Stephen R. Bissette really didn’t want to be Vermont’s cartoonist laureate. It wasn’t that he didn’t feel worthy. In a career spanning more than half a century, the award-winning Windsor resident has become one of the most respected and influential comic book artists in the field. His résumé reads like a greatest hits of the new comics movement of the late 20th century: cocreator of Saga of the Swamp Thing, editor of Taboo, and contributor to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Heavy Metal and too many others to count. After he soured on working for comics giants DC and Marvel, he started his own publishing company, Spiderbaby Grafix, and has steadily self-published work for decades.
Still, Bissette had a surprising response when the cofounder of the Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction called earlier this year with the supposedly good news that he was to be named the state’s next cartoonist laureate.
“I told James Sturm no,” Bissette recalled, chuckling.
Bissette had valid reasons to decline. He and his wife are in their seventies, he explained, and he’s somewhat less game to take on new projects and responsibilities than he might have been two decades ago, when he was a founding faculty member at the cartoon school. Six years into retirement from teaching, Bissette said, he wanted to use his remaining time to focus on his own projects.
But the couple had also recently experienced a series of profound personal losses. In the span of a couple years, several relatives had died — “most of our family,” Bissette said. Tragically, that included their son, Michael, who died of brain cancer in 2024 at the age of 45.
“We retreated from the world,” Bissette said. “We were just cocooning.”
Bissette was named Vermont’s sixth cartoonist laureate in March, succeeding Tillie Walden (see page 40). So, what prompted him to emerge from the chrysalis as a butterfly? (Or, given his predilection for monsters, an acid-spitting winged mutant with talons, teeth and death-ray eyes?)
The very night he turned Sturm down, Bissette received a Facebook message from a former student thanking him for his guidance at cartoon school. The next morning, a package arrived from another student who had just published their first graphic novel.
“I realized I still have a job to do,” Bissette said. “I’m not done.”
So Bissette called Sturm to accept — on one condition: that the school find grants to fund other artists and writers on one of Bissette’s dream projects, a history of cartooning in Vermont. Sturm agreed.
That book will be Bissette’s focus during his three-year laureate tenure. But he’s got plenty of other projects in the works as well, including at least two new editions in his Cryptids Cinema series about movie monsters. Last year, he published In the Mood for Monsters, the third release in his Monster Sketchbook series, which includes an illuminating personal essay on why Bissette draws monsters. That essay should be required reading for fans before the upcoming reissue of another passion project, Tyrant.
Originally published under Bissette’s Spiderbaby Grafix imprint in the mid-1990s, the four-issue comic is a gritty, hyperrealistic survival story told from the perspective of a Tyrannosaurus rex. While it wasn’t a commercial success, Tyrant is now regarded as one of the best dinosaur comics ever made, as much for its stunning artwork and detail as its unconventional storytelling. Two deluxe editions of the complete series are due out this summer from Lighthouse Press, including an oversize version featuring scans of Bissette’s original hand-drawn art.
Bissette recently spoke with Seven Days by phone about that project, his formative years as a comics fan in Vermont and why the state is such a cartooning hotbed.
Growing up in Vermont, how did you first get into comics?
When I was a kid, comics were everywhere. In Essex Junction we could walk to Towns Market, which at that time was down by the railroad tracks, and they sold comic books. Colette’s [Newsstand] on Church Street in Burlington was like heaven, you know: comic books and monster magazines. That was my target as I got spending money.
Drawing comics, though, was because of my next-door neighbor, Mitch Casey. He’s the first guy I saw put pen to paper or pencil to paper and draw a comic. He stapled together a couple sheets of paper and drew this comic book from a monster movie we’d seen on TV that week, and I couldn’t believe it. And from that minute — I would have been 5 or 6 years old — that’s what I wanted to be doing.
When did you realize drawing comics was something you could do?
I went through the same kind of cycles most people do. I grew out of mainstream comics and, luckily, discovered underground comics, thanks to my high school art teacher, Bill Cathey. He gave me my first underground comic. He said, “You can’t tell anybody; I will lose my job.” And it was amazing.
