We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Joshua Kemble. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Joshua below.

Joshua, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Can you talk to us about a project that’s meant a lot to you?

Throughout my career of 20 years doing visual communication for a living, the most meaningful projects I’ve ever worked on are my graphic novels, “Two Stories: Book One” and “Jacob’s Apartment.” While working on commercial art can be rewarding and exciting, filled with a lot of creative art challenges, the ability to write and express deeper and more meaningful ideas within my own graphic novels is extremely fulfilling. Each project took about 5 years to execute, but the results are something I’m very proud of and readers have definitely been moved by these works.

“Jacob’s Apartment” explores how some questions can shake even the strongest faith.

At first glance, college roommates Jacob and Sarah seem like polar opposites. Jacob is a Christian; Sarah is an atheist. Sarah is a drinker, and Jacob, a teetotaler. But they have been friends for years, finding commonality in their shared dream to create art.

Jacob’s world is turned upside down when his father dies, causing him to question his faith. Meanwhile, Sarah wrestles with her own demons, searching for solace in one-night stands after her boyfriend (and professor) leaves her for a job in New York.

A coming-of-age graphic novel in the vein of Ghost World and Fun Home, Jacob’s Apartment weaves together the threads of spiritual faith, identity, purpose, love, and loss to create an engrossing world in which waking and sleeping dreams collide. Each page of the comic is painstakingly hand illustrated, and the story was inspired by the loss of my father to cancer and the kinds of questions of faith and identity that occurred when that happened.

“Two Stories: Book One” was written autobiographcaly exploring one of the lowest points of my life, when I was suicidal. I thought I was living the artist’s dream. As a young, ambitious comic book creator, I had a hip Portland apartment, an affectionate fiancé, and my whole life ahead of him. Until the night I found myself on Burnside Bridge, willing myself to jump. The book explores through hand lettered and drawn artwork, how I got there.

Two Stories is a confessional graphic memoir that grapples with questions of faith, mental illness, depravity, and, ultimately, redemption in a fallen world. It’s been very meaningful for me to have this work out there, as I’ve received letters from readers who said it helped them feel less alone and less stigmatized struggling with their own mental illness issues. The aim is to try to open up a dialog about these hard to discuss issues, and address the hard conversations to hopefully help folks feel less alone in their struggles.

Neither of the projects were made with a commercial aim, but as an expression of art, and an attempt to talk about important issues, and craft compelling stories.

Joshua, 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?

I’ve been a professional in commercial art for about 20 years, most notably known for my t-shirt design work, at the peak of threadless I had won the threadless contests over 15 times, and had many t-shirts that sold over 100,000 copies, leading to quite a few viral images, and design annuals featuring those works. I also got my foot in the door doing book illustration and cartooning from applying for and winning the Xeric Grant, which was a prestigious grant in comics offered by Peter Liard back in the day. I do art direction, graphic design and illustration commercially, while writing and working on graphic novels and comic books. I’m currently working on a graphic novel about Elizabeth Barrett Browning called “Not Death, But Love: The Strange Supernatural Story of Elizabeth Barrett Browning” for Turner Publishing with the writer Lavender Vroman.

How can we best help foster a strong, supportive environment for artists and creatives?

I believe people, including myself, need to do a better job of seeking out independent new work. We often default to going to movies, buying books or products of things we already connect with from existing I.P.s and while this can be entertaining and fun, it unfortunately incentivizes artists to create things that already have popularity or attach their artwork to already existing properties. The thing to remember is to support independent new ideas and artwork by artists, like indy comics, so that we can continue to have new, exciting work being created. It’s a long journey and struggle for most cartoonists to create new works that are counter to current trends, and the only way we get new and exciting work is by supporting it. Basically, buy NEW books. Watch NEW movies. Go outside of the mainstream and support independent work, or all we’ll have is the same old stale I.P.s being rehashed over and over again, and that’s all we’ll incentivize artists to do in turn.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

Early in my career, I lost most of my portfolio, about 8 years of work, when I was jumped, beaten and robbed near my old apartment. Not only had I lost the ability to walk for a few weeks, and had to overcome a lot of hard fears of returning outdoors, and a general mistrust of people after the fact (a lot of this is pretty common for victims of violent crime) but I had to find a way to overcome the overwhelming feeling of futility in making things, since I’d struggled for years to build a portfolio, and all of those years of work were lost. I ultimately overcame this, and one of the things that was initially lost was about half of “Jacob’s Apartment,” which I eventually finished, and is now published by Graphic Mundi. If you’re going to get into art, you will face hardships, and perhaps it wont be as extreme as getting beaten and your work physically stolen, but it will be difficult. You have to adopt a “don’t let the bastards get you down” attitude, and a stick to it mentality. The only strides I’ve made in my career were from a stubborn insistence on not giving up, continually working on projects, and despite the odds making work that I felt was important. Eventually good things come, but it takes a lot of fighting against the wind to get there.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.joshuakemble.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/joshuakemble/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/joshkemble/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshua-kemble-8438864/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/JoshKemble
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/joshuakemble