After four years in the making, the Northwest Museum of Cartoon Arts will be opening a permanent location in downtown Portland.
Its debut exhibit, “The Pacific Northwest in Comics,” will explore and highlight the local comic industry and the notable artists, writers and others who have shaped the scene.
Mike Rosen is the board chair for the museum. He joins us to share more about the only cartoon arts museum in the Northwest and the role Portland plays in the industry as a whole.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: I’m Dave Miller. This is Think Out Loud on OPB. After four years of planning and preparation, the Northwest Museum of Cartoon Art is opening a permanent location in downtown Portland today. Its mission is to celebrate the history, influence, diversity and joy of all aspects of cartoon art, and to do so in one of the epicenters of cartoon and comics production. The museum’s debut exhibition highlights the local comic industry and the notable artists, writers and others who have shaped the scene.
Mike Rosen is the board chair for the museum, and he joins me now. It’s great to have you back on the show.
Mike Rosen: Thank you.
Miller: Where did the idea for this museum come from?
Rosen: So there was a Facebook memory of an Oregon Historical Society exhibition that they did in 2015 on comics in the Pacific Northwest. And it came up, and all these cartoonists friends and comics people said, “we need a museum.” So I kind of jumped on it and I built a really, I think, diverse and eclectic board. And we’ve been working on it since then.
Miller: What role does Portland play in the cartooning and comic industry?
Rosen: I think it’s like the epicenter of the comics industry for sure.
Miller: For the country?
Rosen: Yeah. We think, per capita, Portland has the highest number of cartoonists and comics artists of any city in the world.
Miller: Why?
Rosen: That’s a good question. It started in the ‘80s with Dark Horse Comics. What they did is they searched for talent around the country and they brought people out. And they were the first comic company to allow creators to own the complete rights to their work. So now famous comic artists came out and they attracted others, and it just kind of snowballed from there.
And in the ‘80s, it was a much more affordable city for young people starting out. It’s amazing, the number of writers and cartoonists that are world famous that are just living in Portland.
Miller: You mentioned Dark Horse. What are some of the other big names of houses or creators here right now?
Rosen: Well, Brian Michael Bendis teaches at Portland State University. He created the first biracial Spider-Man character, Miles Morales. That was made into a movie, “Into the Spider-Verse,” won the Academy Award. He writes for Marvel, DC and Dark Horse. Mark Russell’s an up and coming writer for DC and Marvel. Mike Allred lives in Eugene, he’s internationally recognized. Matt Wagner has written this one character, Grendel, for 40 years, and also writes for DC and Marvel.
Ben Saunders, who’s the head of the comic studies program at the University of Oregon, is quoted as saying, “you can’t throw a muffin in a coffee shop in Portland without hitting a cartoonist.”
Miller: I’m interested in this because you’re talking right now about the production side, and it’s extraordinary that the concentration, we’re not a gigantic city here in Portland. But what about the audience side? What is Portland and the Northwest like in terms of readers?
Rosen: I would say they’re rabid consumers, just the manga side of comics is exploding in the Pacific Northwest. We just had Kumoricon in Portland. I think it attracted 10,000 people.
For comics in general, I mean, you think about it, we have Dark Horse, we have a really high number of comic book shops per capita. I can think of almost 10 that are in the Portland metro area. All ages – we have graphic novels now written for kids. You’ve had graphic novelists on your show before.
Miller: Probably three or four of them.
Rosen: I think you had Lizard Boy.
Miller: Aron Nels Steinke a number of times,
Rosen: Yeah, Aron’s featured in our museum.
Miller: And New Yorker cartoonists.
Rosen: Shannon Wheeler.
Miller: Graphic journalists like Joe Sacco.
Rosen: Joe Sacco’s featured in the museum in the first exhibit. I mean, it’s a plethora of artists. It’s an embarrassment of riches, I’ve said.
Miller: What do comics mean to you?
