Sewer Mutant Podcast: Woodcut Comics with Sunderland Creator Jon Renzella

Jon Renzella is the creator of the Sunderland series of graphic novels that he’s illustrating entirely in woodcuts. The second book in the series, Solitude, was published in February, takes the already weird dystopian future story into even weirder territory. Themes range from environmentalism to right-wing news networks to hippie communes to conspiracy theories and mind-altering drugs. I don’t want to say too much about it for fear of spoiling it. This episode I talk with Jon about woodcuts, end times, and Taiwan.

As always, the music is by Krudler.

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Show notes

Jon learned woodcutting as part of learning print-making in both high school and college. In college, he thought he was going to be an oil painter, but found all his paintings too muddy. But because woodcuts are black and white and hard-edged, his biggest weakness as a painter wasn’t even an issue so he gravitated towards that.

He did a big woodcut installation in 2010, hung up on interior walls, surrounding you 360 degrees. The comic is the backstory to the installation. He’d always been interested in comics, so I always wanted to do comics as a kid. Jon notes that there’s a long history of woodcut comics known as “wordless novels” going back to artists like Frans Masereel, Lynd Ward, and Giacomo Patri, often with socio-political themes. Jon liked that tradition.

The installation was a response to a variety of things in the air: a sense that we were living in the end-times and the looming end of the Mayan long-count calendar in 2012, the rise of social media, the rise of Alex Jones, the financial collapse. Jon wanted to do an end-times scenario where everyone was right. Jon and co-author Eric Weiss worked out the story beats for the entire trilogy in advance. He works in the “Marvel method,” creating a visual timeline and sketches he wanted to include, then creating the actual pages and writing the script to match the illustrations.

“Unfortunately the world became more like the story, I guess it makes it easier to continue the story,” Jon says. “A lot of the things I was thinking about back then have become more salient.”

He also did a digital comic a few years ago as he learned Clip Studio. “I’d never done digital art before.” He’s also done a few comics with other people in Taiwan.

Moving to Taiwan enabled him to work part-time and focus on art the rest of the time. He thought he’d only live there one or two years, but he’s ended up staying.

In 2010 he had an artist residency in a large building. He didn’t need the whole space, and knew a lot of other ex-pat artists. So he turned the front of the building into a gallery, had exhibits every month. After the residency, they opened the non-profit Lei Gallery to continue putting on art shows with both local artists and ex-pats and host events including live music.

Life in Taiwan gave Jon a different perspective on how societies can operate. He says the US you don’t get a lot of outside perspective, it’s hard to understand how other places operate. Going abroad gave him a counterpoint.

He and his partner, who is a neuroscientist, are working on a sci-fi comic together that takes some inspiration from her work.

The next Sunderland book won’t be out for a while, because the idea was always to make each book during a different decade of his life. He did the first in his twenties and the second in his thirties. It will be a few years until he starts the next one.

Other comics he recommends: L’Incal by Moebius and Alejandro Jodorowsky and Spacegirl by Travis Charest. It’s not a comic, but he also just got a book of illustrations from The Divine Comedy by Gustave Doré.