The Hudson Valley has long been celebrated as a cradle of American landscape painting. Thomas Cole sketched the Catskills. Frederic Church built Olana overlooking the river. Generations of artists have come to the region seeking inspiration in its dramatic topography and luminous light. What’s less widely known is that the valley also has a deep and surprising connection to comics.
That hidden cultural lineage is the subject of Moira Fitzgibbons’s new book, Drawn by the River: The Hudson River Valley as a Comics Ecosystem (SUNY Press) and an accompanying exhibition, “Comics and Community in the Hudson River Valley,” opening on March 11 at the Marist University Art Gallery in Poughkeepsie. The exhibition was co-curated by Professors Malgorzata Oakes and Amy Finkel of the Marist University Art Department.
Fitzgibbons traces the Hudson Valley’s surprising legacy as a hub for cartoonists, comic-book printing, and graphic storytelling—from Disney comics rolling off presses in Poughkeepsie to today’s thriving community of regional creators. Taken together, the projects make the case that the Hudson Valley has been a fertile ground for cartoonists, illustrators, and comics publishers for more than a century.
Fitzgibbons, a Marist professor trained as a medievalist, first came to comics through teaching. Medieval manuscripts combine images and text in ways that anticipate the visual storytelling of comics, she says, and she found the medium unusually effective in the classroom. “Comics are designed for people with many different kinds of literacy,” Fitzgibbons says. “Even small children who can’t yet read can still follow the story.”
But the idea for the book began closer to home. While teaching graphic narratives at Marist, Fitzgibbons began inviting cartoonists to speak with her students. The appearances, along with a local exhibition of cartoonists at the Poughkeepsie Public Library District, revealed something she hadn’t fully recognized before: the Hudson Valley had an unusually rich concentration of comics creators.
“And then I remembered the Western Printing plant right across from Marist,” she says. For much of the mid-20th century, that massive industrial complex in Poughkeepsie was one of the most important comic-book production facilities in the world.
Originally built as a Fiat automobile factory, the site was taken over in 1934 by Western Printing, a Wisconsin-based publishing company seeking an East Coast manufacturing hub. Over the following decades, the plant grew into a sprawling 600,000-square-foot operation employing as many as 1,800 workers.
At its peak, the facility printed enormous quantities of comics, including Disney titles distributed worldwide. “They actually got a contract with Disney,” Fitzgibbons explains. “At one point they were printing 30 million copies a month of Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories.”
The plant wasn’t just a printing operation; it was a community anchor. Workers included editors, artists, press operators, and truck drivers, and the company cultivated a strong civic presence in the region. Western Printing sponsored sports leagues, hosted exhibits at the Dutchess County Fair, and published its own internal magazine, The Westerner, which chronicled life at the plant. “It was very Poughkeepsie-centric,” Fitzgibbons says. “They even had a feature called ‘Pics from Pokip.’”
The plant also became a meeting point for artists and editors traveling between New York City and the Midwest. Visitors included children’s author and illustrator Richard Scarry, who gave talks there during the 1950s amid national anxieties about whether comic books were corrupting young readers.
Those anxieties, which culminated in congressional hearings and the creation of the Comics Code Authority, eventually reshaped the industry. By the late 1960s Western Printing began shifting away from comics toward educational materials and other publishing ventures.
Yet the region’s comics connections continued to grow in other ways.
Fitzgibbons points to a thriving creative community that includes artists such as Wendy and Richard Pini, creators of the influential fantasy series ElfQuest. The Pinis moved to the Hudson Valley, and Wendy Pini’s art, Fitzgibbons notes, was deeply influenced by the landscape. “The colors are amazing,” she says. “And she’s talked about how the topography of the Hudson Valley really shaped the way she drew those worlds.”
In fact, Fitzgibbons argues that comics and the Hudson River School share more than a passing resemblance. Both traditions rely on powerful landscape imagery, and some 19th-century artists experimented with visual storytelling techniques that look strikingly comic-like today.
One example is the Hudson River School painter John Frederick Kensett, who produced humorous engraved illustrations for books that playfully manipulate page margins and sequential imagery. “They’re very playful,” Fitzgibbons says. “They’re funny. They’re playing around with the page in ways that really anticipate comics.”
The Marist exhibition brings these connections into focus, pairing historical material with contemporary work by regional cartoonists and student artists. While Fitzgibbons’s book contains about 100 images, she says seeing the artwork displayed on gallery walls creates a different experience. “It allows the artwork to breathe,” she says. “You can put different cartoonists’ ideas in dialogue with each other.”
The exhibition also highlights the social networks that continue to sustain comics in the region today, from small conventions to independent publishing.
Events like the Kingston Independent Comic Expo (upcoming on April 18) and smaller gatherings across the valley point to a new generation of creators building their own creative infrastructure. Fitzgibbons sees this activity as part of a broader ecosystem shaped by geography as much as by culture.
“There’s the landscape itself, the river and the natural beauty,” she says. “There’s the tradition of Hudson River School art. And then there’s the proximity to New York City. A lot of cartoonists told me they love being able to go into the city when they need to, but not having to live there.”
The book’s title invokes another way of thinking about the valley’s creative life: not as a static place but as a living system. One of Fitzgibbons’s students, reflecting on the river during a class exercise, described the landscape as something active rather than fixed. “We’re all just kind of rivering near the river,” the student said.
For Fitzgibbons, that idea captures the essence of the Hudson Valley’s artistic culture. “Once you scratch the surface, you see that there are comic artists out there doing all their stuff,” Fitzgibbons says. “There hasn’t necessarily been a connecting of the dots—and that’s what I was trying to do in the book.”
“Comics and Community in the Hudson River Valley,” will be exhibited March 11-13 and March 23-28 at Marist University Art Gallery, 3399 North Road in Poughkeepsie. An opening reception will be held on March 11 from 5-7pm.
