Making comics did some stuff to me. I’m kind of new to the scene. Here’s what I found to be special about it, its world and people.
In the look back on my work in animation I mention how as a kid I drew tons of silly comics. I grew up and then got more into music and film, the oh-so-much-more-serious forms of art. The world of comics remained dormant in the back of my head, festering like a expressive abscess ready to burst.
I’ve made children’s books with a cartoony touch and whenever I draw storyboards, they tend to have a comic book style – even storyboards for live action projects. So through all those years I’ve kept orbiting the comics cosmos. Shit got real. For the last two years or so I have been meeting different people of the world of comics. Bright eyed and green behind the ears I now inch closer and closer to this scene.
Why? Because it burst! I’ve returned to drawing silly pictures. YAY. I put out a comic book called “Art Künstlich” in December 2025. In half year steps and over the span of 9 issues I will try to tell a mysterious story about some fucked up artists in a near-future Austria and its solar punk computer government. Interest piqued? Get in touch! office AT zorn-studio.com. Anyway. Here are some things I realized about the world of comics.
COMICS GET IT DONE
Working on film or tv-projects can get very frustrating. I tried and failed many times. Mainly because the “work” initially only consists of packaging and pitching an idea so someone else might buy and finance it. You have to sell the story before you can start working on it and actually make it, make it good. So no matter how excited I was about the first sparks and genesis of an idea, the backwards feeling process of premise pimping and selling sexy loglines preceded it. And even if there happened to be funding or a running pre-production the chances of anything off the beaten path getting made is brutally slim. Especially in Austria and if the idea is a bit more elaborate and potentially costly.
“Art Künstlich” was such a project. A series, way too big in scope, way to niche, way too out there. Still me and a producer had been trying to pitch it for three years. It even had episode outlines, a pilot script and a strong season arc. It marginally references today’s LLMs and has a classic supercomputer neural network as a backdrop, but the story is much more about people and artistic meaning than AI systems. Did the early hype help the show get made? No. I had to face it, this thing is unsellable. So I embraced this fact and around 2024 I decided to make it a underground comic book series.
Fast forward a year later and I held it in my hands, a finished thing. The idea made flesh. I had gotten to really work on it. My whole heady mystery plot, the crazy dialogues and smartass-ery, I poured it all into this wonderfully free visual medium, without compromise. To leaf through. To show around. I can go everywhere now from this point of origin. It was done. Comics got it done.
COMICS HELP KEEPING IT TOGETHER
Anyone still reading? I wouldn’t be probably. I have a certain condition that makes it hard to stay on target sometimes. I have tendencies to overly obsess on irrelevant details and then I get overwhelmed. I can’t keep my shit together, so to speak. Alongside other measures I curb social media use and, hey; it opened up a huge junk of free time. Time to start an entire comic series for example. And to write weird blogs! What do you know.
David Mathews, fellow comic and animation artist in Vienna, gave me an advice regarding the comic books I started working on – one among many other great ones (thanks for recommending “Elements of Style” to me). He told me to make a schedule for the series, a consistent format, length, frequency of release. So I roughly planed out all of it, how many books and over what span of time I would do. I know now that the last book will be finished in 2029. It’s the first time I have something like a 5-year-plan. Unbelievable. This decisive though lenient structure gives me (self-)assurance and focus.
“I found purpose of expression.”
Working on layouts, sketching, writing and re-writing, drawing, inking, the craft itself, the “doing it”-part, that already provides a very literal structure and can ease a restless mind. But through comics and its schedule, a goal to work towards and arrange my other projects and jobs around, I now even discovered something else. I found purpose of expression. I didn’t know I was missing that. Maybe everyone should have that, big or small, doesn’t matter. So I have this meaningful mission now and at the same time a way to work through issues I have. Shame. Fears. Uncertainties. As soon as they’re expressed, they’re more manageable. Art is just so damn handy. Contained within a panel, it gets easier to keep it all together. One panel after another.
COMICS MAKE ME HAPPY
I have a hard time with people. Extreme impulsiveness makes it so I’m either oversharing, over-boarding, just too much, or I shut myself out entirely. I even developed this self-view of being a peculiar disconnected hermit. In those moments, reading comics and making them, brings diversion and peace. Though in the more intense phases of finishing up an issue I can appear quite irritable and grumpy, the process makes me incredibly happy.
And then one happiness factor leads to another. Through “Art Künstlich” I started showing it to people and friends, approaching – slowly but surely – a partly underground community in Vienna celebrating the medium. I saw I’m not alone with my insecurities and challenges. And look! Comics make so many others happy as well. Artists, fans, collectors, newbies and experts. There is a place for everyone’s weirdness. If you are a shy artist, a fan, want to find like-minded people or just connect via comics, get in touch with the OeGeC or Vienna COMIX WEEK.
And here’s the simplest way comics make me happy. The books themselves. In May I found a bunch of nice new titles and added them to my collection. Some of it is from London’s Forbidden Planet and Gosh!, a store with this incredible small print area right next to the entrance, not hidden away in the back. Other than a sweet pile of Heft’l I got to meet so many cool people, local and international, at the comics events of recent weeks.
Super nice people, smart and funny had really reaffirming stuff to say about my work, art in general and were just so refreshingly different as a scene. I got to talk to Mia Oberländer (“Saloon”), Lukas Weidinger, New York artist and head of CRAM books, Andrew Alexander, Eric Chen from Tisch 14, Lilli Loge (“Bunny war Böse”, “How to fuck up a Threesome”), Andy Leuenberger, and Oskar from Potato Publishing, who helped my 4yo-daughter to make a more than decent zine-run of 6 prints about a rocket ship trip – she’s already so much better than me. Ultimately it became clear, my “hard time with people” doesn’t seem so hard anymore.
And shout-out to Franz Suess, who just won Best German-Speaking Comic Artist – congratulations! We just spoke for a bit, but I could tell the world of comics has made him very content. Oh, and THANK YOU for this superb drawing of me at Vienna COMIX. What could make one happier I ask.
EDIT 11.10.2026: Wichtige Adressen in Wien, wo es auch “Art Künstlich” zu kaufen gibt, ist zum einen Sebastians Pictopia (Comic-Shop in 9. Bezirk, ist auch schon #2 online im Shop) und Top-Riso-Drucker Replikat Press. Über sie habe ich Leute wie Zograf und andere tolle internationale bis österreichische Comic-Künstler*innen kennengelernt, das ADA und Wattworks – also die Szene von Anfang an wirklich nur positiv erlebt.
Josef Zorn, 17.6.2026
https://is.gd/2esl83