Cartoonist is back with ‘Drew and Jot’
Eisner-winning artist’s superheroes are regular kids
Award-winning artist. Comic-book publisher. Co-owner of his own small chain of shops, one each in three states. He doesn’t run around in a cape nor sport a mask, but Art Baltazar wears many professional hats.
For his literal sartorial choices, Baltazar tends toward fedoras and flat hats, like newsboy caps. “I think I have 63 hats. I counted them recently,” he says. “I just love dressing up. When I do school visits, I like to dress up. I don’t want to look like everyone’s dad or neighbor. When I go out with my wife, I dress up too, even if we’re just going to Buffalo Wild Wings.”
As the new year begins, the Streamwood resident adds another feather to his creator’s cap: A brand-new solo project, “Drew and Jot: Dueling Doodles,” was just published. Within its 200 or so pages, writer-artist Baltazar takes his utterly delightful cartooning to new dimensions, crafting a tale within a tale when two middle-school boys create their own comic book — a project complicated by a kid sister who starts scribbling in their notepads.
Baltazar had just seen an advance copy before he chatted with the Tribune by phone in late December, a few days before his 51st birthday. “To see it in hardcover was pretty cool,” the writer-artist says. He was especially excited by the reception the book got at home from his two adolescents, ages 12 and 16: “My kids are fighting over who gets to read it first.”
Although Baltazar has been creating original characters in DIY comics since he was a youth himself, his most celebrated comic books so far involve beloved superheroes that everyone knows. Which makes sense, because Baltazar’s own origin story is closely tied to those characters.
A South Side native, he grew up near Sox Park, which he still calls “Comiskey.” His dad worked the graveyard shift at Sears, which meant they spent time together during the day before little Art started kindergarten. “He’d draw with me — Ernie and Bert, Batman and Robin. I loved those drawings. But then he started working day shifts, so I had to draw things myself. I thank Sears for giving me my comic career.”
Eventually he started acquiring comic books, from Justice League of America to Richie Rich — but it wasn’t enough for the burgeoning artist to merely read them. He customized them too: “I remember on ‘Spider-Man,’ some artist wouldn’t draw enough webs on his face, so I’d put in new webs with pen or pencil. And I re-stapled them when they fell apart.”
Baltazar is now patriarch to his own close-knit family: his wife Rose, their two teenagers and a grown stepson. All five regularly spend time together; when we spoke, a few days before Christmas, Baltazar expressed enthusiasm that they were going together to see “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.” Of course, Baltazar has turned his passion for geek culture into a career.
A rising star in 2003 when he first got published in Disney Adventures, Baltazar’s first huge hit came in 2008, when he and partner Franco Aureliani (who goes by just “Franco”) reinterpreted DC Comics’ Teen Titans from angsty action heroes into Tiny Titans, fun young kids attending Sidekick Elementary. The award-winning comic series captures the same sort of multiple-level magic that makes the Muppets and Pixar so successful: exuberant art for children that also cleverly entertains grown-ups.
In 2012, Baltazar added “proprietor” to his list of professional achievements. That spring, the first Aw Yeah Comics opened, brightening up downtown Skokie with its primarycolored walls bursting with white stars — and Action Cat, a character Baltazar created, painted onto the door as greeter. Two years later, the Aw Yeah brand of whimsy extended throughout the Oakton shopping district when Baltazar and another artist painted 15 hydrants, with the village’s encouragement, to represent various superheroes (plus a droid or two tossed in for good measure).
Because many comics shops had long catered to a narrower but richer customer base of adult collectors, Aw Yeah Comics felt like a burst of fresh air. “We wanted our store to be the place where a kid gets their first comic,” Baltazar says. “When you walk in our store, you’re part of our world. And you’re encouraged to loiter.” The not-sosecret headquarters for comics fans was so successful it expanded into two other states: If you ever take a road trip heading east from Skokie, you could stop into an Aw Yeah Comics in Muncie, Indiana, and another in Harrison, New York.
The locations aren’t centered in big cities, but they’re connected to the store owners’ roots in the comics business. Baltazar and Franco both dreamed of having their own comics shop, but they were busy writing and drawing — winning two Eisners, the industry’s Pulitzers, for Tiny Titans and a third for Itty Bitty Hellboy, another early reader comic book. Their collaborations happen despite long distance: Baltazar lives in northwest suburban Streamwood, while Franco lives in Harrison, about an hour northeast of Manhattan. (The glue holding the shops together is the stores’ third partner, Marc Hammond, who focuses exclusively on the business.)
In addition to expanding one shop into a tiny national chain, the team also self-published its own line of comics. Deciding to spin Action Cat and his anthropomorphic buddies into their own limited series, they launched a Kickstarter campaign in February 2013. “We asked for $15,000 to publish six issues, and we got funded in less than eight hours,” Baltazar says. They ended up extending the goal and raised more than $47,000 from 1,100 backers. Many of the funnybook adventures are set in Skokie and involve the comics shop.
The success doesn’t surprise Heidi MacDonald, onetime editor at both DC Comics and Publishers Weekly who now covers the comics biz on her own site, The Beat. She remembers first meeting Baltazar and Franco in Chicago, during a comics/pop-culture convention. “I had dinner with them,” she recalls, “and found them as completely hilarious in person as their work suggested.
“Kids still like print comics,” MacDonald continues. “Anecdotal, yes, but the kids I know who are always fiddling on tablets still like physical books and comics. And it is hard to overestimate the success of kids’ comics in bookstores in recent years. … The comics shops that have survived almost all have very well curated kids’ sections.”
One sea change in comics for kids — a trend Baltazar had predicted — is the shift away from monthly comics to thicker volumes. “Publishers want the 100page volume, the graphic novel,” he says — volumes such as “Drew and Jot: Dueling Doodles,” the first part of a three-book series with Boom Studios.
The story-within-a-story element to “Drew and Jot” enables Baltazar to play with his art style. To illustrate the pages drawn by the kids, he scanned ruled notebook paper to use as the background of the boys’ sketchbooks, then he drew some elements in crayon and scanned that too. It’s an idea that’s been in the works for about 15 years, since his son was a baby. “I wanted to see if I could whip up a comic while my son was still napping, so I got notebooks and markers and crayons and challenged myself. I drew it real fast, in like an hour and a half.”
He takes special pride in creating his own original work, which includes another series of graphic novels about Gilbert, the little merman. But Baltazar hasn’t stopped playing in other publishers’ toyboxes: Later in 2020, DC Comics will release “ArkhaManiacs,” another playful, G-rated take from Baltazar and Franco on famous characters — this time, specifically the ones in the Batman universe.
As he currently works on “Drew and Jot,” volume two, he admits to a bit of professional pride. “I think ‘Drew and Jot’ is the best book I’ve ever done,” he says. “It’s so unique-looking. I love it so much, mostly because they’re my own characters.” Most of all, he’s excited for 2020 to unfold and his new creations to appear in the world: “I can’t wait for all these projects to be over, so I can read the books.”
Baltazar will appear at 7 p.m., Jan. 23, at Anderson’s Bookshop, 123 W. Jefferson Ave., Naperville.