Image Comics’ Little Bird and its prequel series Precious Metal is home to some of dystopian sci-fi’s most recognizable inhabitants. Bounty hunters or “trackers” with techno-organic enhancements, suicide bomber death cultists, liberationist freedom fighters, and “designers” who neuro-modify the minds of children, all roam a desolate planet barreling towards an uncertain future.
A war between New Vatican, self-styled agents of order, and the last defenders of freedom in the Canadian hinterlands, is coming to a head in these companion series set thirty-five years apart. While these elements may be familiar to readers of Jodorowsky and Otomo, the struggles of Tantoo, Little Bird, Axe, and Max Weaver—the dramatis personae of this sideward American Empire—belong to a world unto itself.
New York-based artist Ian Bertram is responsible for the art in both titles, and his delicately rendered visuals and textured backgrounds have lent the universe an undercurrent of dread and eeriness. Over the course of ten years, Bertram’s illustrations have only become more detailed and expressive, developing an unsettling but penetratingly vulnerable quality.
The Dark Horse series Bowery Boys: Our Fathers, an antebellum political thriller, proved to be a breakthrough series and secured Bertram art duties on prominent titles like Batman Eternal, Wolverine and the X-Men, and the ripped-from-pages-of-life horror comic House of Penance with Peter Tomasi. For the past five years though, Bertram and writer Darcy Van Poelgeest have been diligently at work on Precious Metal, whose first issue was released in June 2024. The long-awaited sequel promises to set the stage for the events of Little Bird, while also delving deeper into the ethical nightmares of illegal body modification, human trafficking, and unscrupulous genetic experimentation.
I spoke with Ian on the phone about art operating as pure utility and power, the boring endeavor of hierarchizing comics, and the joys of entering a “flow state of equanimity” while perfecting a maximalist style of drawing.
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Jean Marc Ah-Sen: The question that I usually like to start with is about an artist’s first exposure to comics. Did you regard comics as an art form with creative potential immediately, or were you aware that it had something of a bedraggled reputation? I can remember a time when a comics professional attending a book festival would turn heads.
Ian Bertram: I think my first exposure to comics was at such a young age that the idea of different hierarchies of art just hadn't occurred to me. It was one of those things where if you could find comics, you could be immediately charmed and gravitate towards the images. I think a lot of what's been going on in the world is defending the things that you actually enjoy and not being embarrassed by them. It’s something that people have grown to respect. I know that my brother's generation would ask “Why would anyone care if you like comics or not?” It’s not even worth thinking about. I guess in retrospect there was definitely a sense that comics were nerdy, but I'm not really sure I ever really cared. I don't think that I had an upbringing where a larger cultural idea of what was sophisticated and not sophisticated was accessible. It was more that it felt very natural and easy to enjoy comics and I never really thought much about what that would mean in terms of how it would be received by people.
The reputation has definitely changed over the years though. In the U.S., with all the Marvel movies and stuff like that, I think general audiences have gotten a little more familiar. But I think that it's still easier for people to disregard certain types of comics and elevate others, and there's all these little niche groups of people within comics—some people are making really cool avant-garde weird stuff, and some people are doing mainstream house style stuff, and then there is everything in between. And there are always going to be boring people saying “Oh well this is valid, this is not valid.” And it's like “No, they’re all valid.”
Do you remember what you were reading when you were young?
The most vivid images in my mind of my childhood is an X-Men book that was essentially an omnibus of all the different heroes and villains. I forget what it was called, but I remember loving it and drawing all the different characters when I was nine or ten. But I don't actually remember the first comic.
How imperative is it for comics to undergo this facelift I was describing—where it can rise from the muck, so to speak, maybe establish itself as an art form of the first order? Does validation need to occur to lend any medium a sense of legitimacy?
Good question. The thing I’ve always really loved about comics is that anyone who gravitated towards it knew that it was a medium where you weren't allowed to be pretentious. I think that there's a very real suspicion of anything that's a little too lofty or that feels disingenuous. A lot of my favorite comics do elevate the medium, but I don't think anyone should really be concerned about it.
With Felix Comic Art [Bertram’s art representative], Felix Lu has just completely exploded the medium in a very cool way where contemporary artists have not only been able to actually make good money selling their artwork, but he's been doing it in a way that people are really excited about. For me, selling my artwork allowed me to work on Precious Metal for five years without being paid to do it. That is a very strange thing and I think I'd be lying if I said that wouldn't happen if comics hadn't been elevated in some way.
