The older I get, the more I lose old friends. It’s the hard reality of this life we’re all in, but every time it happens, it doesn’t get any easier. I wanted to devote some space here to write a little about one of my oldest friends, Dave Rawlins. I met Dave back in 1990, when I was fresh out of Art College and trying to find my way as a graphic artist and comic creator. At that time, I wasn’t having much success at either. Dave was also an artist and aspiring comic artist. He didn’t share my laser-focused determination to break into comics, but that was okay. He was always a reminder to me that part of making comics is the sheer fun of it, and existing in that ‘happy place’ of drawing. That’s a lesson I learned from Dave.
One of the many interesting things about Dave was that he wasn’t into the 90’s comic art trends or styles back when we first met. He was steeped in 1960’s era comics, a weird combination of Steve Ditko, Jack Kirby, Al Feldstein and Robert Crumb. His subject matter leaned toward the absurd, from UFOs and comically grotesque monsters to equally comically grotesque people. Dave could have easily found success in comics by carving out his own niche in that market, because literally no one was doing what he was doing. That’s what makes his art special, because it has an uncompromising honesty to it, and his personality is expressed in every line. In the field of comics, that’s actually a pretty rare find. That’s the second lesson I learned from him.
I worked with Dave in the early days of my career, before I had a career. We collaborated on a comic called ‘Majestic 12’ and a few other small-scale efforts. None of it ever saw print. Dave went on to provide art and stories for small press publisher Blue Moon Comics in the late 1990’s, and had been actively and prolifically churning out caricatures and portrait art on his Facebook page for the last few years. Most recently, he provided a faux cover art for my comic Saga of a Doomed Universe, and you’ll get to see his work again in the sequel that I’m currently developing.
Dave was funny. He had a sometimes cynical world-view, but it wasn’t the typical bitter cynicism that we see so often in many others. Dave’s cynicism was funny, without a shred of mean-spiritedness. He had deep knowledge and respect for artists who were equally cynical/funny who were also not quite mainstream. From the writings of Philip K. Dick to the music of The Kinks, they tracked pretty closely to Dave’s own world-view, whether he saw that connection consciously or not.
There’s so much more to Dave than this brief write-up, of course. And much more than this small sampling of his incredible art. Just know that, in both cases, it was all good.
Scott
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