How one Fairfax artist preserves her inner child with comic strips and cartoons.
Most cartoonists remember the exact moment they realized they wanted to draw for a living. For Carolyn Belefski, it was during her elementary school years, sometime between watching Bugs Bunny cartoons and watching Fox News graphics fly across her television screen. “I was like, ‘look at these graphics, and the scrolling bar, and the weather bar!’” recalls Belefski fondly.
These days, Belefski doesn’t watch much television, but she still draws. A lot. Belefski, 32, is a graphic designer and the cartoonist behind “Curls,” an online comic strip about a fun-loving gal named Curls whose whimsical dreams become reality.
Belefski has also drawn covers for the Boom! Studios comic book adaptation of “Adventure Time,” illustrated ad campaigns for Clorox and HealthCare.gov and previously served as the editor-in-chief of the D.C.-based comic book newspaper Magic Bullet. First Lady Michelle Obama even tweeted out some of Belefski’s Affordable Care Act illustrations in February.
She started drawing “Curls” for the student newspaper at Virginia Commonwealth University in 2002. “It was a frenzy of craziness,” Belefski says. Though she says looking back on her early work sometimes makes her cringe, she’s glad she did the work. Over time, the comic helped her bolster her drawing, expand her imagination and strengthen her story- and joke-telling abilities.
These days, the comic includes characters like a giant piece of toast, a turtle, a penguin waiter, a boxing fish and a bird with an ice cream cone stuck on its head. “The whole gang is just this assemblage of characters that you’d never envision to hang out together,” she says. “They’re this misfit gang of cool characters looking for adventure.”
Though that may sound silly, “Curls” has garnered attention and praise from the likes of The Washington Post and the Washington City Paper. And in March, Belefski raised more than $5,600 on Kickstarter, enough to compile the comic into a full book anthology.
Despite having a full-time job and a busy freelance schedule, Belefski finds time to post new “Curls” comic strips each Monday. But that’s an easy feat for something you love, explains Belefski. “‘Curls’ is basically my outlet from the day job and everything else,” she says. “I can always have ‘Curls,’ and that’s something that’s always mine. I’ve really grown to treasure that.”
At the end of the day, Belefski says the work she does is all about preserving her inner child. “I’m trying to suppress aging as much as possible,” says Belefski. “I don’t ever want to lose that. I’ve run into adults who have lost their childlike-ness, and it’s actually really sad to see because it’s as if the child inside of them died. They’re missing a big part of the human experience.” –Tim Regan
(June 2015)
