Artist and author Sandy Plunkett escaped the streets of Gotham for the forests of Southeast Ohio in 1990. The area has affected his work ever since, shifting it from the world of comic books to the natural beauty of Appalachia.
One of the really nice things about Athens and about being able to get out into the country with a 20-minute bike ride is I get to keep sketchbooks and do sketches of the environment around me - dilapidating farmhouses
tractors and hayfields and things like that Plunkett said.
Plunkett recently released The World of a Wayward Comic Book Artist, a collection of his sketches, and will be signing copies today at Alden Library.
Plunkett illustrated comic books for much of his career, but found the process dissatisfying.
They're paying you for your services and they expect a certain kind of product on a certain kind of deadline and I always found that really hard to do
Plunkett said. I just tended to work on my page too long and be too meticulous with it.
After coming to Athens, Plunkett began to draw more rural scenes, as well as freelancing in the area.
You can see Sandy's thought process and he's thinking sometimes out loud to himself and revealing things about his work
what he's trying to do
said Jeff Kallet, marketing associate for Ohio University's Swallow Press. He gave us a pretty big spectrum of styles. He's got elements of the fantastic in there
but he's also got these very surrealistic pictures that are like local scenes.
The collection was born when a few of the press' employees saw Plunkett give a speech in November 2008 at the Kennedy Museum of Art in Athens.
David Sanders, then-director of the press, ran into Plunkett on the street a few weeks later and asked if he'd be interested in creating a collection of his sketches.
You see all these different efforts and art in the making in the sketchbooks
Kallet said. Some of them might be considered failures
some might be considered successes
but it's the artist in motion.
