To learn more about the comics, Bored Panda reached out to James Squires, who began by telling a bit more about himself.
“I'm a human person based in Porirua, New Zealand with my partner, son, and some animals. Exactly two animals. In between work and family and sometimes sleep, I draw very silly things and do my best to remember to also put them somewhere on the internet, so people can read them. I'm most known for drawing the comic Moonbeard (pictured).”
James also shared what drew him to the world of cartooning.
“As a kid, a few dusty boxes of old newspaper comics found their way into my hands and I got my start drawing by copying from the pages, so my super early comics were basically Garfield, but awful. Sadly, they were all lost in a fire. At university, I neglected my studies to write comics for the uni paper and eventually moved online and just never really stopped. Well, sometimes I stop, but I always come back. It's a nice, sometimes cathartic creative outlet, and I'm so blessed that I get paid hundreds of millions of dollars to make these.”
We wanted to know how James himself would describe the essence or theme behind the cartoons of “Squireses.” He wrote: “My comics are sometimes bleak, sometimes surreal, spooky, whimsical, absurd, silly. Sometimes very silly. Sometimes they have punchlines, but often they don't. Sometimes they're funny, but often they're not. I'm a big film nerd so I'll draw influence from film a lot, mainly science fiction or horror. They're a bit all over the place so it's tricky to really pin down specific recurring themes but if I had to try, then I would.”
The creative process varies from artist to artist. Therefore, we asked James to share an inside look at his artistic method for “Squireses”.
“I have a sort of production line of tiny ideas all getting built at the same time, all starting as small seeds borne of some news story or my own anxieties or a quote or a memory or too much TV and then they all get added to a giant vat to gestate and percolate and by the time they've been through the machine, typically the one fully-formed is the dumbest of the lot. Alternatively, a comic just arrives in the shower, crawling out of the plughole. Hairy. Gross. The finding time to draw them part, that's the hard bit.”
In terms of the audience's expectations, this is what James had to say about the desired takeaway.
“I'm just grateful I have any kind of audience so honestly: anything. I'm not picky. I just throw them out into the world and if someone takes something away or is still thinking about a comic later, then that's just dandy.”
And lastly, James added: “Thanks for reading. I love you. I miss you. Call me.”
