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Simmons expresses self through drawing comics

MELFORT — Everybody has a hobby, and for Sean Simmons, that hobby is creating, with his comic ‘Rizzo’. He wasn’t born an artist, but he has been practising his whole life.
Sean Simmons
Sean Simmons poses with a piece of art he wants to sell at the Northern Lights Gallery’s Back Alley Tour, 2018. Photo by Jessica R. Durling

MELFORT — Everybody has a hobby, and for Sean Simmons, that hobby is creating, with his comic ‘Rizzo’.

He wasn’t born an artist, but he has been practising his whole life.

Simmons started doing art in Grade 1 in Manitoba, creating cartoon characters in the margins of his schoolwork.

 “I remember in Grade 3... I have no surviving examples but memories of it. A classmate and I came up with a comic strip then and we would do them; I would say daily, but maybe it was only weekly – but in these spare moments, these free time moments in class, we would collaborate,” Simmons said.

The comic strip was about a dinosaur in a sailor’s hat and a caveman.

“I remember talking to him, not that many years later; maybe we were in high school. We weren’t really friends anymore, not enemies, we just drifted apart, but he commented to me one time [that] he still had a whole pile of those little comic strips.”

His high school encounter with his friend was in 1986, the same year he got his first job as a comic artist for a local paper.

“I got paid $5 a strip, and it was weekly, and my first paycheque to me was a five week month because I got $25 pay cheque and that was amazing..., but that wasn’t “Rizzo”, that was “Tweed”, a little alien guy that I invented in schoolbook margins.”

Years later he moved to Melfort, and began making covers for small town magazines.

Simmons would sometimes send these covers to his friend in the U.S., Chris Riseley, who owned a website. Riseley would post the ones that weren’t used. One day Simmons decided to draw Riseley, “maybe naked, I’m not sure. This big headed large guy, circle, circle and a set of arms, and I sent it to him, and he thought it was hilarious. So we did it up as two, three panel strips, and away with that.”

The current Rizzo graphic novel that Simmons is working on is with Riseley, about Riseley’s own recovery journey from alcoholism. 

“We’ve given it to doctors, we’ve given it to professionals, addictions counsels, just for feedback so we know how to place this thing.So it’s not up in the air, but something is happening with it, I assure you,” Simmons said. “It’s a really strange and trippy graphic novel.”