About Me:

My name is Evan Dunn, I am an Illustration-Animation major Attending the Art Institute of Boston. I'm 20 years old and have been drawing comics since 1989. I do comics as a way to incorporate elements of both literature and art into the same form. Sort of a meeting of medias. I feel like if you can combine the best painting in the world with the best novel, you can achieve both in one all encompassing work. Not to say that I have been able to do this, or know how to do this... this is just my ideal. My shining star marking my goals.

Why the name Quietcorn?

Over many years I've gone though a lot of names for a lot of things, and none of them seemed fitting and or catchy. One day many years ago I was on a road trip with my family though parts of Pennsylvania I believe. There were vast fields of corn everywhere. It was beautiful, the way the wind gently pushed the stalks to and fro as we sped silently past. Barns and farms lay dormant among the landscape, as if each one was in it's own little magical wonderful world of peace, and yet containing a peaceful and fulfilling life. The name came into my head. I tossed it around for a good hour or two before deciding to use the name for anything. It seemed to apply; sort of a play on words. "Quietcorn"... the central character at the time was Keith the Bear, and in this incarnation he was from the city of Wichita in Kansas, so it worked in that sense. It also could mean Corn as in a Corny joke and Quiet as in an underplayed theme. It fit, no one else had taken it and it sort of rolled off the tongue.

About The Quietcorn Characters and what they represent:

Each character I have represents different parts of my personality taken to an extreme. This is why the characters rely on each other so much in order to function. It's very rare that you will see any portion of my comics featuring one solitary character, simply because without one to contrast the other's extenuated personality traits, the extenuated traits become the norm, removing the humorous element. To this extent I have explained each character and what they represent.

The Trio - Before we start I need to say something about the following three characters. Keith, the Scribble and the Double. When I was growing up, I had two amazingly close best friends, Ari Silverman and Isaac Samules. Ari and I started doing comics in 1989 together. We together would design casts of characters and villains for them to beat the tar out of. the "Weird Character force" (W.C. Force for short) and "The Zappers". Really dumb stuff. The superhero teams would go off fighting ill conceived villains who were usually just us drawing altered versions of the action figures we had. Isaac helped every now and then by creating a new character, or a story idea or the likes. Either way, we were inseparable friends. The scribble's original design was created by Ari in 1989/1990. The Double's original design was created by Isaac around 1991. Although they look almost nothing like they did back then, these two characters along with Keith (I'll explain his significance later, but the general idea is that he most closely represents me as a whole) are the closest characters to my heart. Keeping those three as the central characters makes me feel reminiscent to my childhood roots and to my two oldest and dearest friends. (I have express permission to use these two characters as I see fit from their initial creators many times over in the past decade.)

Now for individual characters:

Keith-

Keith the bear was created after I read some of an 80's Dark horse comic called 'Boris the Bear'. Boris the bear's premise was that he was this robot toy bear who had achieved sentience and was living with his family, read comics and beat the tar out of overused comic characters such as transforming robots and funny animals. It was primarily a parody book, and it inspired me. I created Keith, although I didn't name him Keith at first. He was called Mr. Bear for awhile. I had a stuffed koala I owed and loved since before I can remember, so I comic-ized him to create a unique character. His original comic as "Mr. Bear" ran for thirteen 15 page comics in 1994-1995 I believe. These were the first close to real size books I had ever done, and it was also a return to humor for me. I started in humor in 89, but moved to action for many years (even so, most of it was essentially child doodles). I digress. It was a return to humor for me. I named him Keith in his 14th book, which ran for 4 issues picking up where 'Mr. Bear left off. By that time I had grown dissatisfied with the direction the plot was going in, so I reset the universe and began the plot again from scratch.  Keith was always placed as the straight man. To any situation he would be the one to watch and to respond. He is the little voice in my head telling me "That's dumb" or "Why would you ever think of that?" In this aspect, I feel he represents the outward me. The attempt to be normal amongst wackiness. His being a bear makes that impossible, and he never could actually fit in, but he puts fourth the effort of normalcy. In a lot of ways, this is how I react to unfamiliar social situations. 

Scribble-

The Scribble is as I've said before, one of the oldest characters. His origin story hasn't changed since 1989 when the character was conceived. His personality and appearance however... have. He is drawn to look like a doodle. Like something a bored person might scrawl onto a napkin after their morning coffee. The original design for him was just single circles. One for his head, one for his chest and one for each of his limbs. He was the leader of the superhero team, and was overall as uninteresting as the team itself. Today, he has been revamped and given deeper emotional attributes. He represents my misplaced heroism. I feel like the good guy, and I always try to do the good or right thing biased on my morals. A lot of times this gets me into trouble. The scribble represents that feeling personified. He wants to be a super hero, he has the powers for it... and he does his best to be one... even though that might not be particularly well guided or effective. Despite this, he always tries to do good, which wins him points in my book. You'll notice that throughout the comics, nothing particularly bad happens to him. This is intentional.