Rosen: They mean imagination, they mean literacy, especially for me. Comics is a gateway to literacy. The museum has taught two summer workshops, reading, writing and drawing comics. I’m very passionate about that. It’s a gateway for kids, they see pictures, they recognize words, they go on to graphic novels, they go on to reading. It’s about imagination, it’s about pop culture.
And when you think about someone like Joe Sacco, who’s one of my favorite artists and writers, it’s about dealing with some really complicated issues. His new book “War on Gaza” won the Eisner Award this year, and we have a whole room just featuring that.
Miller: What else can people see in this first exhibit?
Rosen: Two things I’m proud of … We have a writer’s room, it’s a room where you can just sit down on a couch and you can pull a binder off the shelf, and it has the comic book and it has the script for the comic book; the script is like a screenplay. So you can relax and you can actually see the words to the page translated.
Another area that I’m really excited about is up-and-coming artists where we feature artists from the Portland and Pacific Northwest that are just getting started, you can see the future of comics. And in that, we have two neurodivergent artists, one with Down Syndrome and one with autism. I mean they produce beautiful stuff, so we’re really proud of the diversity in the museum, of the type of comics and the people creating them.
Miller: This is after something like four years of planning and preparation and then some itinerant pop-ups before there was a permanent location. What has it taken for this to become a reality?
Rosen: That is really important. I would say Dave Schrott and I’m trying – let me find – he’s got a partner I’m blanking on his name, but they had a piece of underutilized property. We went to them and we told them what we could afford and how big a space we needed, and they said “you can have it.” We’re getting an incredible deal and they’re taking a risk on an arts nonprofit. And we’re really grateful. That was the catalyst starting in June, we had raised some money, started looking for space again. And we just, through a friend, happened upon them. They’ve been great.
Miller: Is that the way that this can happen, because of a good real estate deal?
Rosen: Well, you think about what’s going on in downtown Portland, there’s a lot of vacant property. And the city and property owners are finally coming around to the fact that it’s better to have these spaces occupied than vacant. We’re really trying to bring people into downtown Portland. So property values in terms of rental prices are low. And you’re seeing much more of this. There’s a pop-up, a comic book store, Books With Pictures, who’s gonna do a holiday pop-up and maybe even stay in downtown. The property owners, I think, are really stepping up to the plate now.
Miller: You’ve been on our show before, but not to talk about anything close to this. You are a former member of the Portland Public School Board, you have a PhD in environmental science and engineering. You were on to talk about lead in water from drinking fountains that kids were being exposed to. You’ve gone on to, among other things, editing a graphic novel by Steve Duin, the longtime Oregonian columnist, and editing three comics about COVID by Shannon Wheeler.
How has that worked? After being a fan of comics, I understand, for your whole life, how has working on them deepened your understanding of what they are and how they work?
Rosen: Well, it’s been an experience. When I worked on “Oil and Water,” the Shannon Wheeler/Steve Duin graphic novel, I really learned to allow the artist’s vision and the writer’s vision to be the guiding force in the work. It was a fictional story of a project that I worked on on the Gulf Coast, but it had some very salient points about the environment and brought forth what was really going on in the Gulf Coast. And with the Shannon Wheeler comic on COVID, it was just this incredible experience to show how comics could have a big impact on the community, and teach them about what was going on in COVID, how to prevent it and live with it.
Miller: What are your hopes for what this museum will be in the coming years?
Rosen: I want it to be considered a traditional art museum, because comics and cartoon arts are a legitimate form of art. I wanted to bring in all ages and walks of life – even people that haven’t been exposed to cartoon arts before – and the comics, nerds, superhero people being there. Our next exhibit is Will Eisner, who’s the father of the graphic novel. And our third exhibit is manga, and we’re hoping to partner with Dark Horse, who’s a big manga company now. I’m just really excited for the whole community to help us celebrate the comics, cartoon arts community in Oregon and the Northwest.
Miller: Mike, thanks very much.
Rosen: Thank you.
Miller: Mike Rosen is the board chair for the Northwest Museum of Cartoon Arts. It is opening today in Northwest Portland.
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