It may surprise you to learn that Portland, Oregon, a mid-sized America city known for its rain and its many river spanning bridges, is a global hotbed for the production of comic books. A new documentary for OBP’s Oregon Artsbeat, Indie Comics City: How Portland Built Its Own Comics Universe, which premiered at the annual Rose City Comic Con, tells how it happened, a story about the place of Portland itself, and the decentralizing modes of cultural production everywhere.  

The documentary, helmed by OPB’s multimedia arts and culture producer Steven Tonthat, delves deep into the beginnings of local comics history. For the first 50 or so years of its existence, the comics industry was located along with the rest of the publishing industry: New York City. The artists who made the cultural load-bearing works that we associate with them—Superman, Batman, Shazam, Mad magazine, the EC Stable of bad boy books—worked liked sheepdogs, fulfilling a demanding monthly release cycle while supplementing their income with illustration work for magazines, book covers, advertising and any other clientele who needed a decent cartoonist for whatever it was they were trying to sell. Some of these comics artists worked in offices in the city, others plied their trade in home studios and delivered their pencil roughs to the main office where it would get inked, colored, and printed onto millions of forty page books that were distributed to drug stores and other retailers across the country. 

Karl Kesel is a writer/inker who has worked for Marvel and DC, and spoke to the Mercury while tabling at Rose Comic Con, sharing his journey into the industry. When he began his career in the early 1980s, he was one of these artists, living in the big city and hustling around town for work. “It helped a lot that I could go into the offices at DC or Marvel, and pick up assignments that had to be inked overnight and handed back in.” 

Over the next forty or so years, the idea of any cultural production being tied to a specific location would be systematically dismantled by the technologies of globalization. Digital cameras and fast data transfers have, for instance, led to the widespread dispersion of the global film and television industry away from California and into any English-speaking municipality with reliably decent weather. 

Comics books, a medium that only requires decent pens and an overactive imagination, saw this fracture happen nearly 20 years before Hollywood-as-an-industry decamped from Hollywood-as-a-place. FedEx’s overnight service, fax machines, high-quality flatbed and drum scanners, and telecommunication improvements made the prospect of working outside of the publishing industry core doable. 

In 1989, these technologies allowed Kesel to consider a move away from the grind of big city life: “My first wife did not like living in New York City. She wanted to live on the West Coast, I wanted to live north enough to have seasons. North/West, Northwest, led us to Portland. I’ve been here ever since.”

Before the 1980s, Portland was a tertiary space for indie comics creators and cartoonists. The important early editorial cartoonist Homer Davenport, paraplegic gagman John Callahan, Simpsons creator Matt Groening, alt-comic sage Lynda Barry, and Rupert Kinnard—a queer comics pioneer who is profiled at length in OPB’s Indie City—all called Portland home at some time or another. These artists sourced work from local alt-weeklies, gay magazines, and esoteric, high-art focused labels like Fantagraphics—operations where wide distribution or even color printing weren’t front of mind. This is not to underplay their importance: their work still courses through the city’s comic scene, especially in the more zine-adjacent corners. But it was different from the highly rigorous, highly-edited milieu of DC and Marvel, with its colorful pages and ubiquitous distribution. 

In 1986, Mark Richardson, a longtime writer for comics and television, founded Dark Horse Comics in Portland. Dark Horse split the difference between the big distribution superhero publishers and the indie-comic scenes. In the late ‘80s and the early ’90s, Dark Horse published two kinds of monthly comic books. The major moneymakers were books based on big licensed properties, like the pre-Disney Star Wars literary universe, the adventures of terrible lizard Godzilla, and the Alien movies. The company’s other offerings were more obscure: creator-owned properties like Frank Miller’s Sin City, Mike Mignola’s Hellboy, and Stan Sakai’s rabbit-man samurai epic Usagi Yojimbo. The company eventually became America’s third largest distributor of comic books.

Richardson was also an evangelist for Portland, the documentary notes, a city where you could live with the comforts of urban life without chopping off your hand to pay for it. Writers, artists, and more publishers, including Oni Press and Image Comics, followed his call and made Portland into a hub for the comics industry where artists could work, develop, and thrive without dumping their entire paycheck into their landlord’s pocket.

Infrastructure and community followed. Steve Lieber, a comic book artist who has worked for every publisher you can imagine, is one of the founders of Helioscope, a large, shared studio space for comic artists and cartoonists that has been operating in some form or another in Portland since 2002. 

“Every one of us has a home studio, but… you work at home for a year or two, it’s a lot of fun. After five years you start to realize why they punish prisoners by putting them in solitary,” Lieber told the Mercury from his table at Comic Con. “Getting into a room with other artists means you can compare notes, share equipment, share strategies. There’s a lot to be gained by being in contact with other people who do what you do.”

Cat Farris, a cartoonist and comic book artist, told us about how Portland’s scene helped her find her place in the art. 

“I studied animation at Art School, and when I came back to Portland, I was looking for an animation job,” Ferris said. “There weren’t really a lot of those, especially for a kid who just got out of college. I ended up at Helioscope, which was at the time called ‘Mercury Studio,’ and Jeff Parker (comic artist and unofficial “handyman” at Helioscope) told me, ‘you can draw, why don’t you try comics?’ Being in Portland got me into comics and this career. I owe Portland a lot.” 

Many of the people I spoke with at Comic Con were worried about the future of comics in Portland, where the coast-wide affordability crisis has dug deep into the city’s reputation as a fun, cheap haven for artistic pros looking to pay rent. 

“In his book How Music Works, David Byrne says that to build any kind of art scene, you need three things,” Lieber said. “A core of people who are into the same kind of stuff, a few supportive institutions, and affordable rent for artists starting their careers, so they can spend time working on their art. 

“For a long time, Portland had all three. We don’t have the rent anymore, but we still have comics scenes and institutions in spades.” 

You can watch the documentary Indie Comics City on OPB’s website.