Throughout the month of October, the Cartoonist Cooperative will be sharing interviews with members of the Co-op who have a new comic available at the ShortBox Comics Fair 2023!
NOTE: The Cartoonist Cooperative is not affiliated, associated, authorized, endorsed by, or in any way formally connected with ShortBox.
Cartoonist Cooperative: We’d love it if you could introduce yourself and tell us about your background in comics.
Blue Delliquanti: I’m a comic artist, writer, and teacher based in Minneapolis. From 2012 to 2020 I serialized my comic O Human Star online, and I frequently contributed short comics to Iron Circus anthologies like FTL, Y’All! I’ve more recently focused on graphic novels like Across a Field of Starlight and graphic novellas like Adversary, which was my entry in last year’s ShortBox Comics Fair.
CC: Tell us more about your new comic!
BD: Pickled Onions is structured as a how-to guide for a range of everyday tasks, like repairing a bike tire or preparing a simple meal, but with a little extra information sprinkled in by our helpful narrator.
CC: Tell us about your creative process; how did you develop this comic and what are the steps you took to bring it to the final stage?
BD: This was actually the third idea I attempted for this year’s fair! I think the scale of a project like Adversary convinced me that I could pull off something of that length again, and my original projects just weren’t coming together quickly enough. I ended up exploring territory that was a little unfamiliar to me – zines – to grow a much smaller idea that I hadn’t figured out what to do with: using a how-to guide to launder uncomfortable emotions into the practical information. Now I have a better appreciation for zines – they’re much faster to make when you aren’t drawing characters or settings!
CC: Can you tell us about your newest projects/projects you have in development? Feel free to plug anything here as well eg. socials, website, etc.
BD: I am currently working on the art for a limited series of Ghostbusters: Afterlife comics for Dark Horse, and I’m teaching classes at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. You can keep up with my work at bluedelliquanti.com, at my Patreon, or my social media accounts (bluesky, tumblr, twitter).
