The Greenpoint Gazette Takes a Trip to Pizza Island

Like any other small-ish neighborhood that’s part of a bigger city, Greenpoint is home to countless subcultures; and then some. While art and music scenes are palpable here, sub-groups like comics, for one, may take up less room in the spotlight because of their non-performance based nature. Deep in the heart of Greenpoint is the Morgan Fine Arts Building (649 Morgan Avenue), and inside is a cartoonist’s studio by the name of Pizza Island. Current members of the studio are Julia Wertz, Sarah Glidden, Karen Sneider, Domitille Collardey and Robyn Chapman.

Not surprisingly, the ladies know each other through comics. Sneider and several other cartoonists have been running a drawing group for the past eight years called AWP, short for Artists With Problems, a name that started as a joke but wound up sticking for the same reason. The group gets together every Tuesday night at various people’s houses to draw, socialize and share work. Sneider met Chapman, Glidden and Wertz through AWP, and Collardey through Glidden and Wertz who had met her via the Internet when she was still living in Paris; Glidden wrote to Collardey to tell her she loved her work and the two kept in touch until Collardey eventually moved here.

As creative freelance jobs often go hand in hand with working solo, all of the Pizza Island ladies (pre-PI) found themselves simultaneously frustrated with the solitary lifestyles they were leading.“I was tired of working at home alone all day, and drawing in coffee shops wasn’t much better. I wanted to join a cartoonist studio and as it happened Julia and Sarah were looking for the same thing,” Sneider said.

The ladies all agree that being around one another is inspiring and it enhances production, whether it’s finding the energy to stay later because there are other people around, or resisting time-wasting temptations such as Facebook and the like. “When there are three or four other people working in the room, you’re less likely to procrastinate or waste time surfing the Web. You see everyone else working so hard and it’s really motivating,” Glidden said.

Sharing a studio with fellow cartoonists has technical advantages, as well. The girls have each other to turn to “when they are trying to figure out the best way to compose a panel or need advice from one another about, say, the best way to draw a car,” Glidden offered. She added:“Before Pizza Island, if I needed advice on something I would have to scan it and email it to Julia, then wait for her to look at the image and email me back. Now I just turn around and ask her.”

If you were to pop in to Pizza Island for a surprise visit, what you might find would be a roomful of ladies plugging away at their desks, talking intermittently, perhaps listening to podcasts, NPR or music. While less likely, you may find the girls watching TV though often they use headphones as one might imagine it’s hard to agree on one station or channel in a room of all women. Schedules vary as some of the PI ladies are morning people and others find success working deep into the night.

Naturally, what all these women share is making comics. The common thread among their work is that they each make autobiographical comics, though some make other kinds, as well. Wertz makes comics that read like an open diary about a twenty-something woman in New York. Her drawings done in “typical comic book style” are simple black and white with the occasional punchline. Sneider draws gag comics—she has had gags in the New Yorker and Nickelodeon magazine. Her longer pieces are also funny, and mostly about monsters. Glidden does journalism comics—the book she just finished, How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less out November 3, is a sort of political travelogue about Israel. Chapman does anthologies, and Collardey does fashion illustration work.

Beyond the perimeters of Pizza Island there is still an abundance of comic community action to be had, not just in Greenpoint, but all over Brooklyn. While the comics community as a whole is small and informal, there is a definite cartoonist scene consisting of cartoonist parties, book releases and conventions. In fact, the biggest and best comic-related event is coming up in December at the Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival run by Gabe Fowler of Desert Island, who also hosts many release parties for area cartoonists. “I think more and more people are recognizing comics an art form “on the map” but it’s not very sceney. It’s not like how Bushwick has that kind of underground music scene or Williamsburg has an art scene, because comics [aren’t] exactly something that can be done in public,” Wertz said.