When first approached about becoming Vermont’s next cartoonist laureate, Stephen R. Bissette declined. Though he retired from teaching at the Center for Cartoon Studies in 2020, he’s busy enough.
But later that day, late last year, he received an email from a CCS graduate, thanking him for being their teacher. Then the next day he received a book in the mail from another former student. He took these communications as a sign.
“That’s when I thought, ‘I’ve got a job here to do,’ ” Bissette said in an interview.
So he reached back out to James Sturm, CCS’s co-founder and the main force behind the cartoonist laureate post, and said he’d do it, but with one condition. Bissette wanted to get grant funding so he can produce a book on Vermont cartoonists.
The previous five cartoonist laureates have done some traveling and speaking around the state, but none has left the ceremonial position with a product to show for it.
It’s hard to imagine a better person for the job than Bissette, who is as eager a culture vulture as Vermont has produced. A native of Duxbury, Vt., he has lived most of his life in his home state, aside from a few years at the nascent Joe Kubert School of Cartoon and Graphic Art, in Dover, N.J., and some time working in the comics industry. He and his wife, Marjory, have lived in Windsor since 2006.
Bissette already has written a book about movies made in Vermont, “Green Mountain Cinema.” And he is tapped into its cartooning history as few others are, as he’s a living piece of it.
One of the works that turned Bissette on to cartooning was “This Is Vermont,” a 1953 history of the state, from 1609 to the mid-20th century, by George Merkle. “It was one of the things that led me to realize I could be a cartoonist,” Bissette said.
So was the work of Jeff Danziger, the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist who also draws a strip about a Vermont farm family that was in local papers when Bissette was growing up. (A connection: Danziger was teaching at U-32 high school in Montpelier and future legendary cartoonist Frank Miller was a student in one of his classes, Bissette said.)
Bissette also pointed to a show of cartoon art at the Helen Day Art Center in Stowe that included a family quilt done as a sequential narrative. Cartooning runs deeper than we might expect.
“There is a tradition here in our state,” said Bissette, whose claim to fame as a cartoonist was re-imagining the classic Swamp Thing character and co-creating the character John Constantine, a supernatural anti-hero detective, with fellow cartoonists Alan Moore and John Totleben.
Vermont is the only state with a cartoonist laureate, though that has as much to do with the presence of the Center for Cartoon Studies, the White River Junction comic art college founded in 2006, as it does with the state’s cartooning history.
Or does it? Is there something about Vermont and its character that has made people such as Danziger, Alison Bechdel and the late Ed Koren want to cartoon here, or that gave rise to Vermont native cartoonists such as Bissette and Rick Veitch, who was Bissette’s classmate in the Kubert School’s inaugural class, and James Kochalka, a Springfield native and former cartoonist laureate?
Cartooning requires a lot of steady, patient work through multiple steps — writing, penciling, inking, lettering, coloring. Vermont is no stranger to hard work, and to alternative ways of making a living, such as writing and drawing. And winter is ideal for cartoon art.
“James Sturm calls winter in Vermont ‘cartooning season,’ ” Bissette said.
Bissette turned 71 this month and though he’s retired from teaching seems as busy now as he ever was. He records bonus features and commentary tracks for Blu-Ray versions of movies, particularly the horror genre, which he knows inside and out. And a Kickstarter campaign to fund a deluxe collection of his “Tyrant” comics, about a Tyrannosaurus rex, has received more than $200,000 in donations with 21 days still to go.
A book on Vermont cartoonists is something he’s long wanted to tackle. “I’m sure there’s tons of cartoonists I’m not aware of,” he said.
There are certainly many that the general public isn’t aware of. Bread and Puppet, for example, the Northeast Kingdom theater company, has been making mini-comics for decades.
Bissette might not be as available to the public as some of his predecessors as cartoonist laureate, but he expects that there will be a public component of the book on Vermont cartoonists at some point. His appointment, to take place at the Statehouse on April 9, will keep the laureate’s mantle here in the Upper Valley. He’s replacing Tillie Walden, of Norwich, who’s a graduate of CCS.
The April 9 ceremony is a brief event, but the real festivities take place April 11 at Springfield Cinemas 3, Bissette’s favorite movie theater, for a screening of “Constantine,” the 2005 film starring Keanu Reeves as the character Bissette co-created. Tickets are available now at the cinemas’ website, springfieldcinemas3.com.
Art nearby
“Proximity Effect,” a show of recent work from Barnard artist Amy Morel, opens with a reception from 5:30 to 7 Friday evening in the Taylor Gallery at Kimball Union Academy in Meriden. The show is up through April 25.
Vermont Book Awards
Not surprisingly, the Vermont Book Awards nominees include some from the Upper Valley. “The Ghost of Wreckers Cove,” a children’s book by Angelica Del Campo, was illustrated by Liniers, the pen name of the Norwich cartoonist Ricardo Siri. Also nominated were “Helen of Nowhere,” a novel by Vershire author Makenna Goodman and “The Salt Stones: Seasons of a Shepherd’s Life,” by Helen Whybrow, an Upper Valley native and former editor in chief of Countryman Press who now lives in the Mad River Valley.