Josh Shalak
Falling Rock National Park
Josh makes wonderful comics that use nubby “chipboard” covers that look totally great. He started drawing comics in his fourth grade math class because he liked drawing more than math. He did a strip in high school, another one in high school, and now he does “Falling Rock National Park,” which is syndicated in college newspapers and it’s also online. Josh has taken drawing classes but he studied English and Japanese History at Oberlin College. He likes telling stories and these studies at Oberlin helped him fine tune his storytelling. He’s been producing “Falling Rock National Park” for six years and had it available in six volumes at Comic Con. Every year he collects about a third of his strips, those he considers the best of the year, and binds them into books. He draws about 190 strips a year and binds about 65 into the annual books. His plans to stop syndicating the “Falling Rock National Park” strip and make it into a comic book that he’ll bring out quarterly. He had two books that were not related to “Falling Rock National Park,” one was “Dancing with Jack Ketch” about a runaway slave who became a pirate captain (a true story) and the other was “Tomb of the Zombies” about friendly zombies in Egypt (a not true story). Josh grew up in Tucson Arizona, which explains the Southwest settings for his work, but he’s been living in Portland Oregon for the past six years. He said he finds it difficult to write and draw about the place he currently lives and prefers to draw on his memories for settings.
For more SDCC 2012 coverage, here’s Comic Con all in one big post.