Bored Panda got in touch with Jim to get to know him and his creative process a bit better. The artist revealed that he has always liked to draw and read newspaper cartoons. In high school and college, he studied art but then switched to computer science as his creative outlet due to dissatisfaction with fine art education and "a need to make a living". Many years later, needing some stress relief, Jim started to draw again and focused on the goal of making people laugh through cartoons.
We got curious about where the artist gets inspiration from. Jim shared that ideas of all kinds come to him very easily- in fact, he has more ideas for cartoons, writing, jokes, products, and narratives than he has time to deal with! "Someone once told me I seemed to have a parallel world running in my head at all times, and I think that's basically true. I think of myself as a creative person and writer first, and an artist and cartoonist second. My website contains some of the shirts and other products I've designed, and I'm always adding more."
We asked Jim what is the thing about comics that fascinates him the most. The artist replied that it is the potential cartoons have to bring people to a better space in their lives, if only for a moment. "That's why I do what I do."
The greatest challenge of the creative process for the artist is "taking an oddball idea and boiling it down to the most effective joke for a cartoon. It's a lot like stand-up comedy or children's book writing in which you have very few words to get your point across."
When it comes to the future, Jim wants to, in the words of Frank Zappa, "make as much of it [comics] as possible for the people who like it". Meanwhile, the artist wants to build his humor portfolio, which he does by publishing articles and sharing his email newsletter, to which Jim encourages everyone to sign up!
Ultimately Jim plans to combine his writing with his cartoons to create super-fun and rightly funny mini-novels. "Think Hardy Boys meet Monty Python meet a Zucker brothers movie."
