Octavia Art Gallery is pleased to present a solo project by New Orleans based, political cartoonist John Slade. Located in the gallery viewing room, Political Apocalypse No Zombies highlights 25 of the artist’s cartoons from the past year as well as his animated film Afro Brother Spacemen.
Slade has been creating political cartoons since the Ford administration, and while there has always been fun and games within the medium, today Slade feels that the work has taken on the work of journalism to a greater extent. His work has become more urgent than ever before and he now wonders if he is, “drawing the beginning of the apocalypse, without the ever popular zombies.”
Pen and ink have been Slade’s medium of choice since his Kennedy Courier high school newspaper days, and even now he creates all of the pieces by hand prior to digitizing them for publication. In tandem with his skillful ink and marker drawings, Slade’s comics capture the head spinning events of 2020.
With a career spanning over thirty-five years, John Slade has created political cartoons for the old Spectator News Journal, the Louisiana Weekly, the New Orleans Tribune, and has been featured in USA Today. Right now he can be seen on Cox Cable Orleans Wednesdays at 6:30am/pm on Ch76 as the host of Political Cartoons by John Slade. In the past decade Slade has moved into making his own comic book series entitled Afro Brother Spacemen, which has recently been turned into a giant omnibus. The Afro Brother Spacemen characters are currently animated as well. He was also on Showtime In The Afternoon, with his co-host the late Paul Beaulieu on WBOK1230am for over a decade. John Slade’s political cartoons can be found today on the Think504.com website.
To view a video clip of Slade's Afro Brother Spacemen, please click here.