We were lucky to catch up with Arik Grant recently and have shared our conversation below.

Arik, appreciate you joining us today. Do you wish you had waited to pursue your creative career or do you wish you had started sooner?

It was a long process, and there was no true, standalone “epiphany moment”. As a child I had art talent and the ability to write well. I was constantly praised for it, and told how I’d go somewhere, make money, be famous, that sort of thing. But also, as I got older, I was also told to “stop wasting time drawing” and “devote that energy to math” and that “all this doodling isn’t going to get you anywhere.” So my young life was a stream of contradictions and mixed messages.

I bounced back and forth between trying to devote myself to getting good grades and getting a job and all the usual expectations, and pursuing the things that actually made me happy– art and storytelling. So I ended up not really focusing on either of them entirely. My art isn’t as good as I’d like it to be, and I never really climbed a career ladder.

There were long periods in my life where I didn’t do art, and now I am trying to learn and catch up, and it is frustrating. I wish I had set boundaries and carved out time for art when I was younger.

Arik, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

My parents told me I was drawing all the time as a kid. All they had to do was give me a pen and a piece of paper and I was entertained for hours. Eventually, I saw “Star Wars” as a kid and my mind was blown, and I started to focus my art on science fiction themes. I consumed science fiction and later fantasy, and I also discovered “Mad” magazine. There, I saw comics from a variety of creators, using a variety of styles, and I knew there was not just one way to approach this. My parents also took me to an art exhibit featuring early Disney creations, and I saw a bunch of the original, blue-sketch pencils overlayed with ink, and realized that even the best creators had rough drafts and mistakes.

I continued to consume science fiction and fantasy, since I enjoyed the creativity that went into world building and story telling. My mom got me books on the making of Star Wars, and I saw all the development sketches by Ralph McQuarrie– Ralph McQuarrie, more than Luke, Han, or Leia, was actually my favorite Star Wars hero.

So, like Mad Magazine, I made my own satires of existing TV shows or movies, very scratchy, amateurish, with childish humor. Then I made my own comedy series in the “super-spy” genre, called “KGB”. Years later, I had partially developed my own science-fiction military action series called “Empires”, which is about two massive empires having a Cold War in space, with proxy wars, clandestine actions, and the occasional direct confrontation.

I had no where to put this story, but a friend of mine was putting together a fanzine for furry fandom called “Yarf”, and he asked if I’d be interested in putting something in the fanzine. I was fine with that, even though they asked me to change some of the aliens into furries, which I didn’t have a problem with, and so I ran a story there for six years and about 440 pages. Once it concluded, I tried a few more projects but push comes to shove I didn’t want to be pigeonholed in the furry genre so I went back to developing the original concept with sci-fi aliens. I also did more text stories to develop the setting as well.

I didn’t get very far before ending up being sent to Iraq in 2004. I’d been in the Army, and then the Army Reserves, since I was 18, and I was in my 30’s when I got sent to Iraq. While there, I did a daily comic base don the absurdities I saw while deployed. The comic was “BOHICA Blues” and it was just something I shared with the people I was deployed with, posting it up in the 2nd Brigade Combat Team chow hall at Baghdad.

A few years after returning home, I started re-doing the Iraq comics, posting BOHICA Blues with color, better artwork, and more of a planned story. It was a long-form story told in gag-a-day format. I started printing books, going to conventions, and making a small amount of money there and with Patreon. I’m also kicking off a reboot of my science-fiction series, Empires, and hoping I can generate interest in that as well.

BOHICA Blues is a family-friendly slice-of-life comedy. On the other hand, Empires is more rough. It’s a science fiction setting without magical elements like the Force, no telekinesis or psionic stuff… just regular people trying to overcome challenges without the help of space wizards.

Both of these projects, I think, communicate a lot of experiences I went through, approaching from both comedy and high-imagination directions. Science fiction, of course, has the added advantage of allowing a lot of metaphor in the message, so difficult topics can be addressed in a roundabout fashion.

What can society do to ensure an environment that’s helpful to artists and creatives?

First, I’d say, if you see a young person trying to do art, and if it looks like they might be able to go somewhere with it, then give them the chance to grow. Encourage and support them. As AI moves into the creative realm more and more, people are going to be hungry for real stuff made by actual human hands. We’re going to need all the artists and storytellers we can get because we are clinging to something that is becoming more important and more rare every day: communicating with each other.

That leads to being open to looking at new and unknown creators. I have a kind of wry joke I tell: Fans complain that there’s nothing new and nothing creative, just the same tired old franchises. They’re tired of Star Wars, Star Trek, Marvel, Harry Potter, all this. But then when small-time creators go to conventions and try to offer up something new, people just glance at it and say, “I don’t know any of these characters. Do you have any Star Wars, Star Trek, Marvel, or Harry Potter?”

It’s hard to roll the dice on something new for a lot of reasons. People have a limited amount of money to spend and they don’t want to pay for something that turns out to be disappointing. Or, I admit, there are a lot of creatives out there that go on hiatus and get burned out and never finish a project. And yeah, sometimes something just sucks. But the more frustrated someone is with established franchises, the more you have to be willing to give something new a try.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

As mentioned, I went through a long period of time where I didn’t keep up with my art, so I knew my stuff wasn’t as good as it could have been. I did compare myself to other artists and walked away feeling discouraged, but I also really wanted to get these stories out. I had walked away for too long and didn’t want to walk away again.

It took a while for me to realize that I had started my journey as a kid by comparing myself to other artists– Ralph McQuarrie and the Disney artists that I’d seen making mistakes and correcting them. At the time, as a kid, I didn’t get discouraged and walk away; I wanted to learn from them and see what they did well, and if I could incorporate that into my work. So I tried to learn from anyone I could, and dispensing with ego to learn from younger people. There was no one single artist I learned from, but just an overview of all sorts of creators, big and small, and at different stages of development.

I also realized that… the half-ass comic that gets published gets views. The comic that never gets out of “development” until it is “perfect”? That comic never gets views, no matter how good the end result promises to be. So I just had to commit, and take criticism and learn from it. I got a critical review from someone who complained about some shortcomings in my comics, and I looked at the criticisms, and realized that these criticisms were valid. I learned a lot more from that review than I did from friends and family who were telling me everything was great.

I look back now and the early comics are bewilderingly bad, but I am still happy with them, because they mark how far I’ve come.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.bohicablues.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bohicablues/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bohicablues
• Twitter: https://x.com/213thBattalion
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@randomcoyotestudios986
• Other: Patreon (probably my most active place, actually): https://www.patreon.com/c/Coyote

Image Credits

Jason Chudy