Justin Smith Publishes Spyungo Comic

Justin Smith always enjoyed drawing and he was good at it from the first time he picked up a crayon. Despite this, the 32-year-old East Hampton artist spent much of his adult life playing guitar in bands and working in television.

Fortunately, sometime after moving to the East End in 2005, Smith realized that he should stop fighting against his instincts and do what he does best. He began showing his drawings and paintings with local art collective Bonac Tonic, and selling illustrations of his musical heroes at , but Smith is just now working on what is probably his greatest accomplishment.

It took some time, but the artist finally published his first creator-owned comic book, Spyungo, this summer. Smith has already released two issues, and he plans to complete the seven-issue series by next fall.

“I always drew, no matter what,” Smith said explaining that he never stopped illustrating and creating characters, even when he was working for MSNBC and Court TV. “It was always there,” he said.

Smith pointed out that his coworkers would see his doodles, and before long he would be drawing storyboards for the television shows or making flyers and CD covers for whatever band he was playing with at the time. He began drawing for others as a kid, so the concept wasn’t foreign to him.

As a teenager growing up in Bayonne, New Jersey, Smith would entertain his friends with outrageous sketches and doodles, and it gave him great pleasure to make them laugh. His buddies would request drawings of the most bizarre characters and scenarios they could drum up, and Smith always accepted the challenge and delivered.

He recalled drawing “a polar bear with robot arms decapitating a crack-head” for one of his more imaginative pals.

Spyungo is very much in this spirit. The comic is about a couple of metal-head stoners in an alternate universe version of Bayonne in the 1990s, and the title character was born out of one of Smith’s goofy teenage sketches.

“I drew him on my desk freshman year of high school, in Spanish class,” he said, noting that the creature, originally called “Pookie the Freak,” drew laughs from every kid that sat at or near that desk for the remainder of the day. Pretty soon Smith was drawing Pookie everywhere and for everyone. “That was my personal mascot,” he said.

During the last 15 years, Pookie was renamed Spyungo and Smith altered his look to be more vicious and streamlined. “Over time I tried to come up with a back story,” he said, explaining that his original idea was to make a cartoon, but it never got off the ground.

Smith said Spyungo is definitely a better story now, so it was a blessing that the project took so much time to be realized.

The series follows a single story arc through all seven issues. It’s about two boys living on fringe of the accepted social structure who discover a world of mutant creatures hidden on the grounds of an abandoned chemical plant. Smith said the story covers topics like police corruption, family crisis and issues of identity, “What it means to be a freak, not just physically, but socially.”

The first two issues of Spyungo can be previewed and purchased at www.ComixPress.com or www.IndyPlanet.com, and more of Smith’s work can be viewed at www.JustinSmithArt.com.