By Jeremy F. van der Heiden

Last Wednesday, the Somerville Arts Council held the latest event in its Salon Series at the Armory Cafe on Highland Avenue. This month, local artists gathered for a discussion on comics, labeling the event as The Local Comics Scene: Where Muppets, Line Art, and Central American Politics Meet. The night focused on two presentations, one from comic artist Joel Christian Gill, and another by a two-person comic art team, Shelli Paroline and Braden D. Lamb.

Since January, the Somerville Arts Council has hosted monthly events in the Salon Series, all at the new Armory Cafe, inviting the public to experience the latest happenings in the local art scene.

While Joel C. Gill acts as the Foundations Chairperson at the New Hampshire Institute of Art, guiding young students toward the most applicable concentrations, much of the excitement in his life is derived from his work as a comic artist.

His career has been on a very unique track, as he started as a painter and eventually realized his love for comic drawing. His first comics, titled Strange Fruit One, focused on a variety of social and political topics. This edition featured one of his first characters, Henry Box Brown, who nailed himself into a box to escape southern oppression and reach Pennsylvania.

As he gained more visibility through his racially driven comics, things took a strange turn. Around the same time that the first edition was published, political operatives in Belize came up with the idea to create a new campaign in hopes of defeating the existing Prime Minister, Dean Barrow, in the upcoming elections.

“Strange Fruit One ended up in London, and one of the people in London got a hold of it and said ‘this might be the guy,’” Gill explained to the audience. “So I got this email, and it seemed like one of those Nigerian scam emails, saying ‘we’ve been admiring your work for a long time and want to know if you would be interested in working with us on this campaign.’”

This commissioned job led him to the wild and wonderful world of Belizean politics. Though many Somervillians might picture Belize as a paradise in the Caribbean, the nation is perpetually poor with high rates of crime, while the ruling members are thought to be corrupt and indifferent toward the struggles of the common man. Gill created the characters based on the Prime Minister, as well as other high-ranking officials who happen to be mostly family and friends of Prime Minister Barrow, and sent them to his contact in London.

From there, the campaign got under way, as others working for the London-based PR firm created massive billboards, rap videos in the Belizean dialect, cartoons and comic books alongside the talented Mr. Gill. Unfortunately, the efforts did not pull through, as Prime Minister Dean Barrow defeated the opposition by two votes.

Interested parties can find a lot more from this artist through his website: www.joelchristiangill.com.

Working comic artists Shelli Paroline and Braden D. Lamb followed Gill with a presentation on their latest productions. While Gill’s career is overtly unique, Lamb and Paroline are just as rare in the comic industry as they are exclusively comic artists who make the entirety of their living off their art.

Creating comic books and more with licensed characters, such as those from Disney and Pixar, as well as adult swim cartoons, the duo supplement popular animated films and television shows with hard copy productions. Lamb explained this work as being quite unique, as he and his partner are tasked with translating live-action characters into static drawings and scenarios, which is often the reverse of a more traditional process.

The two got their break while doing rapid sketchings at a comic book expo, where the right people saw the duo turning out brilliant sketches and strips from scratch in a very short period of time. Additionally, the two’s ability to complete long comic books with almost impossible deadlines for most artists, such as a twenty-two page comic book form of the popular Ice Age that had to be completed in two weeks.

Lamb and Gill are currently working hard on comics for Adventure Time, a popular cartoon on the Cartoon Network, and have even designed two new characters. Some of their original cartoons have been published in the Boston Comics Roundtable’s Inbound Series, including the fourth edition, which acted as a comic book history of Boston.

This only scratches the surface of the talented duo, and much more is available on their respective websites, www.bradenlamb.com and www.shelliparoline.com.

The hosts of the event also offered an open invitation to any artists, comic-lovers or the like to attend the Boston Comics Roundtable’s weekly meetings held in Harvard Square. Information on these events and much more are available on the organization’s website, www.bostoncomicsroundtable.com, while schedules for more events sponsored by the Somerville Arts Council can be found on its site, www.somervilleartscouncil.org.