Strange On The Range: Wyoming Comic Artists Create Eclectic Compilation Of Wild & Weird

The debut issue of the underground publication Strange on the Range is dedicated to the work of Wyoming comic illustrators. It’s a celebration of Wyoming-born weirdness and wonder, and it immediately transports readers to “Casper’s Seven Wonders.” 

Comic artist JL Mast, who splits his time between Casper and Saint-Etienne, France, plays comic tour guide.

“When I got to Casper fresh from France, everyone was like, ‘You gotta see the Seven Wonders,’” reads Mast’s comic, as it depicts a loose collection of real-life oddities spread across Casper. These include the “Car In The Box” on North Sun Drive and the “Spiral Staircase to Nowhere.”

Mast’s comic gives directions to a location behind Toy Town, where as Mast illustrates, the staircase “leads straight into a solid brick wall.”

From realistic to absurd, Strange on the Range offers a platform for Wyoming-based comic artists like Mast. 

In  summer 2023, Ella Bishop-Heil daydreamed about creating a forum for visual creatives like herself in Wyoming. 

The title Strange on the Range came to mind.

It was playful and expressed how Bishop-Heil sometimes feels at work as conservation manager for Pathfinder Ranches. She’s comic-minded in a cowboy world, and the thought of replacing the word “home” with “strange” made Bishop-Heil smile. 

Around October 2023, Bishop-Heil started reaching out to other comic artists in Wyoming and gradually, the first submissions arrived at Strange on the Range headquarters in Casper. From home, Bishop-Heil started to curate the zine, all the while dreaming up its first cover. 

The yellow banner at the top of the cover of issue No. 1 looks like the standard front cover of a Broadway Playbill, and the horse imagery Bishop-Heil composed shows off her dynamic style. 

“Like those early Broadway Playbills, I wanted to also like reach for pulp design covers like pieces of paper that you would get look at once and kind of throw away,” said Bishop-Heil.

“It's not quite a comic cover, but it's not quite a fine art illustration. It's like kind of somewhere in the middle,” said Bishop-Heil.

Original Works For Issue No. 1

Mast was one of the first to submit original work to Strange on the Range. It was a perfect fit. 

“He draws comics professionally. He's been published in Marvel,” said Bishop-Heil. “He DM'ed me on Instagram early on and was like, ‘I want to draw a comic for the zine.’ That's not an excerpt from something printed elsewhere. You can only read it in the zine. Just truly special.”

Other original work came from Laramie Artist Sarah Frary, whose illustrations project magical realism upon the Wyoming backcountry. 

Frary recreates the adventure of tracking a mountain lion with hounds. 

“We caught him and, unharmed, we let him go,” writes Frary, as her black and white illustrations fade between waking moments following the scent of a lion and a dream state. 

“That morning we shared a dream,” writes Frary. “It was an intense experience.”

Upcoming Showcase in Cheyenne

“Looking at Wyoming, there's this sort of craving to participate in creative things by artists,” said Bishop-Heil. “Seeing something like the zine pop up, people were instantly intrigued and interested.”

Bishop-Heil said she wanted to craft something low-budget and grassroots. 

“I hope people saw this approachable tool that was specifically designed to support this medium of art that isn't often supported,” said Bishop-Heil. “Comics art as a whole is sort of overlooked.”

This summer, the medium will be spotlighted in Cheyenne by Arts Cheyenne and the Cheyenne Creativity Center. 

“We have a zine gallery show that's upcoming in June,” said Bishop-Heil. “I’ve been working with Desirée Brothe. She's also an artist in the zine. She did the ‘Helen and Kate.’ She's the executive director of Arts Cheyenne.”

“Helen and Kate,” as Brothe illustrates, are on an odyssey through dive bars and bad motels. Brothe reconstructs a world she first encountered in a strange fever dream. 

“These two women traveling and just some of the scenes that you actually see in the story were part of that dream,” Brothe told Cowboy State Daily Friday. “I start taking inspiration from the dream images as well as other resources and put some images together for it.”

Like the plot of a David Lynch film, there’s something dark under the surface of Brothe’s illustrations that goes unexplained. 

“I leave two things open to interpretation: what time period does it actually take place in? And what do they actually do for work? I leave that open to interpretation for the reader,” said Brothe. 

Strange on the Range is available in hard copy at Wind City Books and Art 321 in Casper. On June 6, artists from Issue No. 1 will kick off a month-long exhibit at the Cheyenne Creativity Center during a First Friday reception from 5-8 p.m.

David Madison can be reached at david@cowboystatedaily.com.