Find an artist’s work that speaks to you on our visit to the WSU Art Museum Collection Study Center, where we will see works from the Northwest Alternative Comics exhibition (Fall 2016). Use your blog post to explain how you feel the artist makes his or her individual voice heard to you.

Max Clotfelter’s “Hybrid Moment.”

While visiting the Art Museum Collection Study Center, I found one particular artist, Max Clotfelter, who makes semi-surreal comics that tend to be on the “weird” side. One particular example that was available to me was called, “Hybrid Moment,” a comic in which someone goes to the Animal Shelter to find a “lost dog” who ends up being a human being (potentially a werewolf of some kind). Through reading about the artist’s biography, I felt as though some of these traits were really obvious in his work, for instance, his biography states that he is an outsider and that he couldn’t show anyone his work besides the owners of a comic book store he frequented, them telling him “the weirder the better.” This sentiment is quite obvious in his style of art, for instance, one of the final panels of this three page comic in which the

WSU’s Art Museum Collection Study Center. Max Clotfelter’s “Hybrid Moment.”

dog is transformed back into a woman. The artist quite obviously took the “weirdness” idea to heart in this particular sequence, changing the dog into a liquefied, writhing mass before it took the shape of a woman, sweating from, presumably, the pain. This comic really does feel like something that one would not be too eager to show others, due to its strangeness. It also follows his idea of childhood bewilderment, depicting a scenario that feels like it comes directly from a novel for adolescents, however, with a more adult twist.