“To hold someone in such an absurd realm is really difficult. And comics really uniquely work as a medium to do so.”
Molly Colleen O’Connell is a cartoonist, illustrator, and printmaker originally from West Palm Beach, Florida. O’Connell moved to Maryland to attend the Maryland Institute College of Art, where she graduated with a BFA in 2008. She later moved to Chicago to get an MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she graduated in 2017.
At SAIC, O’Connell has been a lecturer since 2018, though she took a break during the COVID-19 pandemic. O’Connell also works as an adjunct faculty member at DePaul University.
“I was really influenced when I was teaching history of comics for years at DePaul. It helped me dive really deep into who I was influenced by. I could trace the origins of their work,” said O’Connell.
As a cartoonist, O’Connell has been self-publishing her work for years. O’Connell keeps a practice of both self-publishing and working with publishers. She enjoys the directness and control of self-publishing.
She has two main series: “Pebbles,” her raw adult demographic series about an ornithologist in the ’90s and aughts, and “The Shriekers,” a kid-friendly comic series full of Halloween-themed, spooky-style gag comics. O’Connell finds joy in creating work for different audiences and being able to move between multiple projects at once.
Much of O’Connell’s work originates from keeping an extensive sketchbook practice. O’Connell explained, “A lot of things start there. ‘Pebbles’ started as a short writing when I was actually sitting in the prairie in Maggie Daly Park. There’s a prairie in that park, which is weird, but a nice respite from the city.”
“I feel like the biggest part of why I went to grad school was to figure out how to help some of my disparate practices come together,” said O’Connell. O’Connell works in many mediums. Originally, she started in print media, eventually making a shift to comics, but her work has remained interdisciplinary throughout her career.
In continuing to talk about working through other mediums, O’Connell said, “A lot of cartoonists at one point were also vaudevillians. Comics are an isolating, disciplined practice that you are very solitary for. So it makes sense to me that you need a break from that.”
Film is a major influence on O’Connell. O’Connell used to work in a movie theater and found a lot of influence in the different films she saw through that job.
When asked for comics recommendations, O’Connell named “Tokyo These Days,” a new manga series by Taiyo Matsumoto, and she thinks more people should read Kuniko Tsurita.