Double-

The Double has a confused history. When Isaac handed me the sketch, I toyed around with what he might be. A robot? An Alien? his original design he had satellites, knobs, lines up and down his boxlike chest. His arms were metal cables (simplistic versions of these since none of us could draw that well at that point). First we added him to the scribble's team. Then we tried to give him a history. He flew around in a giant spaceship that looked like a hamburger... we knew that much. In one incarnation he was a robot who could make copies of himself. In another he was an interplanetary traveler who could make himself look like anyone he wanted. His character was phased out of use around 1993 and wasn't re-integrated until around the time when Keith book 3 was going to come out. By that time he had completely changed. The only thing reminiscent of his original form were elements of his head and his flying hamburger. Even so, he was still the Double. He represented my anger, my irrational fear and my impatience. His makeup were some of my more negative qualities personified in order to create conflict between the emotional representations that were the other characters. He is my anti-hero. He is necessary, but his instinctive reactions are almost always overblown and end up harming more than helping. In any situation he will always be the one to get into a fight before having any idea about what is going on. You'll notice that I don't really have a well established and rounded villain character. 

The Thing That Came To Dinner & The Amazing Crusading Pizza-

These characters were late additions to my cast. The Thing's original design was created by Ari and I when we taped a bunch of broken action figure parts and accessories together. We came up with a one legged creature with a hat who most obviously had to be a door to door salesman. I put him into the comic on more or less a dare. After his first appearance in Keith book 1, the character and his Pizza sidekick took off and are now an integral part of the Quietcorn cast. He is also the last thing Ari and I ever worked on together in comics. While he didn't have anything to do with the development of the thing's personality, I still feel like a part of him is reflected in our joint creation. The Thing is my sense of the ridiculous. Everything about him is completely nonsensical, as well as his more down to earth friend... the ever popular "Amazing Crusading Pizza". He is nonsensical, yet follows logical and sometimes complex conversational steps to come to a conclusion about the nonsense. This is what makes the character work so well in contrast to the others who are more biased in emotions and reactions. The Amazing Crusading Pizza was originally going to eventually get his own solitary adventures but the idea never gelled enough to take form.

Jake-

 Jake's original design was to make him an old man in a plaid red and white shirt with overalls. He was modeled after two old men I saw in a supermarket in upstate new york. The larger man was dressed as I just mentioned and his friend was bald on top of his head and dressed in a business suit. The two were at such an odd contrast to each other especially to be friends that I had to do a quick sketch of them and create a comic around them. It worked for a little while, Jake worked better than his friend (who I named Jim). Once last year's scribble storyline came along, I had a chance to re-incorporate Jake under different circumstances and this time give him a little less stereotypical a character. I placed him in the roll of a hobo who follows the cast of the story along. He represents a compassion and respect I feel toward the elderly, despite how goofy he may act. The reasons for doing what he does shows that despite his age, he can still dream (the pilot hat) and he can still go on adventures and have fun.

The Plizzack-

 The Plizzack I designed as a part of an entire eco system I made for a comic that I never ended up doing called "Wassimia". Each creature on this island was randomly names after one of my friends. The Plizzack was the only one I found interesting after I had let the idea of doing that comic die. The Plizzack was sort of an anti-vegetarian statement. For many of my vegetarian friends, their justification for eating plants rather than animals were that plants were not sentient. The Plizzack's purpose was to create a cute sentient plant just to counter what they were saying. It was a great comic to do, and it is still posted on the web page despite it's being several years old now. It is a creature that I've always wanted to use more, but can almost never find a good excuse to.

Skippy the Flying Zucchini Salesman-

Skippy is purely a result of bored doodling. I think I scrawled his original concept drawing on the back of a math sheet in class. Why is he there? He's a fun plot device. I like having a ridiculous icon that my characters can look up and aspire to. It makes them feel more human.

The Monster- 

The monster is a remnant of an early attempt at a high school comic strip that I published once or twice before I started the Thing that came to dinner strips. The problem I was having was that it being in a school newspaper, my immediate thought was to parody the school. This if course was not even remotely acceptable in any shape manner or form. So, instead I devised a strip in which you had two kids, one of whom had a dimensional portal in his locker and from this portal a monster would come out every so often. The monsters weren't necessarily bad...  just hungry or scary or big. The comic was cute, but it god old after four or so strips and we stopped printing it in favor of the thing that came to dinner strips as they seemed of stronger quality (although less understandable to the general high school public).

Top 10 Personal Professional Influences (not in any order; otherwise known in the Biz as Name dropping ^_^):

(Note: These people have had to me the most notable influence on the development of my style)

1. Bob Burden (Flaming Carrot comics)

2. Jim Henson

3. Jeff Smith (Bone)

4. Sergio Aragones/ Mark Evanier (Groo)

5. Mitsuru Adachi (Touch, Short Program)

6. Mike Allred (Madman)

7. Douglas Adams (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)

8. Dave Sim (Cerebus)

9. Kevin Eastman (TMNT)

10. Richard Adams (Watership Down)