On Broadway

If not for the furious drawing, agitated erasing and hard-core creating going on here, Parrish Baker and his assemblage of comic artists at the Broadway Café might resemble (as one coffeehouse patron observes aloud) a support group. After all, the members of the collective are more concerned with encouraging one another’s endeavors in their often thankless work than in offering any serious critiques.

Pencils and sketchbooks litter the tables, where the artists are crammed elbow-to-elbow, bent over their work in concentration but still speaking. The Broadway Group, as they are known, meets every Tuesday evening. All of the group’s members are illustrators and graphic artists who previously sat in isolation, quietly drafting stories onto pages. They started meeting regularly about two years ago.

“We just started running into one another over time,” says Steve Bushman, a fellow illustrator who has exhibited work at the Telephone Booth, the Old Post Office and other area galleries.

It’s Baker who appears to have spearheaded the group’s formation, and his story is the most inspired. The self-taught artist has slaved away at a copy services company that shall remain nameless for longer than he cares to mention. He produced his first comic nearly a decade ago. (Baker made it available for free at the Broadway Café counter but suggested that $2.50 per issue go into the baristas’ tip jar.) Since then, he’s put out Sparrows Fall — a series centered on the life of Christopher Sparrow and his relationship with a crass opossum named “Nips” — on a monthly basis. That work is available (and free) at the group’s home base as well as at Muddy’s Coffeehouse.

Baker acknowledges that his work has improved over time. But it retains a homegrown feel in both style and setting; Kansas City figures prominently in the Sparrow stories. And he’s garnered attention from local publications — his work has appeared in The Kansas City Star and Review, and he’s featured in Back Pages and Fire and Knives. He chose to draw at the Broadway Café, he says, because the place is “just special in some way.”

Also special: Bonnie Leigh, a recent graduate of the Kansas City Art Institute — and Baker’s wife. (He calls her the best artist in the collective.) One of Leigh’s strips involves an uncomfortable episode from her adolescence. It shows a character in gym class who has been asked to disrobe, a request that unfortunately reveals a certain lack of development in her female anatomy. The story is painful, amusing and honest.

Daniel Spottswood, whose background is in graphic design, had been drawing at the Café for eight years before he ran into Baker. (His Disquietville is published weekly in the Preview section of the Star.) He agrees that the gathering is more about commiseration and company than constructive criticism but allows that there’s the occasional ribbing. “We give each other a lot of crap for lack of productivity,” he says.

But, Baker adds, “All in all, it’s positive. We get to touch base with other people, have fun and feel that we aren’t alone. More often than not, it brings me a feeling of hope.”

Because there’s nothing more disquieting than the idea of a hopeless comic-book illustrator.