Comic artist Drew B. Hall builds a connection with Distractor

Working as a comics artist can often be a solitary pursuit, Columbus artist Drew B. Hall said, lamenting that the opportunities to build community with fellow creators are typically few and far between.

“We see each other maybe once a year,” said Hall, pointing to annual gatherings such as Cartoon Crossroads Columbus as a rare point of contact. “But then even at shows, we’re behind tables, and we aren’t able to get out a lot, so not everyone even gets to have a conversation with one another. … I just think there needs to be more connectivity in that way.”

As one antidote, Hall created Distractor, an occasional forum in which creators can gather, read works for those in attendance, and get to know one another a little bit better than is generally possible in a more formalized convention setting. “And I think these kinds of things are important for that [connection], because this work can be so solitary and depressing sometimes,” said Hall, who will host the next Distractor at It Looks Like It’s Open (17 E. Tulane) beginning at 7 p.m. on Saturday, Dec. 14, joined by S.R. Arnold, Raeghan Buchanan, C.M. Campbell, Brian Canini, Emi Gennis and Alec Valerius. “Even the reading is more of a Trojan horse, really. Yeah, it’s a reading. But really, we’re all going to be there, and we can talk about whatever we want to talk about. It’s a chance to build and to be in the same room together in community. … And this is a community that has given me so much. I feel like I need to give something back.”

When Hall, originally from Marion, Indiana, moved to Columbus about a decade ago, he had little awareness of the city’s deep history with and connection to the world of comics. He didn’t know Jeff Smith lived here, or that the world’s preeminent comics museum, the Billy Ireland, existed tucked away on the campus at Ohio State. Gradually, though, Hall discovered these assorted local gems, describing his first visit to the Billy for an exhibit on “Calvin and Hobbes” as a particularly eye-opening experience.

“And I’m just weeping at seeing these pages that changed my life as a kid,” he said. “I had never seen comics taken so seriously as an artform. It’s not just the wing in some museum; it’s the whole facility. It was just like, ‘Oh, here are all of these incredible pieces of work that have impacted me, and they’re all right here.’ And then seeing the real page, where there’s whiteout and accidental mark making, it really humanized it for me.”

Hall wanted to be a comics artist from childhood, recalling how he’d read the funny pages each day, paying particular attention to “Beetle Bailey,” “The Far Side,” and “Garfield,” whose creator, Jim Davis, comes from the same hometown as Hall. Early on, he would unroll long scrolls of paper on the ground and sprawl out to draw and redraw these strips, to the point where certain aspects of these comics became embedded in his style. Each time he draws a shirt cuff, for instance, Hall said he is reminded of Mort Walker and his strip, “Beetle Bailey.”

“And I’ve changed it, but I can still see Beetle Bailey’s cuff, and that building block is still in there,” said Hall, who traced his artistic lineage back through his bloodlines, including grandparents and a great-grandfather who painted and an uncle who did illustration work for the local newspaper. “There was never a doubt I was going to end up in art, and I knew I wanted to be a cartoonist from the beginning. … I just didn’t have enough patience or self-confidence to think I could sit there and be a painter.”

For a time, though, Hall did make the attempt, sharing how he would paint on giant pieces of wood, lug them to an exhibition somewhere, and then lug them all back home where they would sit and take up space in his basement. And so, he turned to cartooning, first creating single-panel “floating head gags” that he posted to Instagram, and then expanding into four-panel strips before moving in the early months of the pandemic to creating his earliest zines, which consisted of little more than a couple of pieces of paper stapled together.

“‘The Comfort Dungeon’ is my anthology series, and it is such a reflection of that time, because it was all of my dread, all of my existentialism, all of my anxieties, and then I also had nothing but time to make stuff,” Hall said. “But it was this moment … where I was like, ‘Fuck it. I’m going to do this thing.’”

This decision opened up new avenues to Hall, who quickly immersed himself in the comics world, discovering countless new artists via the Gutter Boys podcast, many of whom have since become good friends. 

“It was like this whole world opened up to me that I had been vaguely aware of but thought, like, ‘I’m not a part of that,’” he said. “And it’s like, you just gotta try. Make a thing, buddy, and you’re in.”