Transcript: Patrick Atangan - Comic Artist

For arts Sake
Episode “Patrick Atangan Comic Artist”

Peter Atangan: I have always been involved in art in one form or another. One of my earliest memories was drawing in front of the TV. And that is something that I always felt like I would eventually be going into, and I have ever really thought of anything else. I can’t see myself doing anything else.

I come from a family of accountants and it’s a little bit odd that I have become an artist. Or at least they see it as that. In comic books you are wearing a lot of different hats. You are a director you are a writer. You are a set designer, you do the costumes. It is very much a one man show. And it keeps my schizophrenic head occupied. It keeps me from being bored with my own work.
It’s a book of short stories tentatively titled short stories. And what I am doing is I am collecting true childhood stories from my own childhood as well as those from my friends and family.

When I originally approached people about this project and I told them I wanted just short two or three paragraphs. Illustrating something that happened in their lives that tells the reader a little bit about who they are as a person. There is going to be about a hundred of these stories. My intention with them, as the reader is reading it. Is to be able to step back and look at these stories collectively, as a self portrait.

Because the number of stories is so large that they eventually start running into one another and hopefully the reader will eventually see it al as one voice. And the stories that I am getting, I am not saying that there are no happy moments in childhood. Childhood is filled with a great number of, of those moments. But you know happiness doesn’t necessarily make you who you are today, and doesn’t necessarily make you a better person. Childhood is very much about struggling, struggling through a world that wasn’t designed for you.

When I designed these characters I designed them like stuffed animals purposefully, I gave them no hands and limns that couldn’t really do anything. And that very much reflects the world of a child. They are powerless to really affect any change in their environment.

The idea of childhood as happy and fluffy, and I am using the art, the art itself as a contrast to the characters. They themselves are sweet looking; they are living out these lives that are quite tragic and sad. The art of Quiana, it basically talks about the art of cuteness, and how cuteness is basically distilled. You know this creature with the large head and eyes that have this vacant stare and no limbs.

Very much like a baby in a sense, because that’s what babies are, these odd looking creatures, with big heads and eyes. And instinctively we want to protect things that look like that. The way it has been constructed on illustrator it actually feels like I am making an entire world. It is almost like I am building something in real life. When I make a bookshelf I have to start with legs, make the sides of the bookshelf and actually make shelves. It’s unlike any type of drawing that I have done before, when before it was all very much surface. I actually have to think of these objects in three dimensions.

Geez, why is it that I want to tell stories? I think it is because I have some interesting stories to tell. It’s in human nature to want to share. And this is my way of sharing what I grew up with and what I have to offer, as an artist, as a person.