Also, I think that it's totally fair if it would bother people that the medium isn't elevated to the level they think it should be, but I also think that one of the cool things about comics is that it feels limitless—you can just make the most elevated work you can think of and it requires very little in terms of outside influence. If you can think of it and you have time and money to do it, and you can draw it and write it, you can make the thing.
There's definitely examples of people who are incredibly talented and charismatic spokesmen and spokeswomen who can be charming and speak in a way that “elevates” the medium, but I think a lot of comics people are not really interested in having their personas elevated to the point that their creations are secondary to their name. I like the idea that the medium can just stand on its own and you can offer a thing to the world and people can judge it however they choose. Elevated or not.
I was also thinking that it might depend on your definition of “elevation” too. I used to have to go into a hobby shop to get comics and part of that project of elevation was related to ease of access—trade paperbacks in the big-box stores, which just meant that a whole demographic of people who didn't know they possessed an interest in manga or the graphic arts suddenly had their eyes opened. But there’s also a literary project of elevation that assumes that comics must be “respectable” in order for it to be truly valuable in people's eyes.
A hundred percent. It really depends on what you value in comics, right? If you value them as an art form, then I would guess that you're more interested in it being elevated, whatever that might mean. Maybe elevated in the sense of in more places, more accessible, turned into blockbuster films. Or maybe in a more “sophisticated” type of way where you could get all dressed up and do something in a gala space. I think the cool thing about art in general is that it really is completely subjective—if someone was to say to me “Hey, I hate the way that comics has gone because the thing I loved about it was that I could go to a hobby store and go into this place that I felt was mine and safe and precious and unique and hidden and all these beautiful things, and now people who haven't read every issue of X-Men are telling me online that my interpretation of Wolverine is wrong when actually I've read all the comics,” well that’s as real as anything else, you know? Personally, it always seems like a mistake to have a harsh opinion on anything. I mean there's definitely horrible things in the world, but when it comes to art, I think it’s very special if we can let it be free to exist however it wants, and decide for ourselves if it's worth our attention.
Klaus Janson was something of a mentor figure to you, right? Can you talk about how integral a role he played in your development as an artist?
I'm so happy that you brought up Klaus. Klaus Janson was my education at The School Of Visual Arts in New York. Aside from one or two other professors, Klaus taught me literally everything I know about comics in terms of storytelling techniques and the real workmanship aspects, where you draw all the time and you do it even when you don't want to because it's not about you—it's about servicing the story. Anytime I’m at NYCC, I always go try to find Klaus because he’s just a fantastic human being. He’s someone I'm incredibly grateful to have been able to study under. He’s so knowledgeable and broke things down in a way that was so intuitive. I still have a bunch of his class assignments at home because he wrote stuff on the back and that's just very precious to me. I hope he actually sees this. I’m always trying to tell him these things and now he’ll have to just read it.
Your first work was the self-published 1001, a graphic adaptation of the Arabian Nights. What is the value in retelling stories across mediums and generations? Do you think something is culturally lost if this interpretive exercise does not occur in popular mediums, as they do with classical music or opera in the high arts?
I think my answer is going to be slightly disappointing in that 1001 was a college thesis with specific parameters. Basically, the theme of the thesis was retelling a classic tale, and there was a list of things to choose from. When I finished the comic, I printed it out on computer paper and taped together 50 copies to take to MOCCA. I went with my friend Gus Storms, who's phenomenal, and we basically went in there without a table, and saw one that was just completely open on the corner right next to a trash can. We sat down and just had a table at MOCCA for an afternoon. I sold those 50 copies for like five bucks and gave the rest away. It’s a great memory.
The reason I ask is because I knew about this tradition in film where retelling classic stories from myth was once a pretty bankable project where audiences could go see a remake of say Medea at various points in their lives. I initially thought that you were doing a callback to that or the popularity of adapting stageplays into film.
When you just said that, it reminded me of The Sunset Limited. It’s one of the greatest film adaptations of a play that I've ever seen. It's Tommy Lee Jones and Samuel L. Jackson just absolutely acting their butts off. It is phenomenal. Anyway, I definitely think there’s the immediate answer where there’s some truths that are passed down through all these different tales, and for some reason stand the test of time— there’s something very vital and important that they're expressing that is universal, something you can gravitate to regardless of time—but I also think that as someone starting out, the idea that you would make something that was completely devoid of a template is impossible.
