Sam Gibbons

Gallery Affiliations: Jonathan Levine Gallery

Region: South

The first comic book I can remember reading was a Donald Duck Adventures comic when I was about four years old. A year ago I stumbled across this particular comic while rummaging through boxes at my parents home in Ohio. While skimming through it, one story struck me with a strange sense of recollection. The story itself cast Donald Duck as an undercover detective trying to bust a diamond smuggling operation. He kept getting foiled by a spy who was constantly changing his physical appearance, distracted by a bathing beauty with a puppy dog face, and eventually duped by illegal cargo concealed in crates of hotdogs. Reading this comic some twenty years later, I could still recall the confusion I felt when I had first seen those pages.

The most common cultural association with cartoons is that of a sort of childhood innocence, humor, and slapstick. But now, with more and more cartoon shows and comics geared towards adults, our association with cartoons is beginning to represent more adult themes of humor involving sex, violence, and drugs. In my work, I try to achieve the transgression of these two types of associations through the staging of their opposition.