“The space that I mostly exist in is the indie art comics-small press zone. I love that. And I find it to be a really beautiful, wonderful, supportive place.”
Originally from Pennsylvania, Conor Stechschulte is an artist, cartoonist, and printmaker and an assistant professor who’s been teaching at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago for eight years. He always had an interest in making comics, and started focusing on comics as an undergraduate at Maryland Institute College of Art . He continued his pursuit as a graduate student at SAIC.
Stechschulte’s interest in comics grew when he was part of a club at MICA called Closed Caption Comics. He said, “We all just sat down and drew a comic in one sitting, and then printed it and distributed it in one night. And that was it for me. I was like, this is the shit. This is what I want to be doing.” Steschulte gained interest in teaching at SAIC through working as a teaching assistant: “I love teaching. I really like almost everything about it. ”
Stechschulte’s works include “The Amateurs,” a graphic novella about butchers with mysterious memory loss and a talking severed head; “Crepesculine,” an ongoing series that serializes Stechschulte’s in-progress graphic novels and short comics; and “Ultrasound,” a graphic novel, turned feature film, about a couple who become unwitting test subjects in a mind-control experiment after a strange sexual encounter.
For the film adaptation of “Ultrasound,” made in 2021, Stechschulte was not only the creator of the source material but also the screenwriter of the film.
In Stechschulte’s practice, both self-publishing and larger press publishing play an important role. On self-publishing, Stechschulte said, “There’s something so satisfying about just being like, ‘I touched every single page that everybody will read of this book,’ you know?”
On larger press publishing, Stechschulte said, “Working with publishers, it just opens up another whole world.” He continued, “I’ve been lucky enough to have works translated into other languages. It’s just a really gratifying thing to be like, wow, there’s all these French people who have read my comic now. It’s crazy.”
Stechschulte believes art is a way to integrate philosophical and mystical ideas with everyday life. Stechschulte is influenced by the interplay of living life, thinking about philosophy and a lot of fiction.
Stechschulte is influenced by the woods and suburbs, citing both as common themes in his work. “I think there’s been a couple of comics where it’s kind of about the sadness of seeing humanity just expand and destroy things and terrible housing developments.” He continued, “With housing developments, there’s something comforting about it, but it’s also horrifying, just watching woods and farmland disappear.”
Stechschulte noted the importance of a larger comic community in creating his work. He described the comics community as one of the best arts communities he’s ever been involved with. “It was really wild to fully engage with the really broad comics culture and just realize what a small corner of it that I usually exist in,” said Stechschulte.
Currently, Stechschulte is working on four different projects. “Crepesculine;”, a graphic novel tentatively titled, “The Prince of the Air;” and another graphic novel called “Searchlight” that’s wordless.