Robert Crumb adapted the Bible as an older man and that’s wild. What a strange thing for someone to do, and he did it with such passion. I don't know if there's one answer and I certainly don't know if I have that answer, but I do like the idea of the cultural utility of retelling stories in different mediums. I don’t know if it becomes an exercise in vanity or an exercise in having a thing that's powerful and timeless work through you in some way, where you can maybe learn something about what the story really is, and if its themes and lessons still apply in today's world, but you only can find the answers by trying it out for yourself.
Your Dark Horse comic book Bowery Boys will celebrate its milestone 10 year anniversary soon. What are your thoughts on this collaboration with Cory Levine looking back after all these years?
I loved working with Cory. I've been incredibly fortunate in comics where all the writers that I've worked with have been gracious and kind and cool and talented. Especially in my formative years, when I was trying to figure things out. Cory just reached out and said “Hey, I have this cool story idea, would you want to draw it?” We met up and we talked and I had just re-watched Gangs of New York—what a film. I mean, that’s just giving the people exactly what we want. It's just delicious and decadent and brutal and everything I love. So when Cory asked if I wanted to do something like that, it was great for a lot of reasons, but a big one was that I was able to make money drawing comics while I was in school. I think I was actually working on that in one of Klaus's classes. He allowed me to do that as opposed to one of his assignments because in his mind, he thought “this is a working opportunity, why would you say no to this?”
I remember thinking how assured your style was right out the gate. There’s a little less detail than your current work, but I mistakenly believed that this was a comic from someone who had been in the field for years.
It's very funny looking back on old work. I mean, you interview people, and I’m sure you look on old interviews like “Oh my god, I can't believe I asked that question!” It’s the same for me. We're always in our own heads about stuff, but artwork-wise, I think “This is terrible.” That's the inner critic. I think the utility of looking back on old work is knowing where I was in my life, what I thought I knew at the time or was working through, and what was important to me and what still is important to me. I don’t know how assured the style was at the time—it certainly didn't feel that way. It felt like I was just chaotically trying to draw the best things I could while having no idea what I was doing.
Almost every artist I talk to has that relationship with their earlier work. As a non-artist though, there's just joy as you witness an artist evolve and grow. I would think that audiences don’t have the same internal critical mindset as artists?
Maybe this idea is a little, I don’t know, saccharine sweet, but you said as a “non-artist,” and I think what maybe what you mean is as someone who doesn’t “draw comics.” I was just having this conversation with a new artist friend that I have a lot of respect for. He’s been working for a while and he brought up something that I agree with, which is that everyone is an artist or has the capacity to be one. There's so much artistic flair in everyone. There's so many examples in my life of people starting a new artistic pursuit, like my partner getting into interior design and me teaching her about color theory and just being blown away by her level of sophistication with color in such a short period of time. She's an emergency room doctor—this is not someone who's been dedicating herself to the arts or anything like that, and she just went ahead and built these incredibly beautiful tables and chairs and coordinated all these amazing palettes for the apartment.
Another example, my friend Forest and I train Muay Thai, and it’s great for a lot of reasons. He’s my main training partner and he just decided over the past eight months that he wants to learn to draw. He didn't even tell me until he'd been doing it for about four months. He just spends an hour and a half every single day studying art and drawing, and he's making huge improvements. It’s wild. I may be taking a snippet of what you're saying and over-elaborating on it, and I’m not trying to doubt your opinion on it, but I just wanted to address this kind of binary sentiment that a lot of people have. I just don’t think that’s the case. I don't know if I'm correct, but it feels that, anecdotally throughout my life, none of us choose to be artistic. We’re either encouraged or not encouraged, or we find we become artists for some reason that's beyond our decision-making.
I guess the value of making art depends on what you're trying to get out of it? I started doing Muay Thai about four years ago now and compared to one of my friends who's been doing Muay Thai for like fifteen years, I’m horrible. And for him, compared to people that have been doing Muay Thai in Thailand since they were six years old and had two hundred fights by the time they’re sixteen, it would be like them fighting a baby. There are so many levels, but it's all art. Maybe it's a little romantic and impractical, but I feel like it would be better for the world if we could all be more encouraging to our inner artists.
