David Blumenstein Interview
David Blumenstein is a man who wears many hats. A husband and father, as well as a cartoonist, comics-artist, service designer and visual communicator, he juggles many things at once. When I ask how he manages to do this this in addition to being the deputy president of the Australian Cartoonist Association, he answers he does not. His work and personal life are perfectly integrated, he says, with comics and art.
Blumenstein’s drawing style is distinct. Simple, and “edited down” to a fault, his comics are informative and engaging, mixed in with a dash of philosophy, and a sense of humour. His comics are mostly autobiographical, and tend to one of the following: stuff he is curious about or stuff he is pissed off about.
A simplified version of David as shown on his website.
His comics are represented by a drawing of himself as an avatar, with squiggly lines of hair on a round head with a beard. In his comics, as the narrator, he takes the reader on a journey about pickup artists in #takedown: My evening on a pier with pick-up artists and protestors. Inspired by a protest he attended about a pickup artist named Julien Blanc, David documents his thoughts about him, how the protestors stopped Julian Blanc from giving a speech about berating women, and how Julian Blanc had to change venues to continue giving his talk (which failed because of the protestors gathering up the police.)
A panel from David’s website taken from the comic #takedown: My evening on a pier with pick-up artists and protestors.
Another comic that David has worked on is called Free Money, Please, an investigative enquiry into the concept of money and an artist’s relationship with money. For this project, David interviewed a bitcoin mogul, and asked him questions on how to save up on money, as well as his personal opinion on the concept of money himself. For this project, David paid an audio-transcriber to transcribe the interview for him. After viewing the audio transcript, and doing his research, he then starts the editing process. This involves choosing which segments to include and not to include. He then shows it to friends for feedback, and after revises his thumbnails until he comes up with a completed product. He says in the future, after gathering more interviews, he hopes he could make Free, Money, Please into a printed book for future publication.
In Free, Money, Please, David interviews a bit-coin mogul, who is represented here as a robot of grand stature.
Other than working on his comics, David also works on freelancing projects that are related to service-design. Service-design defined as delivering a product to show how a concept works. He tends to work on projects that he has a personal connection with, such as promoting mental health, and homelessness. Although he has not ever experienced any of those things, he mentions he knows friends who have been in these situations, thus this motivates him to work on these projects.
It was by choosing service-design and comics, David believes, he was saving himself out of a dire situation in the animation industry. David, previously, in the animation industry, believed that he needed to find a way out, as the state of the animation industry was changing. Companies were starting to export their animation to places where it could be produced cheaply such as China, and for David the way out for him—was comics.
Ironically, as the deputy president of the Australian Cartoonists Association it seemed to David that many cartoonists needed to find other outlets, other than comics in order to sustain their income. Some using storyboarding (through the animation industry, or commissions (for example fanart) in order to do so. He found this through an investigative survey he sent surveying cartoonists about their career, and how they made their income.
Other than finding other markets for cartoonists to make a living, when I talked to David about other interesting trends that seem to be happening in the cartooning industry, he mentions that people are redefining the word cartoonist. This is because people, especially the younger generation, are not using this term anymore. Rather, he says, people are using the term “comic-artist.”
In regards to advice for younger artists he recommends to form or join a professional group (a union or even the Australian Cartoonists Association), so that way artists know (especially when freelancing) whether they are paid fairly or not.
This article was written by Sabine Kwan, an intern at Squishface Studio. To see more of David’s work, visit his website.
