From the Museum: Comics as Fine Art with Beth Hetland

by Zoya Brumberg (MA 2015)

Fragments of colorful clippings are meticulously arranged across tan woven paper.

The colors are mostly muted, or perhaps faded, having come from artist Ray Yoshida’s (BFA 1953) personal collection of comics. The forms are reminiscent of waves and mountains, with snippets of text and clothing but no human faces. Curved lines meet with right angles to remind us of the original form: the blocks of classic comic strips. Each clipping comes from backgrounds and negative spaces, coalescing into Yoshida’s original work Eeee!

Yoshida himself was not a comics artist or graphic novelist, but he was interested in comics as folk art and incorporated them into many of his collages. His collages use elements of comics as their own visual languages, separate from the narrative forms that we expect from the medium. Yoshida was a School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) alum who went on to teach at the School—much like graphic novelist and Professor, Adj. Beth Hetland (BFA 2009), who teaches the art of comics, cartooning, and graphic novels. She chose Eeee! to spotlight because it concretely shows how comics “influence and ripple throughout contemporary art.”

Yoshida identified as a painter, but his collages give us a glimpse into all the other forms of visual media that influenced his aesthetic. He had a major influence in the Chicago art scene and taught many of the Chicago Imagists, and as Hetland notes, you can really see how his sensibility inspired so many Chicago artists to incorporate comics and folk art into their work. 

For Hetland, cartooning and comics provide a window into the many ways that we “read” art. SAIC—which is launching a Master of Fine Arts in Comics in fall 2025—gives Hetland the freedom to teach cartooning and comics within different interdisciplinary courses about creating narratives. Hetland’s students read comics as an entryway to building visual vocabularies. Whether they are working in sculpture, installation, or other media, learning through comics gives them the tools to “push the boundaries of how we define things like narrative, character, environment, and pacing,” Hetland shared. Studying cartooning helps artists think about symbolism, text, and iconography as crucial tools for artmaking.

Hetland noted that in the art world, “comics and illustration can feel like commercial art,” which some artists look down upon. Hetland teaches a unique course called The Artist Formerly Known as Starving, which guides students through many of the practical skills they need to survive as independent contractors in the art world. Both her creative and “life” skills courses break the barriers between fine, vernacular, and commercial art. Yoshida’s collages embody Hetland’s approach to consuming, teaching, and creating art by combining the beauty of commercial art with a painterly sensibility. 

Hetland brings Yoshida’s work to her students to show how far comics reach in the fine arts world. “I enjoy the play that Yoshida has with his work, the investigations, and the many, many iterations,” said Hetland. “Iterative works and series speak loudly to me as a cartoonist. There's a kinship I feel with Yoshida's work, and Eeee! is an encapsulation of that sensation.” ■