May 2008

As a child, James Sturm loved to read the Sunday comics. But his interest in this niche art form wasn’t a passing one. Though he couldn’t have known it at the time, it was, in fact, the beginning of what would one day be a very successful career.

Sturm’s childhood interest in cartoons and comics evolved rather quickly to encompass not only reading them, but also creating them. “I started reading superhero comics, and immediately tried to make my own,” explains Sturm, whose decision to take up the pen made writing inseparable from drawing for him from very early on.

An avid collector of Marvel Comics in his youth, Sturm earned a master of fine arts from the School of Visual Arts in New York in 1991. That very year, comic book publisher Fantagraphics began releasing his series The Cereal Killings. Exploring what would happen if the animal characters on cereal boxes were real, the series was nominated for a Will Eisner Comic Industry Award — a prize given for creative achievement in American comic books.

Sturm says that although ideas come to him from all directions, it is when an idea sticks — when it “gets lodged in your brain and starts exerting its own gravitational pull” — that he begins to take it seriously. “It takes several years to finish a graphic novel, so the material must resonate on many different levels for me to stay engaged during that time.”

In 1998, Sturm’s Hundreds of Feet Below Daylight, the second part of a trilogy of American historical fiction pieces, was published. The third part, the best-selling Golem’s Mighty Swing, was published three years later. Translated into several languages, it was named the Best Graphic Novel of 2001 by Time Magazine. In 2004, his Unstable Molecules — a four-issue series featuring characters based on the Fantastic Four and published by Marvel Comics — was awarded an Eisner Award for Best Limited Series.

Sturm’s writings and drawings have appeared in numerous publications, including The Onion, The New York Times and The New Yorker. The founder of The National Association of Comics Art Educators (an organization that facilitates the teaching of comics in higher education), Sturm is also the director of The Center for Cartoon Studies — a two-year cartooning school located in White River Junction, Vermont.

Of his work, Sturm says it is “quieter and more meditative” than the comics he read in his youth, and different than what many people expect. Currently in residence at The MacDowell Colony, he is working on a graphic novel about a day in the life of an Eastern European rug weaver in the early 1920s. “The book takes place over the course of 24 hours. An incident occurs that causes the weaver to come to a crossroads where he feels he must choose between art and commerce,” says Sturm.
At May’s MacDowell Downtown presentation, Sturm will present excerpts of his work, and will also walk the audience through the process he undertakes when creating his comics — from thumbnail drawing to finished piece. He will also talk about one of his major influences: Charles Schultz’s Peanuts.