6 minute read
Artist/Illustrator, Bryan West
BRYAN BRYAN WEST
Multi-talented artist writes comics, records podcasts, and talks Jean-Claude Van Damme
Written by Nathan Zanon Photography by Daniel Garcia
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“I think for a lot of people, if you are an artist and have specific aspirations of the types of art you want to do, you end up having to kind of jigsaw or Frankenstein a career together,” says Bryan West. And as a comic artist, illustrator, teacher, designer, podcaster, and Jean-Claude Van Damme evangelist from Hollister, he embodies this concept remarkably well.
Growing up, West knew early on that he wanted to create art and that he loved comics. “My mom always tells me, the first time she put a crayon in my hand, I was so elated that I could just use this thing and make lines with it,” he says. “I remember making my parents read me this Dino-Riders comic book that came with the toys, as a bedtime story. When I was old enough to read, I started getting into comics for myself.” Most of his life, he “wanted to do comics in some way.”
By the time West was finishing high school at the end of the nineties, the comic book market “kind of imploded,” he explains. “Marvel was going bankrupt at that time, which is a weird thing to think about now.”
Uncertain about how his passion could work out as a career, West drifted through some nonprofit jobs in his early twenties before eventually realizing that he wasn’t going to be happy unless he was creating art. Meanwhile, an insatiable desire for original content on the internet was creating more outlets for artists to find audiences. And at the same time, the Marvel comic franchise exploded into the media behemoth it is today, spurring new interest in comics.
At age 28, West decided it was finally time for art school, so he headed off to Full Sail University in Florida. He returned
California Census Poster for San Benito County Arts Council
“Google God”
home and, with a graphic design degree in hand, began to “Frankenstein” a career together, teaching and freelancing. Before the pandemic, his creative projects focused on editorial illustration—“conceptual stuff, single images that can sum up an article or an idea behind an article”—because it’s one of the markets that actually pays. He describes the “fun” in it as a marriage between himself as “more of a traditional artist and illustrator” and his “education in graphic design.”
Meanwhile, West was finding time to create his comics and put them out into the world via the internet and, with much greater success, at comic conventions and zine fests. “People really need to pick up a comic and look through it,” he says, “especially if you’re a small press. You have to charge a little bit more. So, you’re looking at $5 at least for a comic that [if you bought it online] you might not like.”
His most successful comic to date is entitled Meat. He describes it as a “horror comic with a sort of vegetarian propaganda message about meat that turns people into, you know, bloodthirsty zombie monsters.”
But much of his comic work had begun to wane in the years leading up to the COVID-19 pandemic. Then, when quarantine hit in early 2020, things shifted. “I had some hard times financially,” he explains, “but more than anything, just being surrounded by a [pandemic] and the specter of death and mortality and all this kind of stuff...it definitely made me think a lot about the way I’m spending my time.” And so, after sort of writing comics off for a little while, he’s coming back to them now and prioritizing doing comics for himself.
Following the peculiar manner in which inspiration can strike, it was another creative pursuit that brought his newest comic to life: his friend Weston Notestine proposed the idea of doing a podcast that would examine the films of Belgian action star JeanClaude Van Damme, whose movies they both loved to watch.
BRYAN TALKS BOND TRADING
Kermit Bond
West had tried his hand at podcasting years earlier. Now, with extra time available to watch movies, he dove back into that medium.
“[Van Damme’s] filmography is kind of funny in that he’s sort of the auteur, so to speak, of his own image. He repeats the same stories. He’ll work with multiple directors trying to get something right. He also has movies that are clearly a metaphor for the way he sees himself coming to America and sort of conquering Hollywood, which is really what most of his fight tournament movies are about.”
After recording more than 30 episodes of JCOVID, the podcast transitioned into its current incarnation, Film Franchise Friends, which casts the same entertaining but thoughtful eye toward various film franchises—everything from Planet of the Apes to The Matrix to The Muppets.
And while podcasting has been a fun diversion, the deep dive into Van Damme sparked ideas for his next comic. “Now I’m working on a comic that’s very, very loosely based off Van Damme’s journey to Hollywood in the eighties, but kind of glossed up. It’s going to have a bunch of fights and, you know, crazy supernatural stuff that obviously did not happen. I love cannon films, movies with ninjas, bad horror movies, just kind of junk filmmaking, so I thought it’d be a good way to sort of take these things that I was interested in—fighting ninjas and references to horror movies and all this kind of stuff—and throw it all together for that comic.”
In the past two years, West’s art has evolved from the regimented, “graphic, flat illustration style” of his editorial work. “Now I’ve been trying to sort of go back to my roots and get looser, be more cartoony, use more traditional media again.” All the time staring at screens while working remotely during the pandemic made him adverse to spending his free time in the same way—on screen. “So, I started digging out all my pens and brushes and paints, and I’m getting back into…being more in this exploration mode again.”
West rebranded his Instagram under the moniker “van_dammaged,” coinciding with both his looser artistic style and his quarantine fixation on the action hero. Scrolling his Instagram, the change is obvious: older comic book images in black ink evolve into colorful frames with a distinct graphic look and then suddenly shift to looser drawings, sketches, videos, and short animations. It was important for West to mark this style shift with a new Instagram handle. Now, he explains: “I’m just not going to worry and just post the stuff that I’m making and make what I want to make.”
Trying to survive as a professional artist has always been challenging, and the art industry was particularly impacted by the pandemic’s disruption to the world. But despite the challenge, West has fought through, evolved, and used this time to keep creating. In some ways, it’s a story that might be portrayed by Van Damme himself, metaphorically roundhouse-kicking his way through every obstacle, be they tournament opponents, supernatural ninjas, or a deadly virus, and ultimately conquering Hollywood. Or at least making some great comic books to sell at the next zine fest. C
