The first time Sophie Lucido Johnson visited the Art Institute of Chicago, she felt “a spiritual understanding that I was supposed to be there. Like I really loved being at the Art Institute.”
Lucido Johnson is an illustrator, cartoonist, and educator, originally from Portland, Ore. She attended Whitman College and graduated in 2008. She spent nearly 10 years as a teacher after college and became a professor at SAIC after graduating from the MFA writing program in 2017.
Initially, Lucido Johnson was introduced to comics through works like Craig Thompson’s “Blankets.” In her 20s, she was reintroduced to comics through a partner who made comics, recommending she read Aaron Renier‘s “Spiral Bound.” Later, Lucido Johnson and that partner would break up. In trying to understand why she was upset about it, Lucido Johnson said, “I sort of had this realization that I was leaning on him to do the thing I really wanted to do, and now that he wasn’t in my life anymore, I thought, well, I think that I really wanted to do this.”
Lucido Johnson describes comics as egalitarian, affordable, and accessible to lots of different people. She talked about the irony in how comics are accessible but difficult to make, and yet are widely seen as “low art.” “It’s like a contradiction in terms. So I am obsessed with them.”
Her process of making comics involves a large amount of sitting and thinking. Everything is written first in a notebook, then edited, then drawn.
Lucido Johnson makes a variety of art, with all of her different practices involving “images with words.” Lucido Johnson’s comics include cartoons regularly featured in The New Yorker, a graphic memoir, and short-form comics published through Instagram.
As a result of her many practices, she makes works for many audiences. When asked about her audience, Lucido Johnson said, “My work is often about birds, and it’s often about friendship, so people who like those things.”
Currently, Lucido Johnson works with publishers and uses platforms like Instagram and Substack to release her work.
Lucido Johnson is working on a novel. Her dream since she was a child has been to write fiction, and after being told she was “bad at it” by a professor in college, she didn’t touch it for years. “I gave up because somebody told me I was bad at it. If someone tells you you’re bad at something, like, fuck them.”
“If you like doing the thing, you’re going to get better at it because you’ll keep practicing it. So it’s a disappointment that I so easily let that get to me, but I’m having so much fun writing fiction. I know that it’s going to be a really steep path towards publication or success, if those are things that are in my future,” said Lucido Johnson.
Lucido Johnson loves the Pentel pocket brush and believes it’s the tool that took her from “I can’t make art” to “I think I’m gonna go to art school.”
