“I realized no one’s going to give me permission to make the art I want to make, so I’ll just make it.”
Marnie Galloway is a cartoonist, illustrator, and printmaker. Originally from Austin, Texas, Galloway is a “10th generation Texan,” but she’s lived across the U.S. She’s been making comics since 2011, after graduating from a non-art related philosophy and logic program at Smith College in Massachusetts.
At the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Galloway is a lecturer, and she’s been teaching comics here since 2023. “And [teaching at SAIC] was a dream, absolutely a dream opportunity that came at the right time in my life. And it’s been absolutely wonderful.”
Galloway has worked on a number of books, including “The Sounds and Seas,” a wordless comic about three women who sing life into the world around them; “Burrow,” a poetic/fiction comic about new motherhood and the juxtaposition of the ferality of motherhood in the mundanity of life; and “Slightly Plural,” a series of comic about pregnancy, birth and motherhood.
“While I was working an office job during the day and babysitting at night and dog walking and doing everything I could to pay off student loans, I was also drawing in the corner of my living room and drawing whatever I wanted. And what I ended up drawing into my first graphic novel, which was in ‘The Sounds and Seas.’ I didn’t know when I first started that I was making a comic.”
Galloway cited the comics community as being an influence on her earlier work: “I met communities of people who were making art in the way I wanted to make art. I learned more about comics by reading the comics that these genius people think about. And it really felt at home.”
Alongside being a member of the comics community, she also acted as an organizer. Galloway previously served as an organizer of the Chicago Alternative Comics Expo, and as designer and art director at Cicada and Muse magazines at Cricket Magazine Group.
Galloway emphasized the importance of making work for herself first. She said finding joy in making the work that she was thrilled to work on, and finding a deeper level of authenticity with work made for herself.
Galloway also puts an emphasis on the idea of change in her work. “I think a lot about identity and transformation, about moments of inflection where you have to allow yourself to be changed by an experience or resist change,” said Galloway.
In her practice, Galloway has worked both in self-publishing and in larger press publishing her works. She noted utilizing the practice of self-publishing in her early career and also continuing that practice now, “just to have something new.”
Currently, Galloway is working on a larger graphic memoir called “I Could Just Eat You Up” about her experience with motherhood, specifically in a way that is “very animal.”