If they’re not writing their own stories, I feel that some comic artists choose their new projects and collaborators with a sense of curatorial intent. They’re telegraphing to audiences where their artistic preoccupations might lie. Do you think this is true? How much thought do you give into the types of stories you’re involved with?
There's not a lot of opportunities when you're just starting out. You take a leap and you hope it's with someone that you respect, or grow to respect, or you hop on a phone call and you just like their vibe. You can kind of pick and choose a little bit, but a lot of it is just a scarcity mindset and you really hope that you end up with people who are not only talented, but respect you and are good to work with and excited about collaborating. I’ve been really lucky with that. [Writer] Darcy Van Poelgeest has become sort of my artistic home when it comes to comics.
Our childhoods and the ways that our minds work and the stories we're interested in telling are all very similar. There’s a kind of weird hivemind aspect about it and a lot of the way that we work is him being really excited about this idea and almost every single time I’ll say “I love it. It couldn’t be better.” That's very strange and I feel very fortunate for it. But for me, where I'm at, the way that I like working is with someone where it’s an exercise in complete trust and collaboration.
Where we both are able to just throw ourselves into a thing and do our parts knowing the other is putting everything they have into theirs. It’s also fortunate that with Darcy, the things he’s interested in writing are the things I'm interested in drawing. We’re both obsessed with exploring brutality and viciousness, balanced with a type of hope. We like the strangeness of wandering through a world that you feel kind of detached from but forced to be a part of. Those are general things that I think probably apply to everyone, but the ways in which they're expressed with Darcy and I feel incredibly similar.
I think a lot of the heavy lifting that would have to be done if I was to work with someone else is already done, and we have this kind of shorthand for understanding. We didn’t luck into it. We worked hard and we communicated and did our best to be charitable and gracious to each other throughout the years. Darcy's an amazing writer for a lot of reasons, but one of the things that I like, that I try to do, and I think I fail more often with, is Darcy can set aside the ego.
If I went to Darcy and said “Hey, I would love for you to write a story that is completely different than anything we've ever done and it’s going to be a completely abstract piece that we don’t want anyone to like or be able to connect with,” my bet is that Darcy would be game. It’s a pretty phenomenal way to collaborate.
We've been friends and working together for a long time now—more than ten years. I had a Deviant Art page and he saw some of my sketchbook stuff and he reached out and said that he had this idea for this comic called Little Bird. My memory is hazy, but I think we did issue one, and then I did House of Penance, and then we came back to do issues two through five.
It's a strange thing because I could try to put words to it, but there is a type of magic to the way that we collaborated, in terms of the enjoyment that we get out of it, that I almost don't want to label, you know? What I mean is I don't want to even tell myself why it works. I have a lot of respect for him as a creator and as a person and it feels like a very unique type of collaboration.
Precious Metal and Little Bird are set against the backdrop of widespread ecological ruin, a repressive religious theocracy, and a revolutionary movement trying to restore balance to the world. Did you and Darcy have the sense that there was a timeliness to this story, and that it had pressing social implications for the current moment?
What's really wild is because we started it in 2013, it seemed that everything that's been happening with Trump and all the fucking Nazis coming out of the woodwork was not really a thing then—I mean, it’s America, so it's always been a thing. It’s the world, there is always going to be something horrible present if you look for it, but I don't think there was as much of a larger cultural conversation about those elements, or at least I wasn’t keyed into that. I will say that stories about revolution against an oppressive regime of some kind have been going on forever. Maybe the specifics of it being a Christian American empire felt pressing at the time, even though I don't think that was quite as apparent to either of us and we were just kind of messing around with it.
I’m aware that if I was reading an interview with someone and they say “We did this book and it was actually prescient and we predicted all of the things that would happen in the world and our book really addressed and changed things,” I would be more than put off. For us, we just kind of made Little Bird because it felt right and then afterwards, we realized that “we got some stuff going on in the world that feels eerily similar.” But I would also guess that if you were to tell stories about fascist dictatorships and religious oligarchies, you could kind of do it at any time and you'd find something in the world that felt similar. There's always the pendulum swinging in some way, although it does seem pretty bad at the moment. I don't think we really thought about it in those terms when we were making it, and then after it came out, we both realized that it felt timely.
What are your ambitions for the Little Bird universe? Are these stories that you two could work on for the rest of your lives, or is this a very finite story that you’re telling?
