Comic Art on Page and Skin: Paul Abstruse - Episode 37

Diversification is a byword nowadays; building your life around one source of income is risky, even when you’re doing the nine-to-five. Sometimes it’s unavoidable, especially when your dream job simply won’t pay the bills.

Paul Abstruse has taken his love of creating comic art and built himself two income streams. The first is the one you’d expect, working for comic labels like IDW and Zenescope to produce pages for comic books.

The other is as a tattooist, where he not only creates the ink you see on folks every day; he also creates tattoos of the comic book characters we all love, even inking whole action scenes on people!

And if you’d expect a tattooist to be a very rough and ready type, you should see the art he’s created for the My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic comic book series!

Please join me as I chat with Paul about how the Australian body art industry has changed over the last decade, the convention scene in Australia and what it means when the job you love doesn’t quite love you back.

WARNING: Due to technical issues, there are a lot of audio issues in this episode that I simply couldn’t edit out. These include background hum, keyboard noise and dog panting.