Hannah March Sanders

Hannah March Sanders lives and works in Cape Girardeau, MO, USA, where they can be found making work in their many, many sketchbooks.

In 2022, Hannah was the lead instructor for a special topics comics course with creative writing faculty member, Dr. James Burbaker, and comics theory English faculty member, Dr. Sandra Cox, at Southeast Missouri State University. Students in this course produced multiple collaborative comics and comic-adjacent works while reading and analyzing works by LGBTQI+ and global majority authors.

You can see more of Hannah’s work at @predisastered on Instagram and hannahmarchsanders.com.

Did you grow up reading comics?

Unfortunately, I did not grow up reading comics! Even having two artist parents, I grew up knowing surprisingly little about any of the 3 major areas of art in which I now work: printmaking, fiber arts, and book-arts/drawing/illustration/comics. Growing up, I didn’t know much about superheroes, in film or comic books, which is what I thought were the subject matter of the majority of comics in my very limited understanding of them. Oddly in this narrative, a few houses up from me lived an artist who drew Green Lantern. My dad and I used to go hang out on his enclosed porch with him, which he used for a studio, and chat with him while he worked. He gave me some trading cards and such, which I didn’t fully value or appreciate at the time. I was an awkward kid (still am) and was mostly just tagging along with my dad observing.

One of my many life goals was to be a writer, so I often combined images and text in my creations from a young age, producing what I would now consider to be comics. I am an avid (read: “obsessed”) sketchbook artist. I have over 100 volumes of my sketchbooks/journals/notebooks dating back to 1992 and typically fill a 100-page hand bound artist book every two months with comics, doodles, notes, shopping lists, and bad ideas. In my formative years, I had a very limited understanding of comics. Later in life I came across R. Crumb and Chris Ware, and they were some of my early influences that led me down a different path to understanding comics and their possibilities. In graduate school I discovered and started using Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics as a way of teaching basic 2D Design principles to my students and learned quite a bit myself along the way!

After pursuing an undergraduate degree in New Orleans at Tulane University in Printmaking (and Painting) with minors in Art History and Philosophy, I got my MFA at Louisiana State University in Printmaking in 2011. My husband is also a printmaker and a professor, so we stayed in Baton Rouge a year after my MFA while he taught at a local community college and he and I were Adjunct Faculty at Tulane and University of Louisiana Lafayette, respectively. We then moved to Murray, KY to teach a semester at Murray State University and several surrounding institutions as an Adjunct Faculty before Blake got hired on for a full-time non-tenure track job at Bowling Green State University in Ohio.

I spent a year living in Bowling Green, Ohio around 2012 without clear purpose. It was a difficult year for me wherein I was mostly stringing together part time jobs as an underpaid commercial garment screen printer, occasional workshop instructor at a local arts institution, and running a very tiny letterpress studio in a shed in the back of a graphic design professor’s house (with a very friendly co-worker named Alice, who happened to be a cat and honestly the best coworker I’ve ever had except for when her hair got in the ink). In a swooping miracle, I was hired to teach art foundations full time at the University of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates and was preparing to move there, but unfortunately my visa application was denied. In the meantime, I had turned down two other teaching opportunities and was left unemployed. I began working for a light installation artist named Erwin Redl, thanks to the recommendation of a dear friend, and suddenly had more time on my hands. I began spending a lot of time in the public library and discovered their fantastic collection of graphic novels/comics.

That’s when I found Pinocchio by Winshlush. This book really spoke to me as a work of art. It opened my eyes to a broader definition of comics. It is a classic story with a twist (a lot of twists), it is dirty in content and subject matter, and it is beautifully rendered.

I soon moved to the Gulf Coast of Mississippi to pursue another teaching position in foundations and art appreciation, and then was hired by my current institution, Southeast Missouri State, in 2014. Though I have continued as a printmaking, fiber arts, and drawing educator, I have over the past decade continued to educate myself about comics. It’s a slow burn. And isn’t that just the best?!?

How do comics inspire or inform the work you make?

I think of all the questions listed here; this is the one that I most identify with. Because it is only recently that I have actively pursued making and studying comics as an art form for myself to engage with in my art practice. My work making comics was delayed to a lack of exposure to comics, a lack of understanding about the range of what comics are and can be, and general self-doubt and imposter syndrome. Also, I love to work in so many different mediums that I’ve just now come to a time where I can really engage with this practice.

I’ve always searched for visual inspirations for the combination of text and images. I’ve been obsessive with my sketchbooks and journals since I can remember. As I began learning to be a practicing artist, the aesthetic of comics naturally appears in my work. I think this is part of the reason I gravitated towards printmaking as a medium and why I was drawn to book arts.

As Buzz Spector writes about so eloquently in his book The Bookmaker’s Desire, there is something more intimate about books as art than any other medium. And through this intimacy, there is a totally different aesthetic experience at play where our right and left brain are working together. An experience of comics for me becomes a highly visceral one not only through the combination of text and image but also through the experience of the book as an art form itself.

“The topography of an open book is explicit in its erotic associations: sumptuous twin paper curves that meet in a recessed seam. Page turning is a series of gentle, sweeping gestures, like the brush of fingers on a naked back. Indeed, the behavior of readers has more in common with the play of intimacy than with the public decorum of art viewing or music listening. Most of us read lying down or seated and most of us read at least partially unclothed. We dress up to go out and look at art; undressed, in bed, we read. We seek greater comfort while reading than the furnishings of museums or concert halls will ever grant us. When we read — the conventional distance between eye and page is around fourteen inches — we often become the lectern that receives the book: chest, arms, lap, or thighs. This proximity is the territory of embrace, of possession; not to be entered without permission.” (Spector)

In 2021, I enrolled in an online course at Harvard taught by Peter Kuper. He dubbed my style “Dr. Bronner’s Soap Bottle Aesthetic,” and it’s true. Blocks of too much tiny text and a bit of some unknowable, hopeful prophecies to boot, all with a nice peppermint scent and a DIY all-purpose commonplace utility. Or so I aspire to be!

I have also found this sort of aesthetic in other forms, such as from David Foster Wallace’s book of essays, Consider the Lobster. I see this sort of aesthetic arrangement as an attempt to represent what cannot be fully represented in words nor images alone. Something tangible but unknowable, untranslatable but universal.

I unknowingly adopted this TELL IT ALL IN ONE PLACE aesthetic in graduate school, if not before. I wanted to make narrative art, but I got stuck in the character design phase. So I began creating prints I called “Story Maps” that combined text and imagery into one large composition. These were also an attempt to bring my sketchbooks into the realm of my “real art,” since I felt my sketchbooks were most successful both at portraying my core ideas and at engaging my audience.

How long have you been making work that references comics?

This is difficult to answer, and the answer might range anywhere from 3 to 30 years, depending on your definition of “comics”. I think I’ve been making comic-adjacent work since I was a small child. I was (am) a horrible speller and have intense (to say the least) handwriting, so even my earliest sketchbooks/notebooks/journals contain the juxtaposition of images and text to attempt to describe “life”. In short, I’ve been creating diary comics before I understood that’s what they were.

As far as intentionally engaging in making comics, that began much more recently. I’ve been hand-binding most of my sketchbooks since studying book arts in undergrad. About six years ago I began to give my artist books (which are also my sketchbooks) themes and incorporate elements of that theme into the design and binding of the books. Most of them are made from trash–old color proofs, things I find discarded in the studio, old cereal boxes and the like. With these themes came a greater attempt to integrate the images and text into compositional layouts. This is usually accomplished quite informally, and in a way that likely wouldn’t scream “COMICS!” to anyone but me.

I find my sketchbooks to be the most successful and engaging things I make, and I have in recent years made a conscious effort to enter them into exhibitions and think of ways to incorporate the joy and energy of my sketchbooks into my artistic practice. Which is how comics have more formally become a part of my artistic practice, it’s also made me a bit of an over-sharer. This seems to fit best into comics communities, who I have found are filled with open, honest, and dark-humored people that tend to understand me.

In Summer 2021, I used research funds from promotion to tenure to purchase an iPad, Apple pencil, and Procreate. During this time, I also received grant funding to take a summer course at Harvard with comics artist and illustrator Peter Kuper. This was my first, and only, formal education in comics, which is why I always feel a bit of an imposter talking about myself as a “comics artist” or “cartoonist” or what have you. I learned so much from Kuper as a professional and practitioner, and so much from my classmates, who ranged from high school students, to graduate students, to just interested folks like myself from all around the world.

Around this time while randomly, and for no reason, just googling “HELP ME I AM ABOUT TO TEACH A COMICS CLASS AT MY SCHOOL SOON, AND I FEEL DUMB” I found an online (and usually in person) group called Sequential Art Workshop (SAW) @comicsworkshop on Instagram. I joined their Mighty Network social network and have over the past couple of years participated in a few of their zoom workshops and open studios. I hope in the future to enroll in their year-long course. Through this group I have found even more people who seem to prioritize the same sorts of things in their work as I do. We help each other with print layout, Procreate tips, image editing, publishing, drawing, and so many other things. We also just share our work with each other and be compassionate to one another. I gotta give a shout-out in particular to Michael @sisyphusjonez on instagram, who is a host of a couple of regularly occurring zooms and someone who has really supported and inspired me personally in my journey to try to make more comics more. I’m by no means the most frequent zoom attendee or group member (I’m likely at the bottom of the pile in these regards), but the time spent with SAW has had a big impact on me and my work, and I hope to pursue it more in the future.

I’m also really inspired by Barbara Tharas @bltcomicz and @garensdiary, Kyle Bravo @kyle_bravo_, Trishelle Jeffery @trishellejeffery, Liana Finick @lianafinick, Lynda Barry @thenearsightedmonkey, Andrew Kozlowski @andrew.kozlowski, John Rosen @diary.of.shame, @hyenahell, Bhanu Pratap @hanabhanu, Lucy Knisley @lucyknisley, J.T. Yost @yost_posts, Julia Wertz @juliajwertz, and shit-I-gotta-end-this-list somewhere so I’ll stop now…  This is just a few of the people I stalk on the internet and wish I could make work like theirs. Also props to the account @comics_hauler who has the best taste and is always helping me learn about new-to-me artists to read! I most recently finished reading Elizabeth Trembly’s Look Again, which is having a large impact on my life and how I approach making comics personally. Who doesn’t love an unreliable narrator? Especially when it’s you, talking about your own life?!?