Matthew Wills
Interview from 2009.
Who are you? My name is Matthew Wills- the Cannibal Cartoonist, and I run Drawfest New Zealand, which is a New Zealand drawing group.
Where do you come from? I started out in Waihi, moved to Hamilton, then moved to Auckland, then moved to Palmerston North and now I’m moving to Wellington. I get around.
What makes you happy? I don’t know, we’ll come back to that one, I’ll have to think about it.
What recent adventures have you been on? Recent adventures… well I went to Auckland, for Auckland Armagedon, where I was running the Drawfest stall. Organising a whole bunch of artists and their art we sold during the event, which was three days long. Then the next weekend I was in Wellington, the other side of the country, selling my own art at a Halloween art market. Through My Galaxy.
So you do a lot of that stuff? Yep. I go to about six or seven conventions a year at least, and I’ve hit a few up in Australia before as well. I’d like to do more soon too.
What’s your favourite thing at the moment? My favourite thing…. Well I really like the cartoon series Archer at the moment. I watch a lot of it, even though it’s a very short series. And I’ve just started watching the series Frankenthal, which is also very good.
Where do you get your inspiration from? My inspiration… Right now I’m going for a very kitch angle, where I’m drawing a lot of vampires and werewolves and things, which is really kind of boring but I’m having fun with it. Normally I just try and be as original as possible. Shun all of those kind of conventions, but lately I’ve just been lazy. The point is I’m having fun with it.
Instead of happy… what makes you angry? When other artists come to me and go ‘I’m going to do this and this and this, and it’s going to be so cool’ and then all they send me is like one crappy drawing that they’ve talked up for hours and hours. They spend more time talking about what they’re going to do, than what they actually do, and then they wonder why nobody respects them, and why they have to ask for people to come and look at their work. It’s true I could go for hours about just that.
I think you summed it up well. The reason I started Drawfest was because of those type of people, I want to protect New Zealand from being those kind of people. I want to inspire people and help people. And stop people who only care about themselves and money, from running things like stalls at Armagedon.
What’s ahead for you then? Well I’m moving down to Wellington, and I am getting an art studio. So I will have my own art studio, I’ll look into running Drawfest as a proper business, start maybe making some real money out of it which would be nice. It’s not really the point of the thing though, it’s just I do spend a lot of time on the road as it is and if I could start doing that full time, go to more art conventions because there are plenty more of them out there in New Zealand, then that’d be really cool. Representing a whole bunch of artists who can’t make it around the country all the time.
Like a rock star but a cartoonist. Yea… And a merchandiser of other people’s goods as well. So I can give other people opportunities while I travel around sleeping on couches and going to all these arty events. There is a tattooist convention coming up in February in Hamilton which I’m thinking about going to but it’s a bit on the expensive side for a stall so I definitely need lots of other people’s art as well.
Where can people see your stuff? They can go to www.cannibalcartonist.com or they can go to my deviant art www.cannibal-cartoonist.deviantart.com oooh. Or they can go to www.twitter.com/cannibalcartoon and I will just talk about stuff and things, mostly Armagedon.
Anything else? Drawsome… Inkcredible, Penoltamitae. When you put pen to paper everyone wins, that’s why its called a draw. Use that one.
http://www.cannibalcartoonist.com/
http://cannibal-cartoonist.deviantart.com/
http://twitter.com/CANNIBALCARTOON
Artwork by Matthew Wills
