ARTIST SPOTLIGHT - Johnny Miranda - Comic Book Fiend Club

This week we welcome Johnny Miranda to the CBFC Artist Spotlight!

Q. Where are you from?

A. I currently work out of Boston, Massachusetts. I have spent some time in the NYC/NJ area, but definitely take pride in working out of Boston, especially because it is not considered a major art city. I spent my youth in the South before moving to California as a kid and finally to Boston in Middle School. So to answer your question, kinda from all over the map.

Q. How long you’ve been drawing?

A. Like most artists, I have been drawing since I can remember. So many of us grow up drawing our favorite characters and cartoons, and as we get older, it gets classified as “Pop Art”, but really, I just make the same stuff I’ve been doing my entire life. I just do it professionally instead of in Biology Text Book or a Talent Show Playbill. I don’t draw Marilyn Manson as much as I did as a kid, but the Simpsons and a lot of those iconic characters, definitely still do. Around 2012, I started to teach myself how to paint, and that really shaped my career to be what it is today.

Q. What materials do you prefer to do your art with?

A. I love to work with so many different materials. I didn’t start off with a huge arsenal of tools, and kind of just used what I could get my hands on (old cardboard, charred pieces of wood to draw, old posters, etc) but now that I have a studio, I love working with aerosol, acrylic paints, screens, canvases and a lot of just random stuff that looks beautiful to me, but might be trash to another person. There is a big misconception that you need all this fancy stuff, top of the line paints, brushes, canvases, and other materials to make good art. Thats all a fallacy. If you want it to exist, you create a path to make it exist.

Q. Character you love to draw?

A. That’s a good question. Definitely Capn Crunch. The blue and yellow to me is iconic, how it all just kind of works and always makes me happy. Allan Burns really made magic with the Capn.

Q. Character that you want to draw that you haven’t drawn yet?

A. I would love to get into some comic book characters. Creature from the Black Lagoon oddly kind of has always intrigued me.

Q. What artist inspires you the most and why?

A. Ooof…..There are just so many. Some of them probably sound super cliche, but Andy Warhol, Dr. Suess, Norman Rockwell, Robert Maplethorpe – to name a couple icons. Artists that are still doing their thing today, I would say Retna, Timmy Sneaks, Jerkface, Virgil Abloh (RIP). There are some amazing artists that are not as widely known but Tim Marrs is up there for me. Devon Clapp is amazing, hes out of Boston.

We live in a world where we kind of expect everything to be original, like, being inspired means you are just wanting to be who inspires you, but in reality, being inspired is so important to finding and creating a lane of your own. So to answer the “why” is these specific artists to me, each bring a unique perspective to art that I think is important if the culture is going to progress. Kind of answered that weirdly, so hopefully that makes sense.

Q. What was your first published work?

A. I Haven’t had anything published, BUT my career has taken me to some amazing places and have got to meet a lot of amazing people, and through hard work and working my way thru the big mystery of “figuring it all out” I’ve been able to become friends with a lot of people I look up to that I never thought I would be friends with or have access to other than being a fan of what they do.

Q. Which artist would you love to do a collaboration piece with?

A. POST. A company and not an artist…. I would love to have my own Artist Edition Capn Crunch Box one day in stores. That would be a dream come true. I would also love to design a Pizza Box for Pizza Hut for a Special Ocassion – like Valentines Day or Halloween. So random, but I think all that stuff is cool.