When did you first know you wanted to be an artist?
I loved to draw ever since I could finger-paint and scribble with a crayon. I soon fell in love with comic books and, at age twelve, knew I wanted to make a career of drawing stories.
How did the people closest to you react when you chose that path?
My parents identified my passion for drawing and encouraged me. My father is a writer, and my mother was the deputy director of the New York State Council for the Arts. I was surrounded by different kinds of artists, actors, and creators. It’s in my blood.
Which artists have mattered most to you?
Not counting filmmakers, writers, and singer-songwriters/musicians, I love painters like Edward Hopper, Pablo Picasso, and Max Beckmann. But the one artist I’m perpetually inspired by is the late, great cartoonist Jack Kirby, co-creator of the Marvel Universe and a plethora of other characters. His unbridled imagination and prescient designs have illustrated some of America’s greatest mythologies.
I’d like to also add the comics art of C.C. Beck, Steve Ditko, Frank Robbins, Alex Toth, Frank Miller, Howard Chaykin, Walter Simonson, Bill Sienkiewicz, and Chester Brown (among many others).
Which artist whose work differs from yours do you most admire?
Cartoonist Ben Katchor. His loose, scratchy lines. His playful sense of composition. His humorous truths in the face of absurdity.
What art book could you not live without?
How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way by Stan Lee and John Buscema. It teaches the basics of drawing and visual storytelling.
What quality do you most admire in an artist?
The ability to finish something. Don’t let the perfect get in the way of the good.
Do you keep a sketchbook?
No. But I sometimes scribble on bar napkins. And I love drawing on cardboard food separators in Chinese takeout deliveries and on Fancy Feast food for cats.
What is your favorite museum?
The American Museum of Natural History. And, the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
What is the best exhibition you’ve ever seen?
Norman Rockwell: Behind the Camera at the Brooklyn Museum in 2010–2011.
If you were not an artist, what would you be?
Since I count playwright and filmmaker as “art,” I’d be a mailman or a cook. But the smart answer is an electrician and/or plumber.
Was there an artistic circle that shaped you early on?
I made friends and produced comix with a tight group of junior high school classmates who spent their afternoons drawing antiheroes rather than doing homework. In 1985, my senior year of high school at LaGuardia, I was an assistant for Bill Sienkiewicz on New Mutants and Elektra: Assassin, and then at Upstart Studios for Howard Chaykin on American Flagg! and Walter Simonson on Thor. At that time, there were only a couple of universities teaching comix, but I got to learn hands-on by working with professional cartoonists on their books.
What is one thing you wish you’d learned in art school?
Comics. They didn’t teach comics and/or visual sequential storytelling when I was taking art classes at Music & Art High School, which became LaGuardia High School in my senior year.
What work of art have you looked at most?
A page I sometimes ogle for inspiration is an action-packed, rock-’em-sock-’em ballet that Jack Kirby rendered from Tales of Suspense #85 (Marvel Comics), where Captain America battles Batroc the Leaper.
What is your secret visual pleasure outside of art?
No secret that I love theater, television, and movies. Mike Nichols’s cinematic adaptation of playwright Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, is a movie I revisit annually.
Do you listen to music while working?
I listen to lots of industrial electronic music. Prince. 1960s jazz. 1970s funk and soul. 1980s hip hop. Ambient movie soundtracks that lean into horror. And podcasts. I love to hear people talk.
What was the last gallery or exhibition you visited?
OAX 2026—the Original Art Expo in Orlando, Florida—of which I was also a guest.
Which underrated artist should more people know?
Jen Ferguson is a painter and private art teacher, and the sole artist at the Blue Ribbon restaurants, where she whimsically interprets wine, cheese, crudités, birds, sea life, and the beasts we eat. Also, her apocalyptic Brooklyn Bridges and ambient landscapes foment a meditative sense of solitude and serenity.
What materials can you not live without?
Pencil, pen, and paper.
Do you make art every day?
Yes. More writing than drawing.
What is the longest you’ve gone without making art?
A week?
What do you do when you feel uninspired?
Read comix and books. Watch movies. Listen to music. Visit a museum. Steep in other people’s art. Enjoy nature. Touch grass. Dip your legs into the ocean. More importantly, work on something else. Crack a different idea. One thing often informs the other.
What questions drive your work?
Desire. Fear. Trouble. Purpose. Change. Excavating emotional gold. Discovering the unexpected. And what makes human connections.
What is the most important quality in an artist?
Personal expression despite criticism.
What have you not yet achieved in art?
Writing and directing a feature film.
What is the best thing about making art in the age of social media?
The broad potential to be seen and heard (for better or for worse).
Dean Haspiel, who publishes on Substack, will teach a workshop, Comix Fundamentals: Writing in Pictures and Drawing Narratives, at the Art Students League, April 28–30, 2026.
