The Three Cent Pup

I moved to my current residence in Winston-Salem, North Carolina from Savannah, Georgia, where I was studying cartooning at SCAD. Among the drastic differences between the two situations was the sudden lack of any kind of social group with an interest in comics. If I were, say, an accountant by trade, this wouldn’t really be a big deal, because accountants are normal folks, who have interests other than accounting, but, cartoonists are not “normal folks”—we rarely have any interests besides comics (unless you count movies based on comics, of course). So, since being here, I’ve often wished that there was some sort of active community here of people interested in making their own comics. Winston-Salem is the (self-proclaimed) “City of the Arts,” but—to the extent that it applies at all—it clearly hasn’t really extended into the art of comics.

At last year’s SPX in Bethesda I was hanging out with former Greensboro (the city next-door to Winston-Salem) resident, cartoonist Rob Ullman and he was talking about how nice it was to be in Richmond, VA, where he now lived, because there was a comics “scene” and I began ruminating again on the lack of such a scene in Winston. The problem is, I don’t want to move—especially to Richmond. I’ve had enough of college towns for the time being, all the VCU art students are heroin addicts, and the traffic is too goddamn heavy. At any rate, I decided I’d rather light the proverbial candle than curse the darkness, and I began stewing on how I could try to get some kind of a scene going here in Winston.

I set a goal for myself of getting ten interested people together and trying to put together a comics/sketch group kinda thing. Since then, I’ve been calling and emailing everyone I can think of in the area I can think of who might be even vaguely interested in making comics, and we’ve just got about the target ten people onboard—ages almost-16 through thrity-somethings and comprising skill levels from just starting out through to published artists like Chad Hunt (far more published than me) who’s inked for Marvel, Dark Horse and the like, and of course me.

I’ve christened the group The Camel City Cartoonists’ Guild and Social Club. To find out more about the operation, visit our recently established blog “The Three Cent Pup” at www.cartoonists.ws