Shaenon K. Garrity is an award-winning cartoonist and scriptwriter whose work includes the online comics Narbonic, Li’l Mell, Smithson and Skin Horse. She works as a manga editor for Viz Media and the content editor of the webcomics site ModernTales.com. Her writing on comics appears in The Comics Journal, Otaku USA and Comixology.com.

For decades comic books and graphic novels have struggled to find legitimacy as both art and literature. Recognizing comics as a medium and not a genre is crucial to the expansion of the art form, and creators like Daniel Duford have ventured outside the conventions of the form to expand the possibilities of the medium. Ultimately, comics are a visual medium that uses images, often in conjunction with words, to tell stories that have traditionally been limited to a series of pages bound together in a book format. But with films based on popular comic book characters and the advent of web comics, the medium has already proven it can exist out the traditional paradigm.
Heavily influenced by the comic books he read in his youth, the pulp adventures of costumed superheroes have had a profound impact on Duford’s art. He explains on his website, “As a kid, my favorite superheroes were the “big men” The Incredible Hulk, The Swamp Thing, Colossus, Thing, etc. All of these big men were ultra-masculine powerhouses whose elemental urges dwarfed their reason. These comic book strong men provided a catalyst for the questions that concern my current pieces.”

Duford has taken the basic principals of the comic book narrative- multiple images used to tell a story- and applied that to a variety of mediums. His recent work has explored the differences between strength and power and the ever present contentiousness between physicality and spirituality, both recurring themes within the world of superheroes. At the same time, while retaining some of the narrative principals of comic books, Duford’s explorations in other mediums requires an interpretive participation by the viewer, which in turn transforms his work from commercial art to fine art.
Part of what makes Duford’s work so compelling is that he diligently works to expand the medium that inspires him, without denying the original source of the inspiration. His “essential” reading list is an eclectic mix that includes traditional superhero fare such as Batman: Year One by Frank Miller and David Mazzuchelli, The Saga of the Swamp Thing by Alan Moore and John Totleben, and The New X-Men by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely, as well as more alternative offerings like Carol Swain’s Foodboy, Ben Katchor’s The Jew of New York, Chester Brown’s Louis Riel, and Black Hole by Charles Burns.

A teacher at the Pacific Northwest College of Art, Duford will be an instructor in PNCA’s Graphic Novel Intensive this summer. “My class will explore the different ways that stories are told visually,” he says. “The class will explore ways of taking the comic off the page and experiment with narrative structure.”

Artwork by: Jefferson Powers, Shaenon Garrity and Daniel Duford