John Kelly is the editor and publisher of Dummy. He is a writer who has contributed regularly to the Comics Journal since 1990 and is the former Executive Director of The ToonSeum, Pittsburgh's now closed museum of comics and cartoon art.

Make a comics website July 25 at SAW!

The Fall Your Project Moves Forward

Are you working on a bigger project that needs time, focus, and community support to reach the finish line? Join us for our Comics Working Group this Summer!

Each week, we'll come together to share progress on our current and upcoming projects, check in on goals, and, most importantly, work side by side. This space is for projects that unfold over time—graphic novels, zine series, large paintings, novels, and more. Our goal is simple: make steady progress together.

Adult Artists of all levels welcome!

Fruit Crafts Party Saturday July 18, 2026 at SAW

Seena Shamsavari aka Sina Sparrow is a Hastings-based illustrator, comic book artist and DJ. His work explores themes of popular culture, movie icons, camp , cult B-Movies, pop idols, gay culture, comic book heroes, the sacred and profane.

Seena’s portfolio includes album sleeves, packaging, visual merchandising, editorial illustrations, T-shirts as well as an extensive range of self-published comic books.

Clients include: Bella Freud, Liberty London, Fanpages (Bay Garnett) and Concept Store-Y Soho. Seena's T-Shirts have been stocked in various boutiques across the UK, Berlin, and Japan.

Trevor Alixopulos' comics began from an obscure place, employing idiosyncratic characters and settings that resonate with some unusual significance to him, and the journey of the work is in how they become knowable. He starts a strip hoping to search and inhabit unfamiliar perspectives.

He tries to create comics that are superficially straightforward cartoons, with a smooth read, that nonetheless on completion leave the reader a bit confounded, with a different story told by the sum than by the parts. The language of the cartoon makes a deal with the reader as to how it will be "read" and what it represents, with terms always subject to change.

His limited edition collection of nightlife comics, Lipstick Traces was listed among the top comics of 2021 by the contributors of The Comics Journal and his graphic novel The Hot Breath of War was nominated for Outstanding Graphic Novel in the 2008 Ignatz Awards and featured on tcj.com's "Top 100 Comics of the Decade."

Join us on the first Thursday of each month for this sustainable, messy drop-in class to junk journal with Maria.

Sliding Scale $15-$30 per session. Select Add-Ons if you can donate extra. Your donation helps support us to run this workshop each month! Thank you!

📅 First Thursday of the Month, 6PM - 8PM

📍 In-Person 1314 S Main St Gainesville, FL

👥 Anyone into art! Class size limited to 20. Subject to cancellation.

Mark Connery is a Canadian cartoonist, artist, and educator who studied English literature and women's studies at the University of Toronto. He's best known for his comic series Rudy, which was so popular it even got a spin-off! 

He's been creating and distributing a multitude of strange comics since the 80s and throughout the 90s, often leaving them anonymously at public transit stops or fests! You can find his more recent works of art on Instagram at mark_connery_art.

Mike Taylor is a longtime cartoonist best known for his zine Scenery, later titled Late Era Clash, which ran from 1994 to 2015. However, he’s been immersed in the comics scene and creating comics since he was twelve! He graduated from the University of Florida with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree and has gone on to create the graphic novel In Christ There Is No East or West, which explores themes of the modern-day American psychological landscape using both abstract mark-making and mind-bending scenes created using analog art techniques. 

He still values traditional art with a minimum of digital adjustments today and lives in sunny St. Augustine, Florida.

Our next SAWburst is with Nicole Williams!

"Platforming Your Art" is a workshop dedicated to those who want to be seen for their art in its purest form. If you want to sell your art while also keeping it genuine and authentic to you, this course is for you!

Mark Newgarden has worked on a wide variety of creative projects in numerous forms including print, film, TV and digital media (from Cartoon Network to Microsoft). His work has been exhibited at such venues as the Smithsonian Institute, the Cooper-Hewitt, the Brooklyn Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the ICA in London and the Picasso Museum in Lucerne. He has won the Eisner Award and the Society of Illustrators Gold Medal, among other honors. He currently teaches at the School of Visual Arts in NYC.

DCAZ 2026 was one for the books!

Book Talk and Workshop!

Andre Frattino is the writer of WE ARE PAN: We Are Pan is based on the true story of Operación Pedro Pan, a joint effort between the U.S. government and the Catholic Welfare Bureau to evacuate 14,000 children from Cuba to the U.S. between 1960 and 1962.

At SAW, he will give a talk on his book and a short workshop on crafting historical narrative for comics.

David Kiersh is an illustrator and cartoonist with a love for personal comics. He created the comic strip Drop-In and published the books Afterschool Special and Dirtbags, Mallchicks and Motorbikes which he also wrote and illustrated. By day, he has worked as a planetarium narrator, children’s librarian and graphic designer.

His website, davidkiersh.com showcases his illustrations and comics over a period of twenty years. More recently, Dave has created and maintained a personal collection of obscure comics and related ephemera into the searchable site/archive comicartandbooks.com

You can check out his shop to help support his projects and encourage him on his journey to create more books, both handmade and heartfelt. Or visit his website for a deep dive into this exhaustive survey of his portfolio, most of which has never been published elsewhere!

SAW PRO-CALL with Janna Morishima June 9

Come join us in our most affordable, online ongoing-community COMICS FLOW + PUBLISH MEMBERSHIP GROUP (comes with a two-week free trial) to join in on MONTHLY PRO-CALLS!

We bring in comic professionals from all walks of life to guest speak (virtually) at SAW. These guest speakers give SAW students/members some insight from their personal experiences throughout their comics career and welcome questions at the end of each session.

Fiona Smyth is a feminist Canadian cartoonist, illustrator, and comics educator born in Montreal. She began creating comics while studying at the Ontario College of Art. She soon became immersed in the art world, creating paintings, murals, comics, and zines, and then went on to contribute her work to various anthologies. Her work has appeared in Exclaim! magazine, Vice magazine, and more.

She's been published by Seven Stories Press, Koyama Press, Annick Press, and Pedlar Press. She's received many awards for her work and is now teaching the next generation of cartoonists at OCAD and working on her next book.

Scribble Bot Workshop June 2 at SAW!

Hi! Welcome back to The Terrible Anvil! Tom Hart and Jess Ruliffson love to talk about making comic-making EASIER, and in this episode, we’re asking “What’s the worst that could happen?”

We're talking about the fear of failure and utter collapse of our mental understanding of our own self-esteem. We're talking about large and small audiences, and envisioning the "fiery crash" of those potential failures, finding that a lot of times, they don't actually hurt. But some do, and we talk about avoiding those! Finally we talk about how communities (like SAW) provide readers and support, and that's what art is about!

Here at The Anvil, we ask the tough questions…

Thanks for being here!