We absolutely could. Darcy has a bunch of stories cooked up and in an ideal universe, we’d tell them all. I don't want to say too much about Precious Metal because I don't want to give anything away, but I think people will be surprised. And I don't think that there's any limit to what we could do within that world. I keep joking with Darcy that we don’t know what’s going on in outer space in the world of Little Bird. We’re in the future, and we could do anything out there. Plenty of space adventures to be had if we wanted to go that route. And Darcy definitely has a bunch of ideas for future stories and I guess we'll see how those progress. What I can say is that I think Darcy did an absolutely incredible job with Precious Metal of telling a story that exists completely on its own, but if you’ve read Little Bird, having a bunch of things pop up or be alluded to should be incredibly satisfying.
I’m reading this book called Investigative Aesthetics by Matthew Fuller and Eyal Weizman, which describes a conception of the artist as “working for themselves rather than for the stabilization of order.” It’s for this reason that political actors sometimes expel aesthetics from the sphere of political action. The world of Little Bird almost completely bereft of art-making, and it is really only in the rebel enclave that this activity can thrive. Can you talk more about this decision?
I’m incredibly happy that you brought that up and also surprised that it's something you noticed. There's a lot of things in Little Bird and Precious Metal that Darcy's doing and that I'm doing that involves some fun, subconscious worldbuilding, but you're never quite sure how it translates. In Little Bird, when Tantoo is pregnant, she runs away from the city and she finds a woman on a solar farm. It’s Tantoo’s first introduction to making a life for herself and experiencing personal growth, and it's the idea that in a world where there is a fascist engine using iconography like flags and crosses—art as pure utility and power—the idea of being able to create art for yourself doesn’t exist. You'd only be able to do it in the middle of nowhere.
I also remember very intentionally having the New Vatican’s big structures be built out of blocks stacked one directly on top of the other. It's incredibly rigid and big, but it's also incredibly fragile in its construction. The buildings are oppressive and powerful, but within the structure itself, it's fundamentally weak.
It occurs to me that an artist’s style might not simply be an amalgam of their influences. In a lot of instances, there seems to be real thoughtful consideration and philosophical weight that goes into the development of it. Bill Sienkiewicz once described his need to adopt an ever-evolving, cross-medium approach to his style because that “high wire” element not only kept him from getting bored, but conferred a degree of tension to his work. What do you think the artistic principles informing your work would be?
What I’d guess Sienkiewicz is getting at is that art can be a tool for dealing with the mind in some way. I can definitely talk about my artistic influences—obviously, Moebius and Frank Qutiely—but I think that we gravitate towards certain things less so because we choose to and more so because we just kind of find ourselves there. The style I like to draw in is a maximalist style. I want every line possible. I want you to be able to see every lash, every drop of sweat, and I want things to feel carved into the page. But that’s almost secondary to the reason why I draw. It’s an incredible tool for dealing with anxiety, depression, obsessive thinking, all these things that are prevalent in every artist's life. No one’s making comics because they're happy. It’s a crazy medium and one that requires a lot of solitude and a lot of escaping into different places and worlds on your own.
For me, having all these tiny hatching marks in my art, becomes a very meditative process. It’s one of the only ways other than Muay Thai that I found to help me reach a sense of equanimity—like a flow state. I think there's an addiction aspect to it, and there's a deep kind of compulsion that keeps people working in comics. No one got into comics to make money, right? You got into it because you couldn't do anything else—not in terms of your ability to do anything else, but you were drawn to comics somehow, like it was beyond your control.
But with influences, I remember specifically maybe about eight years ago being like “I'm not gonna look at anyone else's work.” I’m not sure how true I’ve been to that, but it was a jumping off point of some kind.
Currently I’m in a studio with Tradd Moore, who's amazing and who I share work with back and forth all the time. I see James Harren’s stuff, and a few other artists too, but I guess what I'm saying is that I’m just trying to fall deeper into the style that I'm doing, while loving the work of the people that inspire me. Actually, it has less to do with trying to fall deeper into the style and more with arriving at some type of capital T “Truth” when it comes to the process of making the work. That is the most validating and profound aspect about drawing for me. We talked earlier about not being pretentious… we're getting there!
I love that answer, though. The artistic process is endlessly fascinating and I've never really heard it articulated that way. An art practice as an addiction doesn’t get talked about nearly enough. It’s a little disturbing.
