The Power of Laughter

Andre Gibbs is a comic artist. At the League, he studied comics with Steve Walker. He received his BFA in screenwriting at Brooklyn College in 2023. Andre has worked as a Seeds of the League Teaching Artist for over a year. I sat down with Andre to discuss his journey with art and teaching, the satirical resonances of his work, and recent and upcoming projects. You can view more of his work @andre8233 on Instagram. 

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Mei: Walk me through what your journey with art has been. You were one of our Summer Youth Employment students in 2022. Were you doing art before? 

Andre: I’ve been doing art my entire life. I went to High School of Art and Design and my major was cartooning. That’s where I really started to get into comics. I found the Art Student’s League while I was looking for an art-related summer job during break at college. I had helped with assistant teaching before but not for art. It was a nice change of pace and I actually knew what I was doing. 

Mei: How did studying screenwriting at Brooklyn College go with comics?

Andre: It helps with storytelling. I wanted to be knowledgeable in something else, so I did screenwriting because I really love writing dialogue. That’s what most of my comics are. 

Mei: What can you convey in comics that you can’t in other mediums? 

Andre: In cartooning in general it’s easier to convey a certain expression better. I love drawing expressions. They’re a really hard thing to draw. It’s taken years and I’ve learned from multiple inspiration cartoons, like SpongeBob. Most of my expressions are inspired by him. Charles Schulz’s “Peanuts,” specifically the dialogue, is also a big inspiration to me. I love how they’re children but they’ll talk about socio-political issues. 

Mei: What is your general approach to teaching? Has it taught you anything about yourself as an artist or as a person?

Andre: Teaching students has helped me become more spontaneous with my ideas. I want to come up with ideas that are modern. I try to make traditional mediums work for this generation which has a somewhat shorter attention span. Teaching is a compromise. For example, I wanted to do collages but knew the students don’t really like working with paper unless they’re familiar with the subject matter. So, I did Roblox collages, where I printed out a background with an iPad outline, and in the foreground, they drew and designed their avatars. Trying to come up with ideas that are modern but still collages. 

Mei: What do you love most about teaching?

Andre: What I love most about teaching art is giving the students power.

Mei: Turning to the art that you make, I looked at a lot of the Dreadhead comics. Where are you at with the project? And when did you conceptualize of the character and develop them? 

Andre: I came up with them a year or two ago, when I wanted to create a sona (a persona). His name is Dreadhead because I had dreads at the time, and then I cut them off. It started as a self reference, and then I started giving him his own characteristics separate from me. I was trying to come up with what I could do with him, logically—he’s just a little blob guy! I had these little standees (printed out photos of him) and I would take a picture of him around the city as promo. 

Mei: Are you still working on the series? 

Andre: I’m trying to pinpoint exactly what I want to do with him and give him something more specific to do. The big thing with him is that he wants to be an actor. That is something completely separate from me, I would never do that. I was going to have him open his own business, because that’s very popular now, and also make him a freelance social worker. He’ll go around trying to help people and end up making things worse. I want to play on the trend in those coming of age movies, where the character comes to New York and expects their life to be changed.

Mei: The way they’re made is really fascinating. When I first looked at it I assumed it was digital. But then I kept looking at it and realized you used paper, textile, and sculpture. 

Andre: That’s what I love most about Dreadhead. I really wanted to come up with a mixed media idea. This is a result of teaching as well. Sometimes kids will throw out paper, and it’s textured and colored. I’ll save it, scan it, and make it in Procreate. The texture of this tree is made of a drawing one of my students did. I always ask permission. Here is a picture I incorporated of my cousin. Dreadhead is the only drawn character, except for his roommate who’s more traditional. I wanted it to be a fish out of water story. So Dreadhead is literally out of his element. 

Mei: That’s so neat, all these cameos. Is this a sculpture that you scanned? 

Andre: My brother made that. I saw it and I was like, “oh my god, I love this. I have to take a picture of it before you destroy it.” If I see something a student or my brother or whoever makes, I take a picture and use it later.

Mei: I like how you put a lot of allusions to other media too. 

Andre: That was just like a cute thing to have people questioning what the comic was going to be about. There’s a scientist who has been driven mad trying to figure out what Dreadhead is. 

Mei: Tell me more about the scientist.

Andre: He was going to be Dreadhead’s actual doctor. Dreadhead comes to the hospital because he’s not feeling well. And goes, “doctor, please, I think I don’t have a heartbeat.” And the doctor takes out a stethoscope, and is like “you don’t have a heartbeat.” And he’s like, “oh, good, I just wanted to make sure.” And the doctor is driven into insanity of, “what is this thing?” He doesn’t know what he is. It is meant to be a commentary on low-income minorities and people’s inability to accept them. But more playful. The doctor’s whole thing is he’s trying to understand what Dreadhead is, but he’s not accepting him. And it drives him mad, when all he needs to do is just accept him. 

Mei: It shows how discrimination harms both sides, how you lose your own humanity when you otherize someone like that. And you do it by making a character who’s so extreme in his otherness that he has six stomachs when they try to harvest his organs. 

Andre: I have a running gag where Dreadhead has a “cloaca.” I don’t know where that came from. 

Mei: How do you balance thinking about these real topics and making them interesting and playful? 

Andre: People underestimate the power of laughter. That’s the whole thing about being a cartoonist, you have topics and look at them in a satirical way. I’m very spontaneous with my ideas. With the coffee shop comic, I knew I wanted to have Starbucks in there. But it ended up becoming its own comic, because it’s the escalation of he just wants coffee. And then I thought, what can I add to make it even more ridiculous? This is my coffee. It’s $26. Wait, I have a coupon. If you’re not a member, it’s 10%. It’s a 10% coupon charge. And then you have to join the club. 

Mei: Pushing it to the absurd. Season two is coming. 

Andre: I was actually going to rebrand it. Season two, the Dreadening. Dreadhead in the City. 

Mei: Does the language come first and then the art or the art and then the language, or both?

Andre: If I have an idea for what I want to do with the character, that drives a lot of it. I write down what happens in each panel, there’s usually a setup, then Dreadhead comes in, if he’s not already there, then most of it is leading up to the punchline. I learned that from Steve Walker. 

Mei: When you work on another big project, would you do Dreadhead or would you come up with another?  

Andre: I would probably do a more ambitious story. I think Dreadhead works in short form. I have a lot of experiences that I want to turn into stories. In this one story that I’d love to tell, all the characters are animals and the main character is a bear. He’s dealing with the repercussions of bottling up his emotions and uses media as escape. It’s a commentary on how we can find ourselves and we can find ourselves in the media we love but we can also detach ourselves from reality. 

Mei: Those are a lot of the similar themes you’re already exploring in your work bringing all this other media and characters into your teaching.  

Andre: I noticed kids respond to the media. I try to use different characters that I hope are still relevant and popular. Even if it’s a character I don’t know, I still try to use it to push them out of their boundaries. It’s all storytelling. 

Mei: Have you always been a storyteller or do you think you’ve built that up through this? 

Andre: I definitely love telling stories. More than anything, I just love entertaining. Even this conversation now, it helps me know that my story is reaching someone. 

Andre’s Exclusive Comic here: