Interview Web comics and wheatpaste: Pictures For Sad Children's John Campbell

In August of 2007, John Campbell grew weary of his desk job and moved to Mexico with the goal of doing web comics for a living. Now back in Chicago, Campbell is one of few artists able to support himself off of the medium, with his popular strip Pictures For Sad Children earning him money in book sales, advertising, and merchandising. Recently, Campbell switched his canvas from the Internet to the city's streets, blowing up short strips and pasting them on bridges and buildings around the city. The A.V. Club caught up with Campbell to find out how the transition for cartoonist to street artist is treating him and how Chicago is influencing his work.

The A.V. Club: Why venture into the public art displays you’re posting around Chicago?

John Campbell: It was actually something I started doing in 2005. I was living in the city, and I would post these sad little two-panel comics that I would draw on Post-it Notes and put packing tape over. I referred to that series in ’05 as Pictures For Sad Children, which I eventually used for my web comic. I think there’s something really magical about street art when it works and I notice it. It’s the surprise of not expecting art to be there and not expecting decent art to be on the streets.

AVC: Is this sort of a graffiti-esque thing you have to sneak out and do?

JC: Yeah, I’ll get out at 2 a.m. and bring a friend with me to help paste stuff up. Part of the appeal is that I’m not supposed to be doing it. The other appeal is climbing on buildings, which is fun.

AVC: Have you gotten much feedback from your street art?

JC: One time I was taking pictures of one of my recent paste-ups and some guy pulled over in his car and started asking me about it, because he’d noticed some of the other ones and wanted to know more about the artist. For whatever reason, I was not capable of taking responsibility for it, so I just said, “It’s some guy who does a comic on the Internet.” So I talked with him about it without him knowing I had made it. He was like, “This one’s okay, but this other one is a lot better.” It’s a really different kind of feedback than online, which is usually either bizarrely critical or bizarrely complimentary.

AVC: This seems like your attempt to explore mediums beyond the limitations of web comics. Is that something you think you’re going to continue to do?

JC: I have no idea, and I’ve been trying to figure that out. I’ve been doing comics for a few years, and got bored or not as excited and needed to switch things up some. My show is clearly a cartoonist making, or attempting, installation art. It’s really cartoon-y, but yeah, it’s what I’ve got to work with.

AVC: Over the history of Pictures For Sad Children, what were some of your favorite comics you’ve written?

JC: I’m most proud of recent work. So, of the single-page comics I’ve been making for the past year or so, there are a few where I feel that I really captured what I was going for. For the one with the giraffe who has recently emigrated from Africa, I was just hoping to reproduce the feeling that sort of situation causes, either by being one of the people in that interaction or being an outsider watching that interaction between people from different cultures. I feel like living in Mexico for a while helped me experience the other end of it where people assumed my experience of the United States was completely different than what it actually was.

AVC: How do you think Chicago has influenced your comics?

JC: I had a comic set on the El about this dude who had recently been through a breakup and had all these mechanical things break around him. Riding on Chicago public transportation had me wanting to do a comic about it for a really long time. I had a comic about an air show. I had been in this neighborhood [the West Loop] this time last year. So, just hearing all of the jets flying by and rattling the windows I thought was genuinely terrifying. That came out of conversations with friends about how horrible it was to hear these war machines tearing through the skies around our city. It was really strange.