Pencil Artist of the Week: James W. Fry

This week’s featured pencil artist is James W. Fry, an illustrator, comic penciler, and storyboard artist living in New York City. We met James at this year’s National Stationery Show, where he stopped by our booth and chatted with us about pencils, comics, and the comic industry as a whole. While he was sharing his thoughts with us on the comic industry’s shift towards “serious storytelling,” his favorite pencil (the Palomino Blackwing 602), etc., he also doodled, sketched, and scribbled in one of our notebooks, showing off the skills that have made him a mainstay in the comic world.

James “Toonguy” Fry has worked in the comic industry in some capacity since 1984. During this time, he has worked for big name studios like Marvel, DC, and Disney, taught animation at several different schools, and worked on a number of independent projects. His portfolio includes pages from Justice League of America, The Flash, Superman, X-Men, and Birds of Prey, and he has produced storyboards for a number of Marvel’s animated films.

James believes that comic books are, first and foremost, a media format aimed at children, and his drawing style reflects that. His lines are smooth and well defined, his characters animated and exaggerated. During our chats, he shared his dislike for the “dark” direction of the comic industry, a dislike that stems not from the quality of the art or writing, but from the impact such storytelling has on the children who read them. James said he much prefers the fantastical style of the comics of the 1990s, an era during which the industry did not take itself as seriously as it does today.