I promise you I will not have a conversation with you about free will because ultimately it's pointless, but I definitely think that when it comes to what drives us, we're always in our own blind spots. I can't speak for other people, but when I'm honest with myself about where the work comes from, it is a compulsion. It certainly has aspects of being unhealthy. It’s not always, but I'd say that given my life, my brain chemistry, the things I've dealt with and seen over the years, coming to a place of equanimity even in small ways is incredibly important.
If you can forgive the broadness of this question, what do you think are the most pressing questions regarding the social function of the artist today?
Now that is a question. And I guess it would depend on the day you ask me. I tend to think a lot about the opposition to art, the way that it can be subverted and devalued, but I have a pretty nihilistic take on where things are headed when it comes to our world. I think those ideas end up coming back to art in some way, but I'm not entirely sure what is the most pressing question. There’s A.I. I guess I’d say that the questions that are pressing are the ones that are the most depressing, though the existential questions about the utility of art are not super interesting to me personally—I'm not really sure if I even care.
You have done a lot of gallery shows and exhibits of your art. What are the benefits of the gallery showing, to your way of thinking? What does the recalibrating pace of an exhibit do for your process when you are between the punishing deadlines of print media?
The attraction to the gallery show has maybe less to do with showing things in a gallery and more to do with me constantly making giant pieces and paintings and then thinking “I've made these things, what do I do with them now?” I'd like people to be able to see them and I don't think that comics is a medium that we can do that in, because if I finish a giant 40” x 60” painting I’ve spent a month doing, how do we show that in comics? If anyone reading this has a great idea, let me know.
I've been really fortunate to show in some pretty cool galleries. Not to take away from the gallery experience, but if it was up to me, I would put the work up in the gallery and then leave. I don’t like being there when people are seeing the work. When I put a comic out, it’s not like I’m sitting next to everyone reading it. Work in comics requires your art to be in service of the story, but when I’m doing bigger paintings, it’s a pure stream of consciousness. Over months or years of working on a painting, I'll add a thing here and there, but then looking back, I’ll realize that I was dealing with something in my life. It’s looking at the work and applying meaning to it in retrospect that makes the personal work exciting, but with comics, the excitement is being present for the story.
Do you think that artists have to negotiate between freedom and visibility? What I mean is, does one come at the expense of the other? Does becoming a household name in comics mean you have to reckon with audience expectations or professional obligations and that there is a calculable cost to one’s artistic integrity?
I think it all depends on what you want to do. Here's the perfect example: Alex Ross. This is a guy who I love and is a household name that I think is truly phenomenal. I've heard people say things like “His work is too formulaic” and I’m thinking, “You need to leave. You have no idea what you're talking about.” This is truly incredible stuff, and he is interested in telling superhero stories right because he truly believes in their power.
But then you have someone like Gary Panter, who's doing just the weirdest stuff that you've ever seen in your life and it's so compelling. You feel very conflicted about this work, which feels like it shouldn’t work, but it does, and he’s incredibly accomplished. Maybe the question is if they offered Batman to Gary Panter and he was allowed to do whatever he wanted, would the work suffer? Does the nature of the type of stories that he’s interested in telling translate? And the same with Alex Ross. If you told him “We want you to do the most avant-garde thing you've ever seen in your life,” what would that look like?
Someone like Tradd Moore has been able to keep his artistic integrity and do different types of stories. Independent work, mainstream work. The Doctor Strange: Fall Sunrise story that he wrote himself is very weird and I am constantly surprised that Marvel let him do that. How cool is it that Marvel let something like that happen? I guess it depends on why you would take the project. If you take a project with a character that will give you a more immediate readership, but you have to do all these things that would alter what you think is important, then you have to decide for yourself—if you’re okay with that and is it in service of the work, or if that is opposed to your morals or goals. It’s very subjective, but it feels like you shouldn’t be able to have both.
Also, you might have to come face to face with yourself in strange ways. If someone wants to give you a big bag of money, but to get it, you have to put aside what you feel is your integrity, then that’s a tough decision. You can decide that “I’m going to go that way because I’d be making the decision for reasons other than my ideas about artistic integrity.” I mean you can’t eat artistic integrity. You can’t pay your rent with it. These are all very real considerations. But I hope people get to be in positions in their lives where they can really sit with these questions, and have the stability to make the choices that are most in line with their values.
The post ‘When it comes to art, I think it’s very special if we can let it be free to exist however it wants’: An interview with Ian Bertram appeared first on The Comics Journal.
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