The Radioactive Surrealism of Ryan Heshka Glows with Nostalgia
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…”
I like the dark era of the original Batman, where he was alone and didn’t have to set a good example for anybody…”
Heshka’s influences include a wide variety of pop culture, including David Lynch movies, 1930s exploitation flicks like Reefer Madness
and the works of director Dwain Esper and Universal Pictures horror films. He’s also inspired by “any sort of rubber-suited monster movie from the ‘50s.” Heshka says, “I just love the quality and the texture of those suits and costumes and puppets and stop-motion animation and that sort of thing.”
One lifelong comic influence that manifests in Heshka’s work is Batman. As a child in the 1970s, he watched reruns of the Batman television series that started Adam West and Burt Ward. That led him to the comics, where he gravitated towards Golden Age titles. “I like the dark era of the original Batman, where he was alone and didn’t have to set a good example for anybody,” he says.
“Later on, I discovered the worldwide bootlegs of all those Batman comics, where they got the color wrong or they redrew the costume weird or the ears weren’t the right shape or something,” says Heshka. “I started to like those weird, bootleg versions of the characters as well and that’s what I end up redrawing and painting, reimagining these bootlegs and getting weirder and more colorful and a little bit wilder content. It really stuck with me.”
He’s also heavily influenced by pulp art, particularly the work of the seminal science fiction illustrator Frank R. Paul, which he first noticed as a child on trips to the library. “That really stuck with me,” he says. “That idea of odd, random planetary space-scapes that had this backstory that I had to imagine versus actually knowing what the real story was.”
With both his comics and his paintings, the typography associated with mid-twentieth-century pop culture is also a significant influence. He notes the iconic logo for Batman and the font used for the 1951 version of the movie The Thing—“it’s just The Thing written in this like goopy drippy, organic, germy-looking typography,” he explains—as the sort of letters that have caught his eye.
Heshka hand letters his comics. “I have a drafting background from the interior design days,” he says. “I still have control over my hand lettering.” Still, it’s a time-consuming process. When he wrote The Mean Girls Club, he spent about a week lettering it by hand. “By the end of it, I had a severe hand cramp,” he says.
Frog Wife was a less intensive lettering experience, due to the minimal dialogue, which allowed Heshka to focus on the typography for the cover and chapter headings, where the use of cursive recalls 1950s make-up ads.
But, it’s worth the work for the aesthetic he can capture by hand. “I don’t like that sort of canned look that you get from using Helvetica in a comic or something like that,” he says. “It’s a lot cleaner, but it’s also… to me, it’s very sterile and rubs the wrong way against the hand-drawn artwork.*
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