Alaska to Seattle: Multiple Modes of Illustrated Storytelling
Presented by Fantagraphics Books
Date & Time:
Saturday, July 19, 2025
5:30 PM - 6:30 PM
Location:
PURE Insurance Theater at Seattle Art Fair
Nathan Shafer has been working in expanded media and digital humanities since the turn of the millennium, and crafting his Alaskan sci-fi First Nations epic Wintermoot for over a decade. Seattle Art Fair will be bringing the augmented reality version of the graphic novel to the US as an installation for the first time.
From her Girlhero minicomics in the 1990s, to being the first female artist to create a comic strip story for the New York Times, to her Crow Commute sculptural storytelling piece at Seattle Center, Seattle’s Megan Kelso has brought a grounded sense of humanity to her art and stories, whether fiction, autobio, or fantasy allegory.
Both artists will discuss drawing and storytelling across media and for different audiences, synthesizing their own experiences and received tales into new narratives, and bringing a sense of place and history into created worlds.
Five print collections of Shafer’s Wintermoot (Denaliwood, 2019-2023) are currently available. Kelso’s latest book is the graphic short story collection Who Will Make The Pancakes: Five Stories (Fantagraphics Books, Seattle, 2022)
The discussion will be moderated by Kit Brash, who has worked in arts facilitation for 25 years, from small Australian record labels and publishers to film preservation and TV programming on a national network. He is currently an editor at Fantagraphics Books in Seattle.