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In Memoriam: Jesse Hamm

By | January 4th, 2022
Posted in Columns | % Comments

Helioscope, the Portland studio/collective where creators like Steve Lieber, Leila del Duca, Jeff Parker, and Erika Moen (to name just a few) formed a professional hub to defy the alienating tendencies of comics work, lost one of its important members this past year.

And students of the medium lost one of its foremost Savvy Explainers, “Tips from Hamm” @Hamm_Tips, whose pithy posts and elaborate Patreon essays, whose Carousel column and “Hamm Tips” collections, offered illuminating longform detail about the shadowed, foreshortened simplicity that graces comics art by modern masters like Alex Toth.

Jesse Hamm in 2006
Jesse Hamm in 2006

But whether Jesse Hamm might be remembered for his “Batman ‘66” or “Flash Gordon” art or his independent comics, his sometimes sharp-tongued takedowns of false teachings about comics storytelling, or his gentle and principled adherence to his Christian faith, he leaves no doubt about this:

“‘How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed in a naughty world.’ ~ William Shakespeare

Make your art.”

– from “Hamm Tips” Volume 4

Jesse Hamm the comics artist and enthusiast lived and worked not for himself, but as a light to others around him — his family, his colleagues, his fans and fellow enthusiasts, his friends.

 

Jesse Hamm from Hamm Tips Twitter
Jesse Hamm from @Hamm_Tips on Twitter

Hamm was infinitely perceptive about the brilliance of someone like the reputedly misanthropic Alex Toth, whose work so marvelously conveyed stories of inspiration or dread, morality or ambiguity. But Hamm also seemed exceedingly devoted to the actual values those stories held out, including in his ardent defense of Toth himself:

“[Toth] was an outspoken genius surrounded by oversensitive underachievers; of course he was difficult to deal with… I think what Toth most wanted to see in entertainment was valor, a quality so out of step with modernity that few use the word, or even know its meaning.”

– from “Hamm on Toth”

When news of Hamm’s death on May 12th at just 45 years old hit the comics community, that light-bearing, that sense of valor and goodness, that generous energy to tell stories well and live in goodness, was reflected in the many tributes and remembrances of those who knew him.

They included Hamm’s friend, Cartoon Art Museum curator Andrew Farago, who fittingly paid tribute to Jesse Hamm with words Hamm himself wrote in memory of John Paul Leon, who passed just ten days before him: “Clearly, he was an Artists’ Artist, revered by the best in the field.”


I would add, from the stories told and collected by Farago and from a few correspondences with Jesse Hamm myself, he was not only “revered by the best,” but “cherished by the least,” us far-off admirers, whose worth he valued through his generosity.

Jesse Hamm is survived by his wife, comics artist Anna Sahrling-Hamm.


//TAGS | 2021 Year in Review

Paul Lai

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