1/13/2024 0 Comments People watcherWhat attracts your attention most when your doodling? People? Emotions? What’s something you subconsciously always doodle?Ĭharacter is what attracts me the most when doodling something. Once I sit down, then it’s a focused frenzy of getting shit done. Concepts are much more organic that way and seem to stay fresher, longer. My best ideas just happen when I’m forced to do nothing but think for some extended period of time. I’ve always been a proponent of serendipitous inspiration in the sense that the best ideas happen when I’m walking from Lechmere Station to Courthouse Seafood (Cambridge, Massachusetts shout out!). What’s your story-boarding process like? Is there a brainstorm before the sketching? Do you have a single sentence that then drives the illustration? Especially in our digital age when you readers can look up everything that any artist has ever made, I want to make sure that work I did 5 years ago, 10 years ago, 25 years ago still has some impact today. For cartoons especially, I’ll always steer clear of extremely topical jokes as those cartoons have a much shorter shelf life. If anything, I try to focus on keeping my work existential and as perennially relevant as I can. It makes sense that you see that in my work. I grew up a fair distance away from all of my extended family, and my parents pushed us to be even closer with each other because of that, I think. I have two great brothers, one great sister and two great parents that I talk to very often (my mother is reading this and saying to herself “You really don’t call home that often”). Poop and sleep are also running themes in my work I guess, but I’ll leave those topics for my second interview. It’s funny you pick up on that because I don’t ever think about continuing themes in my stuff. It seems like a lot of your comics recall childhood experiences, would you say that is a reoccurring theme in your comics? What other themes do you personally see in your work? Recently I’ve been really into these Japanese seaweed crackers called Nori Maki Arare. There are a few mainstays that I always come back to though: barbecue sunflower seeds, Swedish Fish (the red kind, not the multicolored kind), MEGA STUFFED OREOSSSSSS. For a month, I’ll intently seek out Blue Raspberry Slurpees from 711. I’m not sure if some of your readers are like this, but I’m the type of guy that goes through big snack phases. Man, now you’re getting to the hard hitting questions about snacks! Getting all Connie Chung on me. That’s the way I think when I work, even when I’m writing. Saul Steinberg, the great cartoonist, described himself as an essayist that doesn’t write. These days, I make mostly cartoons and write scripts for comics and movies. I’m a writer and an illustrator by trade. Connecticut is actually more diverse and interesting than people think it’s not all Greenwich and Starbucks and people who work in New York City but used to live there and don’t live there anymore. I grew up in a shore town in Connecticut called Madison it’s a beach town about a 20-minute drive from New Haven (Madison has great beaches if you’re a beach gal or guy). Who are you? Where are you from? What’s you’re favorite snack food? We chatted with Stahl about how he makes his work and the beauty of serendipitous inspirations.įirst, give us the condensed Micah Stahl spiel. They feed off each other each one necessary to the other. However, Stahl has a poetic play between the words and his comedic illustrations. Tell the entire story in the art, and it makes the text redundant. Give away the entire story in the text, and the art becomes superfluous. As not only an illustrator and storyboard artist, but a writer as well, Micah Stahl balances the classic teeter-totter between the words and the art with no problem. Wry, funny, and shot through with nostalgia, Stahl’s illustrations and comics have a playful quality all their own. He has a formula which encapsulates his ironic commentary on the internet, people, politics, and daily habits. Whether it’s an old couple haggling over where to eat, fellow students in Stahl’s horticulture night-class, the big-nosed man walking down the street, or the whiney hipsters sitting at the table next to him, Stahl attentively plucks out people, places, and conversations he encounters throughout his day and spins them into clever comics and storyboards. No one is exempt from inspiring his next doodle.
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