Patrick Holt is a lifelong lover of comics. In 2011, Holt started a job as a library assistant at the Durham County Library, where he reconnected with his passion for the medium through a colleague, Amy Godfrey. Together, the pair established the Durham Comics Fest, an annual celebration of comics, graphic novels, and the community of comics readers and creators behind them.
After 11 years at the library, Holt now works as a freelance illustrator and graphic designer. He created Triangular Comics & Zines, an online comics store, earlier this year to continue collaborating with and curating the talented writers, illustrators, and craftspeople involved in the local comics community. The INDY spoke with Holt about his passion for comics and what’s unique about local comics and the creators who publish them.
INDY: How did you first get into comics?
HOLT: I have appreciated comics since I was a kid. The one serial work I have returned to most is Hellboy, which I started reading when it was brand new in the mid-’90s and I was in middle school. I have drifted away from it but still have a deep fondness for it.
I have an older brother and a family who was always into different ways of doing the arts. I have vivid memories of going to a Robert Crumb exhibit at Duke, and we went to a talk in Hillsborough given by Mort Drucker, one of the main satirical illustrators of Mad magazine. Between all of that and having an older brother who, in typical little brother fashion, I wanted to emulate constantly …. He had a broad interest in comics. The library, somehow even in the early ’90s, they were also collecting comics.
Where did the idea for Triangular Comics & Zines come from?
I had started at the Durham County Library in 2011, and Amy Godfrey, who was manager of the children’s unit at the Southwest Regional Library, started the Durham Comics Fest. She was the brains, and I was assisting with graphic design. The medium was what was important. NC Comicon and other local events support the fandom aspect thoroughly, so we focused on reading and creating as our angle.
Through the years, we emphasized the idea of supporting local comics creators, of which there were and are many, but it feels like comics making can be a solitary undertaking. There were a lot of cartoonists in the area who did not know that there were a lot of cartoonists in the area. That was a big part of what we were hoping to make clear, that you cartoonists are not alone.
Amy organized the Durham Comics Project in 2014, which was lots of people contributing to an anthology made by local folks. A few years later, I organized the Triangle Comics Creator Network anthology in 2019. As a result of meeting all these people and seeing the energy and still wanting to be involved in that community, I launched Triangular Comics & Zines. It’s another way to keep interacting with that community and supporting and hoping that I can, through the shop, provide an additional way for creators to have their work get in front of more eyes.
The layperson, when they hear “comics,” thinks of Batman or Captain America, or your Sunday comics like Peanuts, The Boondocks, or Dilbert. What do you think distinguishes local comics creators from the mainstream? What’s the sales pitch for what’s being made here locally?
The localness is what’s important to me. I have a wide range of materials that go from super personal memoir comics to supernatural horror and science fiction. The whole range of genres are present just like at a comic shop that you’d visit in person. To me, the difference is knowing these creators are so interested in and devoted to creating in a lot of different ways; some are actively pursuing this as their profession and some are passionate hobbyists or it’s a serious side business.
And some are just like, “This is what I do to express myself and it turns out there’s an audience for it.” So there’s a big range of the specifics, the motivation, but it’s all an earnest pursuit. Marvel and DC and similar publishers, as engaging as their works can be and as much craft and artistry is involved in making them, I find them off-putting for what they represent in terms of a commercial operation and what they demand of their users in terms of the sort of quasi-addictive nature of their storytelling.
What can people expect to find on your comics online shop?
Lots of comics and artist books made by people who are making their own paper or hand-binding the signatures of the book or using letterpress to arrange all of the type—any number of other super intricate and arguably old-fashioned craft and art techniques to make a work that is expressive and beautiful. That’s another smaller angle that I’m trying to include in my shop. Zine Machine calls itself a printed matter festival. Printed matter is a pretty good description of what I’m after as well.
Some of them are just books, so I don’t have to qualify that. Sometimes they’re on a spectrum of kinds of creative, but sometimes they are all in exactly the same Venn diagram overlap. They’re always really cool. Ultimately, that might be the biggest motivation, that they’re really cool.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Follow Reporter Justin Laidlaw on X or send an email to [email protected]. Comment on this story at [email protected].