Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Dave Baker. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Alright, so we’re so thrilled to have Dave with us today – welcome and maybe we can jump right into it with a question about one of your qualities that we most admire. How did you develop your work ethic? Where do you think you get it from?
As a cartoonist you figure out pretty quickly that you’re the arbiter of your own destiny. Literally no one else is going to do the work for you. If you want to be a writer, you have to write. If you want to be an artist, you have to spend time making art. And as a cartoonist, working in a medium that combines those two practices, you have to spend time at the drawing board.
Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?
So, as you’ve probably put together I’m a cartoonist. I’m an Eisner Award nominated writer and illustrator who’s previous books include Forest Hills Bootleg Society (Simon and Schuster), F*ck Off Squad (Silver Sprocket), Night Hunters (Floating World), Everyone Is Tulip (Dark Horse), and Star Trek Voyager: Seven’s Reckoning (IDW).
My newest release is titled Mary Tyler MooreHawk, and it’s being published by Top Shelf. It’s split into two distinct narrative threads. One of them is an action adventure comic about a family of super scientists as they’re attempting to save the world from near-certain doom, and the other is a series of magazine articles, from one hundred years in the future, about a journalist who’s obsessed with a TV show that was adapted from the previously mentioned comics, and only lasted 9 episodes. We follow him as he attempts to track down the reclusive creator who went into hiding after being abruptly removed from the show, in the hopes that the urban legends surrounding mysterious production of copious amounts of new comic book stories are true.
There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?
The lifeblood of working in every creative field is: are you nice, good, and fast or cheap. pick three of the four. The rest? it’ll work out.
As we end our chat, is there a book you can leave people with that’s been meaningful to you and your development?
I’m a huge fan of Nancy Drew, The Hardy Boys, and Tintin. I’ve often thought back on my obsession with the genre of Kid Detectives and Adventurers and tried to parse what exactly it was that drew me to them at a young age. And I think that this genre is secretly highly subversive. If you actually think about what the underlying moral is of almost every Nancy Drew or Hardy Boy story is… it’s “the adults are lying to you.” or “Only the children see the truth.”
Think about it. The villains are always adults who are attempting to get away with some dastardly land grab, revenge-fueled murder, or underhanded swindle. They’re always a member of the cast that has a tangential connection to the protagonist, and when our main character begins to suspect something is afoot, none of the other adults want to believe that something like this could be real. The adults are always in league with one another, and it’s the primal truth of the situation that is only ever evident to individuals sub-fifteen years old.
This is an elemental reality to young people. When things aren’t right as a kid, you just know. When something’s off, you can feel it. Your emotional intelligence is heightened because your experiential knowledge is handicapped. You live in this third state of evidentiary quantum entanglement as a young person.
This theme is represented in almost every depiction of these types of characters. Think about it: Nancy Drew looking off camera into a darkened hallway, posing in front of a grandfather clock. The Hardy Boys pointing a flashlight into a spooky treeline. These images, usually painted by famed artist Rudy Nappi, have a single unifying visual motif: The children are always looking. They’re looking at something, for something, or around something. Children’s ability to perceive is the ultimate wish fulfillment of the genre in question, in my opinion.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.heydavebaker.comc
- Instagram: xdavebakerx
- Facebook: xdavebakerx@gmail.com
- Twitter: xdavebakerx
- Other: Tiktok: XDaveBakerX
