Black and white graphic novel gets colorful in gallery exhibit

How to illustrate idiosyncratic personalities coping with the monotony of day-to-day life? For San Francisco artist Jamaica Dyer, it’s no longer just black and white.

In the 25-year-old’s latest exhibit, the illustrations of the characters from her monochrome graphic novel, “Weird Fishes,” take on a new life with her subtle use of soft color and gentle brush strokes.

Her whimsical artwork is on display at the Cartoon Art Museum’s Small Press Spotlight until June 13.

Dyer lived mostly in Santa Cruz before joining the Animation and Illustration program at San Jose State University. Her interest in illustrating graphic novels, however, began much earlier. “At a fairly young age — I think I was 10 or 11 — I discovered Catwoman and I became obsessed with those comics,” she said.

The obsession soon compelled Dyer to create her own comic strips and attend comic book conventions like WonderCon and the Alternative Press Expo. It also inspired her to work at a comic book store in Santa Cruz, Atlantis Fantasy World, where she became acquainted with indie comic books. In the meantime, she contributed her comic strips to niche comic book anthologies such as “MySpace Dark Horse Presents Vol. 3” and “Spark Generators II.”

However, it was at college that Dyer first brought her comic strips to a larger audience and where she invented Dee, the protagonist of her first graphic novel, “Weird Fishes.” Dyer had a comic strip, “Devour the Child,” in San Jose State’s campus newspaper, the Spartan Daily, that featured Dee.

In 2008, Dyer migrated her artwork to her website, jamaicad.com, and created the Web comic strip “Weird Fishes.”

“I just wanted to have the immediacy of creating the comic and putting it online and creating an audience that way,” she said.

The following year, San Jose-based publisher Slave Labor Graphics published “Weird Fishes.” It is a story about two teenagers, Dee and Bunny Boy, who grapple with issues of identity and question reality.

“It started off with the idea of being a loner and not feeling like anyone understands you and that’s a large part of what’s going on in the first book,” Dyer said. “I wanted to experiment with surrealism and imagination and portray that in the drawings.”

Dyer, who primarily uses watercolors, said the challenge of printing in a small-press format is compromising the colors in her illustrations. “I think that would be the biggest one that you have to worry about — how it’s actually going to be printed which is usually black and white on fairly cheap paper if you’re starting off.” Dyer said that putting her comic strips online allows her to bypass some of these limitations, because she can experiment with colors and textures.

She is working on a sequel to “Weird Fishes,” which will be set partially in San Francisco. As a recent transplant to the city, Dyer said, she finds the city inspiring with its psychedelic bands, art galleries and street activity.

Dyer’s previous exhibit, “Dee’s Siren Song,” was at Mission: Comics and Art earlier this year. She participates in local art events such as the Dr. Sketchy’s Anti-Art School event at 111 Minna Gallery that brings artists and burlesque models together for an evening of creating life drawings of the models. She also attends events by the Cartoonist Conspiracy of San Francisco, a group of comic book artists who meet at cafes and bookstores to work collaboratively on art.

Dyer said she enjoys creating comics because it is an art form that gives a lot of freedom: “I’m trying to create a language with what I’m doing, where certain animals and certain things represent something else than what they are.”

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