{"id":1584,"date":"2019-10-13T08:33:27","date_gmt":"2019-10-13T13:33:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.chestercomix.com\/blog\/?p=1584"},"modified":"2019-10-13T08:33:27","modified_gmt":"2019-10-13T13:33:27","slug":"cleveland-cartooning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.chestercomix.com\/blog\/cleveland-cartooning\/","title":{"rendered":"Cleveland Cartooning"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

There <\/strong>is a Hungarian Heritage Museum and the Dettrick\nMedical History Center and a firefighting museum and, smack in the middle of\nthe modern city built by heavy manufacturing, the Dunham Tavern Museum to\nremember a couple who moved to the area in 1819.
\n
\nYou know about the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame already.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Did you know Cleveland is also the hometown of the two Jewish creators of\nSuperman?
\n
\nJoe Shuster and Jerry Siegel. They changed American pop culture. There\u2019s no\nmuseum dedicated to them or to northeast Ohio\u2019s knack for producing great\nartists in this very American art form, cartoon storytelling. Cleveland spawned\nmemoirist Harvey Pekar and writer Brian Michael Bendis (if you love the first\ndecade of Marvel movies, thank Bendis; Hollywood pulled a lot from his groundbreaking\ncomic book stories). \u201cCalvin and Hobbes\u201d creator Bill Watterson is from a Cleveland\nsuburb. \u201cFunky Winkerbean\u201d creator Tom Batiuk is from Akron, just down the\nroad. There are many others who have drawn here or started here in the past 100\nyears of cartoon storytelling. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Now I\u2019m here. Jerry Siegel\u2019s childhood house is two miles from where I now work, the Cleveland Museum of Art<\/a>. I\u2019m thrilled to be doing philanthropy communications in my day job, helping to raise support for spectacular shows such as the current Michelangelo: Mind of the Master<\/em>, in which you can see the famous artist doodling his ideas on scraps of paper (like a cartoonist). I draw inspiration from working among the world\u2019s great art every weekday. It\u2019s easy to see how my Chester Comix education and marketing work transects my work to promote the museum. There is artistic synergy everywhere: the CMA was founded at the same time American newspaper comic strips were roaring to life a century ago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cleveland\u2019s culture was really stamped in the American Century. It makes\nsense that a city of blue collar manufacturing also produced cartoon writers\nand artists, because cartooning is a democratic art form, printed on cheap paper\nand requiring no formal training to get to the moment of creativity. Cartooning\nis an easy vehicle for the children of immigrants or factory workers to express\ntheir American dreams. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Being in Cleveland inspires me. Williamsburg, Virginia, was a wonderful\nincubator for history comix in the 23 years I lived there, but it was a bit\nfalse to my art form. The mishmash was<\/em><\/strong> the idea: I was applying a modern, popular form of\nstorytelling to the formal, distant and not-very-visual lives of colonial\nAmericans. And I drew a LOT of those stories, digging in to all the details provided\nby the work of the historians and archaeologists who were my neighbors. But Patrick\nHenry himself would not have understood my storytelling. I was applying one\nAmerican culture to another.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Being a cartoonist in Cleveland feels much more organic. And I\u2019m short on\nmy storytelling about 20th<\/sup> century America anyway. I\u2019m looking\nforward to drawing in my evening and weekend hours in my Cleveland apartment,\nlike so many of my predecessors have done. And when I need inspiration, I\u2019ll drive\nby Jerry\u2019s house on the East Side. It isn\u2019t open to the public, but American folklore\nmagic was created there. And maybe part of my work in the coming years will be\nto find a space where we can honor these American storytellers. <\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There is a Hungarian Heritage Museum and the Dettrick Medical History Center and a firefighting museum and, smack in the middle of the modern city built by heavy manufacturing, the Dunham Tavern Museum to remember a couple who moved to … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1584","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-authors-purpose"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chestercomix.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1584","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chestercomix.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chestercomix.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chestercomix.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chestercomix.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1584"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.chestercomix.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1584\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1586,"href":"http:\/\/www.chestercomix.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1584\/revisions\/1586"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chestercomix.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1584"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chestercomix.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1584"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chestercomix.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1584"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}