Friends and family of the late Seattle artist Jon Strongbow gathered for a memorial panel earlier this month at Emerald City Comic Con to tell stories about one of the great eccentrics of the city’s art scene.
Strongbow was born in Olympia, Wash., in 1954, and began his art career in 1984 after spending several years as what he described as “wandering here and abroad.” He went on to become a fixture of the Pike Place Market community in Seattle for over 20 years, where he exhibited a collection of pen and ink drawings called the Secret City Series, produced between 1992 and Strongbow’s passing in 2022.
The Secret City Series blends portraits of city landmarks with figures from a wide range of mythology, folklore, and local history, in what Strongbow described as a “shamanic journey through the streets of Seattle.”
Calling Strongbow a “Seattle artist” has a couple of different meanings. Much of Strongbow’s art is specifically about the city he lived in, as both a commentary on and chronicle of how Seattle has changed over time.
In his work, a Navajo girl plays with colorful dinosaurs on the steps of what’s now known as the Museum of Pop Culture (“Night Journey”), a dragon visits the Magus bookstore in the University District (“Magus Books”), and the site that eventually became Benaroya Hall ends up hosting a bunch of Easter Island moai statues instead (“The Secret of the Ages”).
Privately, Strongbow had been dealing with liver problems for several years, which was compounded by a cancer diagnosis, and had been scheduled for a liver transplant in February. Most of his friends and family weren’t aware he’d been sick at all, so his abrupt decline and death on Dec. 19 at age 68 was a surprise.
Strongbow’s work also includes 12 jazz albums, recorded both as a solo artist and with his band Mystery School; Northwest Mystic Collage, a short-run book of local collage artists that he published in 2022; and the self-published 1988 graphic novel The Fury of the Four Corners.
The panel at ECCC, “Remembering Jon Strongbow,” was moderated by cartoonist and Seattle Central College professor Leonard Rifas.
The panelists included Strongbow’s brother Marc Turnbow; Steve Beard, the former co-owner of the Seattle comic shop Comics Dungeon; and Pat Moriarity, an artist, cartoonist, and adjunct professor at the Art Institute of Seattle.
Beard, Rifas, and Moriarity had all been friends with Strongbow for over 30 years, and led a discussion of stories about Strongbow’s life and work, with occasional participation from members of the audience who’d met Strongbow over his years at Pike Place Market and in the Seattle art community.
“He was always my right-hand man,” Beard said, who met Strongbow in 1991 when he became a regular at Comics Dungeon. “He always had something to pawn off on you, some novel or comic that you just had to read.” He told stories of Strongbow riding his bike from one end of Seattle to the other, in search of more books for his classic science-fiction collection or more horror B-movies that he hadn’t yet seen.
“When I think about Jon Strongbow, from his work and the times that we spent together, a lot of it was in my imagination,” Rifas said, “who I imagined I was working with was someone who had had at least one overwhelmingly powerful experience that was something other than traumatic, and that he had let those insights guide his art and his choices in life.”
Strongbow, according to Rifas, described his art as a personal, therapeutic process. At a panel at the 2022 Emerald City Comic Con, Strongbow had referred to his own body of work as “part of his healing from insanity,” and that graphic storytelling was “a great way to heal your own madness.”
On his website, Strongbow wrote that his art was fueled by “a sort of urgency, in relation to what he saw as the wiping out of natural resources, not only in the form of trees and land and minerals, but of people and traditions.” He frequently spoke and wrote about his studies of traditional practices, which included time spent at the Red Cedar Circle and at the Sakya Monastery on 83rd Street in Seattle.
A collection of Strongbow’s 3D art of Seattle, All One Life, will be posthumously published via Fantagraphics on July 11. Marc Turnbow also said at the panel that he’s exploring options to release an unpublished novel by Strongbow, currently titled Original Wrapper.
Tom Dyer at Seattle’s Green Monkey Records is currently in the process of remastering Strongbow’s musical discography, both solo and with Mystery School, and releasing them digitally for the first time via Bandcamp.
[Errata, 4/16: Corrected the spelling of Pat Moriarity’s name.]
