Photo courtesy of the Graphic Novel Union
By Khristine Sandwith
As new students come to Evergreen, the first thing they think of is creating a home. Being away from home can be overwhelming and one of the ways to fit into campus is finding a club. At Evergreen, the Graphic Novel Union fits anyone interested in art, graphic novels and comics, or even those just looking to make friends.
The Graphic Novel Union (GNU) is one of the clubs at Evergreen that incorporates comics and student artwork on campus. Every Wednesday from 4 to 6 p.m. at Seminar II C2107, people come to make comics, play games, and overall have a good time together. In the past, GNU has been given several names. When coordinator Severin Walch started studying at Evergreen as a freshman, it was originally called Graphic Novel and Animation Creation Collective (Evergreen Comics Club). At one point it was called Comics and Animations, then later changed into Graphic Novel Union. When it was previously called Comic Club, it was often mistaken as a space to join stand-up comedy.
Meetings are mainly based on teaching people how to make comics and how to improve their artwork through games. Some games that members have done in the past include exquisite corpse (folding a piece of paper into three parts and each person either draws the head, the body, or the legs), round robin (starts off with someone making a panel, then another person creates a panel following the previous person, and so on), and comic crossword (drawing three panels to cross and connect with another comic).
Outside of meetings, GNU has been a part of the Olympia Comics Festival and Chibi Chibi Con, as well as a panel for Chibi Chibi Con centering cross-cultural influences in Eastern and Western comics. During the Chibi Chibi Con panel, members talked about Osamu Tezuka’s (a Japanese manga artist) relationship with Disney and Western media groups. Additionally, they used Jean Giraud (French sci-fi cartoonist) and his close friendship with Hayao Miyazaki (Japanese filmmaker and animator) as another example of incorporating different cultures.
Annually, GNU chooses a theme as a main focus to develop artwork for their zine Stampede. For Stampede’s first issue, their theme revolved around underwater basket weaving. Their fifth issue, Teardrops on my Playskool Friends Sesame Street Singing Friends Piano (the name is based on a toy), came out last spring and was part of the Olympia Comics Festival.
Issac Hollandsworth has been a member of GNU since his freshman year in 2016. One of the reasons he came to Evergreen was because it was where Charles Burns (American cartoonist and illustrator) and Lynda Barry (American cartoonist and graphic novelist) went to college. Before he came to Evergreen, he was looking for a comic club on campus, so once he found out about GNU, he knew that it was something that he wanted to go to a lot. Hollandsworth didn’t think that he could draw comics until he started reading Bryan O’Malley’s (a Canadian cartoonist who’s best known for his Scott Pilgrim series) comics. After seeing O’Malley’s work, Hollandsworth understood that drawing comics was something he could do, too.
Severin Walch has been part of GNU since 2014 and is currently a senior at Evergreen. In the past, he was an editor for Stampede and was part of a panel at Chibi Chibi Con for the club. When he first joined, seniors were mainly the coordinators for GNU, so after his first year, Walch was able to become a coordinator, as the previous coordinators had graduated. Walch felt motivated talking to people because of GNU, as well as meeting deadlines while working on Stampede zines.
Marcus Ross, a senior at Evergreen, attended meetings as much as possible since he started going to college here. He joined in the drawing games at the meetings, made flyers to inform people about GNU, and he also participated in Stampede’s zines. The majority of his work was based on 2000s anime, cartoons, and video games. At the beginning of this year, Ross worked on a comic called Dead-Beat Demi-God. The concepts used were from ideas relating back to his childhood, but didn’t execute these ideas until he was assigned an art project in his junior year Evergreen program (The program was called Framing Your Work: Projects in History, Art and the Humanities, and it was taught by professors Stacey Davis and Shaw Osha.) What he did during the art project was drawing as much as he could daily, with no real project in mind; he was ripping up doodles and putting them into a collage. It took him a month to get down character designs and story ideas.
Coming to GNU is a chance to take the time to work on projects around comics and/or graphic novels. What comes out of doing artwork in a club is meeting other people with similar interests.
