Web-Comic Illustrator

"Will Draw for Food"

Jim Shaw is a comic artist and creator of the webcomic, Will Draw for Food. An advocate for emotional intelligence, Jim is fascinated by the underlying abstract concepts behind body language, expression, socio-cultural studies, interpersonal communication, collective symbolism, archetypes, and other aspects of the human condition.
 
Jim graduated from Brookdale Community College in 2014 with an Associate's of Studio Art. Between 2012-2017, he has helped co-found several organizations such as BluTrinity Comics Publishing, CYRIC (Comics for Youth Refugees Incorporated Collective), and CSS (The Comics Studies Society). When he isn't off working on his comics, Jim teaches comic theory in college continuing education programs, as well as public workshops. He was awarded the Competent Communicator award from Toastmaster's International in 2016.
 
His comic, Will Draw for Food, is a semi-autobiographical, slice-of-life, day in the life comic of its creator, a hungry webcomic artist. Some pages hint at the realities of finding food that some comic creators have to experience, like having to buy raw ingredients to make bread. Jim embraces his own flaws as a person so that the audience can relate to their own flaws, along with of course, some good old fashioned dread existentialism peppered in. It also does a great job of portraying the difficulties. Several of the strips also  deal with the struggles of daily drawing life like having to come up with content for a new strip.
 
In addition to his creative work, Jim pursues the scholarly aspects of the artform and quotes well known comic theorists such as Scott McCloud and Will Eisner in a desire to better understand his craft and for the betterment of the industry as a whole. Especially in today’s new digital industry, Jim is actively seeking out ways that comic artists can find venues of financial stability from their creative work through systems like crowdfunding, cryptocurrency, passive income, and complementary currency. His ideal is formulating a new and effective business model that will help the comics industry survive in a world where copying and pasting digital media has harshly affected webcomic artists’ ability to thrive off their creative work.  
 
In the meanwhile, Jim is focused on a new and upcoming long form graphic novel with the working title Ember: Birth of an Inferno. Inspired by the rich and complex lore filled worlds from the Elder Scrolls and Dark Souls game series mixed with the fantastical and elegant storytelling of JRPGs such as Final Fantasy, this story follows a rag tag team of unlikely heroes as they uncover a conspiracy against the gods that has been hundreds of years in the making. Look forward to it releasing in 2019