Ryan Heshka has a longtime love of science fiction, four-color printed comics from the 1950s and ‘60s and mid-twentieth-century mutant movie characters. In his comic Frog Wife, he taps into these influences while adding in a dose of contemporary themes, drawing upon not just the “anxiety of nuclear annihilation” that inspired so much twentieth-century pop culture, but also the “environmental anxieties” that permeate twenty-first century society. He ties it all together with a soap opera plot line of love and betrayal.
To get the bright, limited-color palette, Heshka initially printed Frog Wife in 2019 via the Risograph, a 1980s copy machine that has been repurposed in recent years by artists and zine-makers because of its technical limitations. “The Risograph allowed me to get that three-color, limited palette, where colors are overlapping, you’re never sure exactly what is going to align and what is going to register,” Heshka says. “I wanted that off-register, happy-accident look to the comic, which the Risograph was perfect for.”
Over the years, Heshka’s creativity has taken many different paths. He started out in interior design and had a stint in animation, while side-hustling in illustration. For the past twenty years though, illustration and art have been his focus. His gallery work, which has been exhibited at galleries like Corey Helford in Los Angeles and Dorothy Circus in Rome, initially came as a response to his career as an illustrator.
“It really started off, I think, as scratching the itch that I wasn’t getting in illustration jobs,” says Heshka. “That’s doing weirder work, wilder work—work that was self-directed, versus art directed by an art director. It was really for my own amusement.”
He expanded his practice to include comics as the result of one fateful show at advertising company Wieden + Kennedy’s Portland, Oregon gallery. The 2014 exhibition Mean Girls Club was a multimedia installation based on a painting he made a couple years earlier of ‘50s pinup-style women carrying clubs. As part of the project, he independently published The Mean Girls Club comic. “That was the first comic that I self-published in any great quantity,” says Heshka.
“I think that the comic bug really bit me at that point,” he adds, noting that the project led to Frog Wife and his most recent comic, Pleasure Planet, which was released in 2021 and was influenced by the COVID-19 pandemic.
… you’re never sure exactly what is going to align and what is going to register…”
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