well-worn slats of wood. But they also are charmed by Garner himself, a youthful 41-year-old occasionally clad in a robe and Wookiee slippers. He’s void of preciousness about his work.
“All day you have kids who are told not to touch anything at the convention,” he says. “My stuff you can touch. Within reason, there are no rules. I want more people to have fun with it. And to know
what they’re seeing is uniquely Houston.”
The Deer Park native’s work is rooted in street art with its bold hues, stenciled imagery and occasional drips. But Garner doesn’t look for public canvases for his work, instead making his own from Houston history. He pieces together floorboards from old Houston homes that have been designated for demolition or already razed.
“It’s something tangible that was made by hand by somebody in Houston,” he says. “This isn’t something from Home Depot. It’s old wood cut by hardworking Texans between the 1910s and the 1950s. There’s texture and feeling in it. In the digital age we really like perfection. But I think there’s energy missing in a lot of that work. You can imagine Houstonians
walking on it, somebody’s baby crawling on it.”
Conventions often pull attendees through their famous guests. In its 10th year, Comicpalooza has quickly grown from a small event at an Alamo Drafthouse theater to occupying the George R. Brown Convention Center this weekend. Special guests remain one of the big baited hooks for these events. Comicpalooza has Chuck Norris as well as numerous actors from the Marvel comics universe on TV and film. But guests also can be a burden: Last month, Dallas’ Fan Expo was like a whale in a wetsuit, a chaotic mess pushing the confines of the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center thanks to big bookings like Mark Hamill and two of the leads from “The Walking Dead.”
The artist area often offers a more comfortable environment, where creative types can present their wares.
Garner’s work may be familiar to some in town, as he occasionally sets up shop with his eye-catching works on the side of Memorial. His subjects are broad: He’s made pieces with Darth Vader from “Star Wars,” and he’s done others with more detail presenting street artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, writer Hunter S. Thompson, as well as some Houston hip-hop artists. Some works are merely playful in the choice of color, others are more strikingly funny like his Stormtrooper in a mafia-blue suit and tie.
Musician Erykah Badu has bought six of his works. And Garner’s floorboard paintings helped him find other work, doing art design for restaurants like Peli Peli.
Interesting projects are now finding their way to Garner. He was given the wood from an old ranch where Willie Nelson performed regularly. Garner created a special series of Nelson paintings on them. He’s been approached by Merle Haggard’s family for a similar project.
“Americans love to upgrade,” he says. “So I’m not too worried about running out of wood.”
Quilted creations
Houston resident Andi Hamilton is another local artist who will have her work on display at Comicpalooza, which is just her second convention.
At Fan Expo last month, a man ran through the artist’s alley area when one of her quilts with a Final Fantasy motif caught his eye.
“He asked me how much it cost, and I told him,” she says. “He said, ‘Oh my god,’ and just kept running.”
Hamilton’s work covers a lot of ground that appeals to comic convention crowds, with images inspired by “Doctor Who,” “Ghost Busters,” “Star Wars” and various video games. But her work isn’t mass produced on a machine. An accountant by day, Hamilton spends her evenings measuring, cutting and stitching. One Pac-Man piece took about 24 hours. Others move a little faster, but still require 12 to 15 hours of work.
“Not everything you see at a convention is machine made,” she says. “These just take some time and effort.”
Hamilton’s entry point into quilting was through the Girl Scouts, an effort to earn a quilting patch.
“My pillow sucked,” she says. “Fortunately my great aunt Ethel was a quilter and she helped me fit it.”
She started making quilts for friends when they’d get married. Soon after, she was making quilts for babies.
“A friend suggested I try some 8-bit characters,” she says. A science fiction fan, Hamilton plotted out a TARDIS, the blue police call box/time machine from “Doctor Who.”
Like Garner’s work, Hamilton’s seeks to fuse traditions. She calls her work, “old school meets new school.”
“It was interesting to me at Fan Expo the number of people who stopped by and told me their grandmother was teaching them to quilt,” she says. “It’s time consuming, and not everybody has the patience for it. But there’s something special about it. Every one of my quilts has a flaw, I’ll admit. Nothing lines up perfectly. And those flaws are what make them one of a kind. I love that each of them has this little bit of character that makes them unique.”
Minimalist pop art
Steven Katz is another artist with work on display at Comicpalooza this weekend. His takes familiar iconography — science fiction, fantasy, horror, comic book characters — and recasts it in a minimalist manner, sometimes as vector images. Imagine Quint from “Jaws” reduced to a restroom icon and then dropped inside the shark’s jaws.
Katz’s first piece, “Prof. X,” represented the X-Men character Professor Charles Xavier as a wheelchair icon with some telepathic semicircles emanating from his head.
“It just came to me, and I thought, ‘Why doesn’t this exist in the world?’ ” he says.
The Houston native studied animation, and for years took ad agency work for commercials — mostly for oil and gas.
“I got tired of having 10 different art directors tell me 10 different things,” he says. “So I got out of that game.”
He’s been much happier since, with local comic book shops agreeing to sell his work. And conventions also have become good for his business. His price point is particularly agreeable, under $25 per piece. He thinks he could and should ask for more, but “I know you get gouged at conventions. Between parking, the door fee, food and all that stuff, I want people to be able to walk by and see something they like. Something they can buy and then just keep going on with their day.”
Katz favors bold colors for his unfussy images, like a striking piece with Finn’s Stormtrooper helmet smeared with a bloody handprint from “Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens.”
He has hundreds of other designs both completed and in development. Some are serious, but many reflect his sense of humor as a guy who once did stand-up comedy.
Katz’s first few pieces were made from stencils he designed by hand, a process that proved too slow. Now he prints his designs with a wideformat printer and then stretches the canvases himself.
The bold simplicity makes the pieces difficult to ignore, though winnowing down an idea to its essence is the tough part.
“That’s the problem with minimalism,” Katz says. “You have to convey as much information with as little information as possible.
“But the response to it is immediate. There’s a visceral quality that people react to. Minimalist pop art stuff grabs people.”