If America is all these different cultures coming together in one land, that’s kind of what I wanted the books to represent…
The best conception I can have of our country is different people coming together to make something bigger, and that’s kind of what I wanted to represent in my books by using these comics.
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For the last decade, artist, animator, illustrator and performer R Sikoryak has been putting America’s founding documents into lively conversation with iconic images and characters from comics and cartoons.
That started with the Constitution — “there’s a document everyone says you should read and I wanted to make it readable by adding visuals” — and his new book, Declaration / Emancipation Illustrated, continues with those two documents along with the Gettysburg Address.
In a wide-ranging conversation with Lit NYC host Harry Siegel, Sikoryak talks about getting to New York, cutting his teeth at Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly’s underground cartoon anthology Raw and its ‘Narrative Corpse,” his Masterpiece Comics like Batman’s Crime and Punishment and Charlie Brown’s Metamorphosis, and much more.
Main image by R Sikoryak, and bottom right corner by Mark Beyer. Credit: Raw Magazine, 1996 – c/o R Sikoryak
One thing that might separate me from AI — I hope there’s more than one thing — is that I’m using my own brain to consider what pieces to combine.
I’m taking the time to consider what these things mean together.
If what I come up with isn’t what you would come up with, that’s fine.
I think anyone who wanted to spend three years making this book and using the same conceit, where it’s a different artist for every page, could come up with an entirely different book and I would love to see that book.
For myself, the process of making is the process of thinking and the process of drawing is what I do. It’s not just coming up with the idea.
I have to generate it for it to make sense to me, and I have to generate it for me to understand it. I’m not sure I would understand this book if I just had a machine make it for me.
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