That’s when I got serious. That’s when I realized that anything I imagined, I could put it down on paper. I could tell any story.
I thought comic books were four-color comics. And black-and-white horror magazines like Eerie and Creepy were favorites of mine, but it still didn’t feel like anything I could make, you know, that I could get out there. Discovering underground comics is when I realized, Oh, I could do this.
What was it about comics that attracted you?
Dinosaurs.
I had a feeling.
[Laughing.] It was all about dinosaurs. And there were a lot of great dino comics when I was growing up. DC had The War That Time Forgot and Star Spangled War Stories; Gold Key and Dell had Turok, Son of Stone. When they parted ways and formed their own companies, Dell had Kona, Monarch of Monster Isle; that was my all-time favorite comic.
Then I got into weird shit. Any comic that featured monsters or was weird, I was totally into.
Did those lead you to underground comics, since they were edgier and more lurid?
It wasn’t that. I mean, the first one I read was Meatball! by Robert Crumb, which is about normal people walking around and a meatball falls out of the sky and hits [them] on the head, and they have instant enlightenment.
I quickly gravitated to the more extreme stuff, closer to the genre I loved, like Skull and Slow Death. Slow Death was dystopian science fiction, ecological, you know, catastrophic science fiction. And Skull was one of the premier underground horror comics, but that’s not what pulled me into underground comics. It was reading Robert Crumb and realizing his work looked so accessible.
Tyrant is nothing like those dino comics you read as a kid. Where did the inspiration to do something more realistic come from?
I lived in southern Vermont when I started working on Tyrant. My first marriage had come apart. I’m still good friends with my ex-wife, Marlene O’Connor, but our marriage was over. We both knew it, and I kind of retreated into a dream project, which was to write and draw my own dinosaur comic.
I didn’t want to do a science-fiction comic. I didn’t want to have people in it, you know. It wasn’t about a lost island or a time machine or any of that crap. It was: What was the life of a dinosaur like?
Living in Vermont at that time, we didn’t have ticks. So I would walk in the woods before putting in a day at the drawing board. So the woods of southern Vermont very much inform the ambience and the environments that I was extrapolating from the fossil record as to what the forests were like in Upper Cretaceous North America over 70 million years ago.
The reissues will have lots of cool extra stuff.
We’re doing two volumes of Tyrant. One of them is an original art edition, which is as close to having the original art by the artists in your hands. The books are the size of the original art.
The second volume is called S.R. Bissette’s Tyrant: The Complete Edition, in which we have compiled almost every dinosaur anything I had a hand in as a cartoonist and graphic novelist. So it has everything that’s in the original art edition, but it also has hundreds of pages of the other stuff that I did, including a lot of the process that went into making Tyrant. And there are related projects.
Peter Laird, the cocreator of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, wanted me to work on a project he had called Commandosaurs, which were these futuristic high-tech dinosaurs with weapons. Peter gave us permission to include some of the work he and I had done. There’s stuff I did for Scholastic Publishing, stories I did for fanzines featuring dinosaurs. So that’s going to be a massive book. I think it’s well over 300 pages.
The focus of your laureate term will be producing a history of cartooning in Vermont. Some people might not know how far back the form goes here, but there really is a rich history and a vibrant community now. Why is the state such a haven for cartoonists?
Vermont has a great tradition of local artisans, writers, musicians — you name the field of endeavor, there’s people in Vermont that have been doing it a long time. But I think winter has a lot to do with it.
Plenty of people love winter because they can snowshoe and ski, but there’s also a lot of us who just want to stay in where it’s warm and do something. James Sturm calls winter “cartooning season,” and we really felt it when I was teaching at the school, because as the weather got harsher, students would really just hunker down and focus on their pet projects or the assignments at hand.
There’s a lot of aspects of New England — you know, old sayings like “Good fences make good neighbors.” And part of that is that people aren’t judgmental of somebody who just hunkers down and does what they’re into. So I think Vermont just nurtures that. There are a lot of eccentrics in our home state. ➆
The original print version of this article was headlined “Let’s Get Weird | “
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This article appears in The Cartoon Issue • 2026.
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