Minnesota Jim (Keefe)
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Becky Fillinger for The Minneapolis Times conducts a short interview with cartoonist Jim Keefe.
Our neighbor Jim Keefe is the illustrator and colorist for the Sally Forth comic strip. He frequently references places in the Twin Cities in the strip – keep reading for fun examples. We talked to Jim about cartooning as a career (he’s had a great one!), typical workdays, social media influences and saying no to the laziness and theft of artificial intelligence. If you haven’t read Sally Forth in a while, give it a look!
Q: You’ve been the illustrator for Sally Forth since 2013. For the comic strip, you supply the art, lettering and color guides. Francesco Marciuliano is the writer. Can you please describe the creative process between the two of you.
A: Francesco lives in New York, so he’ll email me scripts with panel description and dialogue, and I take it from there. It’s a good working relationship because if I wanna change stuff in regard to how it would work visually, he has no problem with it. I actually think he sometimes runs with crazier ideas for the strip just because he knows I’m game for illustrating it.
Then you have the added headache of AI slop on social media platforms. I dislike AI photography and AI art immensely. It’s hack mimicry strip-mines the hard work of creatives with no compensation or acknowledgement, not to mention the endless copyright issues it tries to skirt with the legalese rhetoric its proponents vomit forth. Using Al to create drawings means never acquiring the skills to draw yourself – or recognizing what makes your Al drawing bad. Add to that you’re turning a blind eye to the swiping of an artist’s signature style that he worked a lifetime to create, to vomit forth a third-rate facsimile. Just – say – no to AI slop.
Check out Jim’s Patreon here – the most recent post profiles his Sally Forth predecessor Craig MacIntosh.
feature image has Jim Keefe adapting a Steve Ditko splash page
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