Audio By Carbonatix
Shuffleupagus and Five-Card Nancy are just two of the collaborative art games to be played when the Hector Cartoonists Collective and the Denver Comic Art Festival host a pair of Saturday night free-for-all Cartoon Jam Sessions, designed to lure R. Crumb wannabes out of their closets for some mass hysteria. All this, crammed into the confines of a very small South Broadway comic-book shop.
The idea, notes “Hectator” Tom Motley, is to unite disparate people with a yen for, er, committing comic art — and commensurate literary subject matter — to paper. Motley hopes many beautiful relationships will form as participants team up to create new comic strips out of random panels of Ernie Bushmiller’s “Nancy” and the like, in the spirit of the Surrealists and/or underground-comics artists of the ’60s.
But these sessions also offer a chance for fame, even if just within a very tight and minuscule circle of devotees: Jam highlights will be exhibited at a local comic-art show in February, and some works will also find their way into a comic book benefiting the Denver Comic Art Festival, an annual all-ages event that takes place every summer.
The jam’s success is contingent, then, upon who shows up — anybody would be great, too many would be perfect. How many cartoonists does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Eureka! The more the merrier, Motley maintains, so the call is out: Bring ink and an open mind. A perfectly twisted mind might be nice, too.
