Artist August: Becky Cloonan [Art Feature]

I first discovered Becky Cloonan’s work browsing DeviantArt, specifically looking at her work on her self-published comic Wolves. Her work roped me in immediately. It was dark, romantic, ancient, with a mix of fairy tale and myth. That’s what I got just from a glance on DeviantArt. Becky’s work evokes stories immediately. There’s so many of her sketches that I look at and I can’t help but think, “I want to read that story. I want to visit that world.” A comic written and drawn by Becky Cloonan tickles my brain like nothing else. Her collection of short stories, By Chance or Providence, is my favourite thing she’s every done, and I hope there are many comics like those still to come from her.

I must admit, I have trouble separating Becky Cloonan the writer from Becky Cloonan the artist. She draws beats in her comics that are told just with hands and the way they touch things. In Demeter it was in the way a character ran her fingers through the other’s hair, or the way she held a knife, or the concern revealed by touching the pane of glass at a window. But that’s nothing compared to the way she uses the gaze of her characters to tell story; the way they look at each other, the way they look at the world around them, or the way they look at nothing at all, their thoughts turned inward to moments lost forever. There’s an intensity it her characters’ eyes that draws me in every single time. Even in her illustration work, it’s easy to get a sense of the world beyond the frame of the drawing. Just look at her illustrated version of Dracula.

You can check out more of Becky Cloonan’s work on her Tumblr, her blog, her DeviantArt, and you can follow her on her Twitter and Instagram. And, of course, this is how you make zucchini bread.