Meet Arlen Schumer | Comic book-style illustrator & pop culture historian

We had the good fortune of connecting with Arlen Schumer and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Arlen, can you walk us through the thought-process of starting your business?
My goal was to bring comic art into the commercial art world with the same impact Roy Lichtenstein had brought it into the fine art world; here is where I felt I could do my part to uplift the medium in the eyes of the mainstream.

No one has merged good graphic design and comic book-style illustration, in non-comic book arenas (like advertising and editorial) quite as I have—and I’m really the only true comic book art historian, treating the comic book art form with the same depth of analysis and breadth of criticism as more traditional art history.

At the same time, I’ve been working to get comic book art appreciated and treated seriously in the academic and cultural worlds as an indigenous American art form with a rich history, via my comic book art history “VisuaLectures” (so dubbed because “lectures” is such a pejorative, and mine are as visual as they are verbal) and verbal/visual essays (which form the basis of my book about comic book art in the 1960s, The Silver Age of Comic Book Art).

Let’s talk shop? Tell us more about your career, what can you share with our community?
I love comic book art because it really taught me everything I know—and perhaps more importantly, love—about art itself. It instilled in me so many things: a love of drawing, a love of the human body (which the superhero is all about), a love of American popular culture via all those superheroes, a love of color, a love of the printed, page-turning medium.

And a love of reading itself; I remember learning to read from comic books long before I learned to read from books in school. My mother used to tell my brother and I when we got older that she once went to see the elementary school guidance counselor over her “fear” that we were only reading comic books (leftover from the 1950s scare that comics caused juvenile delinquency). Whoever that guidance counselor was, God bless ‘im, because he simply responded, “Don’t worry; as long as they’re reading”!

And “everything I needed to know I learned from comic books,” too! The morals and ideals and lessons those superheroes stood for and taught us by proxy, like understanding the difference between right and wrong, good and evil, when to stand up for what you believe—when to fight for what you believe—have remained with me to this day.

Comic art, being a unique combination of words and pictures—each working individually but also creating a “third” artistic reality, the simultaneous, symbiotic, harmonic convergence of verbal and visual—is one of the few truly indigenous American art forms (along with jazz, baseball and musical theater). It’s not only one of the greatest forms of American popular culture of the 20th Century, with a history to rival film and rock & roll, but now, in the 21st Century, is more popular than ever, with superheroes having taken over film and television, and graphic novels becoming the lingua franca. Our entire visual culture, whether virtual or “real,” is actually a combination of words and pictures, just like comic art has always been, of its time and ahead of its time.

And comic art, being not just “pretty pictures,” but “pretty pictures” that have to tell a story, a narrative, is therefore far richer and more rewarding in content than most “fine art” I see in galleries and museums. And “content is king,” no?

Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?
Since I live one hour outside New York City, I would take them there for the week, eat at 3 fabulous restaurants for breakfast, lunch & dinner every day–NYC has the best cuisines from around the world, like the best hummus & falafel at my fave East Village cafe, the best pizza, the best hamburger, et al!

Then I’d take them to the plethora of artistic & cultural institutions, like The Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum (my 2 faves). Of course, I’d also take them to all the classic “touristy” spots that never grow old: the top of the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty, the boat cruise around Manhattan, the new sky port at Hudson Yards.

Who else deserves some credit and recognition?
My “big break” was getting to work for the legendary comic book artist Neal Adams (1941-2022) at his Continuity Associates. If you had told me at age 12, when I—and an entire generation of comic book readers—was getting my mind blown on a monthly basis by Neal’s work, that I would one day be working for and with Neal Adams, I would have had an adolescent heart attack!

At the time, Neal was doing mostly advertising production art (comps, storyboards, animatics), which was preventing him from taking on all the finished-illustration comic book-styled ads that were coming in; I reasoned one guy could make a pretty good living just on the work he was turning away, and that that was what I set out to do full-time upon leaving Continuity in ’86. Neal had previously done, I thought, the best comic advertising to date; I could never compete with him on a pure drawing level (who could?), but I thought I could differentiate my work by emphasizing overall graphic design and good hand-lettering, due largely to my graphic design education at RISD.

I had no desire to do comic book art for the companies, as I was probably just too slow for the field, and didn’t really have the burning desire to tell stories anyway–I had more of an illustration/poster design mentality. So I combined my expertise in graphic design and illustration with knowledge and love of comic art and its history to create work that I’d like to think stands out from the crowd of more conventional illustration, photography and graphic design.

Website: http://www.arlenschumer.com

Instagram: @arlenschumer

Linkedin: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/arlenschumer/3/164/8a7

Twitter: @arlenschumer

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/arlenschumerNEW

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/user/arlen6658/videos

Other: https://vimeo.com/arlenschumer1