Artist Jason Shafer talks major influences in his comics and advice to aspiring artists
July 2024
Nathan Shafer is a new media artist from Alaska specializing in augmented reality and digital humanities. He is one of the founding members of both the Meme-Rider Media Team, an art collective founded in 2000 designing early form internet memes, and Manifest.AR, the first International art collective making augmented reality works. He was profiled by PBS Digital Studios as part of an online collaboration called The Future in 2014.
Shafer’s geobased AR works have been displayed on every continent. His work has been shown at Noxious Sector Projects, Bunnell Street Arts Center, Rhizome, ISEA, the Pratt Museum, Virtuale Switzerland, Out North Contemporary Art House and the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston. He also contributed chapters to the first anthology of AR-based art making, Augmented Reality Art, published by Springer in 2014; Augmented Reality Games II, published in 2019; and Augmented Reality in Education, forthcoming in 2020.
Images are from Wintermoot, one of Shafer's comic projects.
Anchorage Museum: What is your background with comics? When and how did you start?
Nathan Shafer: I have been a new media artist for over 20 years. I started making comic books in 2019.
AM: What was the first comic you remember reading? What was the first one that had a significant impact and/or made you want to become a comic artist? Major influences? NS: I don’t remember the first comic I ever read. I had a pull box as a middle schooler. I read X-Men and all the Image titles.
AM: What would you cite as your major influences?
At this point in what I am doing as an artist, my influences are who I am currently collaborating with: artists in Łuk’ae Tse’ Taas and the folks I am currently building videogames with. Alaskan storytelling traditions inform what and how I work.
Comic book artists I like: Moebius, Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas, Farel Dalrymple, and Simon Roy.
AM: What are the major themes or issues you address in your art and storytelling?
NS: There are too many to really list. Right now, I am dealing with the issue of the Hyperborean Speculative Imagination and absurdo-fascism, that is in the new issue of Wintermoot. Altogether, Wintermoot is about Alaska and the infinite worlds within it.
AM: What makes a great comic/comic artist?
NS: I don’t have a good answer for that. Someone else saying you are great to other people is the real answer. It is not something you decide for yourself.
AM: Which is better (and why), a comic with fantastic art but a lousy story, or a comic with a great story but sub-par artwork?
NS: Both work for me, not everything is great, and creativity is hard.
AM: What piece of advice would you give to any aspiring young comic artist? What piece of advice would you give to your younger self?
NS: Center yourself outside of an artistic practice. There are no places, spaces, or people in this world that are on a quest to find new exceptional artists. Stay making things before the rest of the world is ready for it. Have a group of good friends and family who you can constantly share with and who you want to share with you.
