Jamaica Dyer
Small Press Spotlight on Jamaica Dyer
Cartoon Art Museum
March 20 – June 13, 2010
Beginning on March 20, 2010, the Cartoon Art Museum’s ongoing Small Press Spotlight will feature the art of Jamaica Dyer.
Jamaica Dyer is a Bay Area native, growing up in Santa Cruz and now living in San Francisco. Her drawings and stories as a kid led to an interest in femme fatales and comic books, and by the time she was 16 she was photocopying comics she’d drawn and distributing them at stores and convention floors. Her comics have appeared in anthologies like Spark Generators 2, Juicy Mother 2 and Dark Horse Myspace Presents 3. SLG recently released Jamaica’s first graphic novel, Weird Fishes, that collects her webcomic of the same name “with all of the oddness and beauty that you would expect from her work.” Her work has a surreal side to it, dealing with adolescence and fantasies, and her artwork usually involves delicate lines and watercolors.
Weird Fishes is the story of two outsider kids who come to terms with their identities. Dee is a girl who sees giant talking ducks, and The Bunny Boy’s worn the same Halloween costume for years. The kids stop playing together and start growing into teenagers, and the ducks become monsters and the bunnysuits become mod suits, and just as things start to settle, the world changes forever.
Dyer opened a gallery show in December at Mission: Comics and Art featuring paintings and sketches from Weird Fishes. Many of the original painted pages from her comic have been on display at the SLG Boutiki Gallery in San Jose. When not painting and developing her new book, Jamaica works in animation creating Flash cartoons.
About the Small Press Spotlight:
San Francisco has been a hotbed of innovative, groundbreaking comic art since the late 1800s with the advent of the modern comic strip. In the1960s, the Bay Area gained further notoriety when the underground comix movement launched from San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district. Today, some of the biggest names in alternative and small-press comics hail from the Bay Area, and the Cartoon Art Museum’s Small Press Spotlight focuses on the works of these talented individuals.
The Small Press Spotlight is funded in part by The Zellerbach Family Foundation and The Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation.