Chapter 1
About the Artist
Artist Liz Valasco says she discovered the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes when she was 7 and “never looked back.” Her comics, zines, drawings and prints can be gently haunting, but there’s a sympathetic wonder to them, whether they depict aliens, odd children, monsters, late-night horror queens like Vampira or the redwoods stretching overhead. The Seeker, the first chapter of which is excerpted here, was published by Tinto Press in 2019.
After studying printmaking at the Cleveland Institute of Art, she moved to Humboldt County in 2015. The shift from Ohio was a bit of a culture shock at first, Valasco says, “but I fell in love with the landscape, like a lot of other people have. … Once I found my community and felt like I belonged, that cinched it.” And in Humboldt, she’d found “a community of artists and other weirdos.”
Much of her work delves into the spooky but for The Seeker, Valasco says a child’s perspective was a natural fit. “You’re not pushed down by the reality of the world yet so a lot of things still seem possible. This sense of magic or the unknown seems very real when you’re a kid,” she says.
“I was actually pretty scared of scary movies when I was younger, but I always loved the spookiness of the season, getting outside at night — everything looks different everything and somehow better.”
Valasco says she draws “relatively simply,” sketching out her images in pencil before going back with ink, using different thicknesses of pens, maybe one accent color. “Since I was usually self-publishing,” she notes, “color is expensive, so I usually just printed in black and white.”
Her Moonpie comics, originally started in Ohio, depict our lush local forests, the result of rainy winters spent mushroom hunting in the hills and woods near her home. Though her titular main character is no local. “He’s a piece of the moon that has been sent down to earth to accomplish a goal, but he’s been here so long that he’s lost sight of that goal,” and instead travels with a little robot companion he built for company.
A third installment of the series is in the works. “It’s not as spooky,” says Valasco, “but it’s weird.”
Liz Valasco’s work can be found at Booklegger, Eureka Books and Epitome Gallery.
Jennifer Fumiko Cahill (she/her) is the managing editor at the Journal. Reach her at (707) 442-1400 ext. 106, or jennifer@northcoastjournal.com. Follow her on Bluesky @jfumikocahill.bsky.social.
This article appears in Halloween.