Meet the Artist: Mike Light

When Mike Light noticed there weren't any comics in The West Side’s November edition, he sent out an email to the publication. “I said, ‘hey, wanna see some of my work?’” Light said. “And the editor said, ‘sure, send over what you’ve got.’”

The cold call – or email, rather – worked. His cartoons will now be featured in the paper’s future editions. “I’m excited about it,” he said. 

No stranger to submitting to various publications, his work has been featured in the Clackamas Review, a website called Portland Metro, a couple of Indie magazines, as well as the Oregonian. 

Art is Light’s biggest passion.

He has been drawing since he was a little kid. His inspiration came from combing through comic books. He’d get home from school, turn on the radio and crack one open.  

“I’ve been collecting them since I was seven,” Light said. “And that’s how I trained myself to draw, by looking at my heroes and copying the things they did.”

Swamp Thing was his favorite comic.“That artist in particular was one of my heroes,” Light said. “The guy was just amazingly talented. I was just obsessed with his work. There was something about the imagery that really got me going.”

In school, he’d get in trouble for doodling on the margins of his work assignments, something he laughs about now. “I just never wanted to do what they wanted,” he said. 

Light moved with his wife from Grants Pass to Oregon City in the eighties and got a job in construction. After thirty-seven years in that grueling world, he retired and the family moved onto a property in West Salem. He’s happy to be done, but the job “provided a good way for me to do all the other stuff I wanted to do, whether it be art or my music.”

Music. His other passion. From 1998 to 2009, Light played bass for LogosEye. The band performed all around Portland and the Northwest for eleven years, recording three albums during that time. They even toured around with Floater, who just recently sold out at the Crystal Ballroom on Halloween. “We were a quirky band,” he said. “Our sound was a combination of U2, Pearl Jam, with Black Sabbath at the party. It was really fun to play.”Music was a staple in the Light household. The same bands he listened to then ended up playing a pivotal role for him as we went to write music with the band.  

“I’m a deadhead, so the Grateful Dead had a huge influence on me in terms of making music in the moment,” Light said. “It had to come from the heart and be driven by the heart.” 

He believes music is a universal language. “I can listen to music from Mexico and not know the words and still get into it. It's just one of those things. There’s always music in my house. If my wife wants to know where I'm at on the property, she just has to open the door and listen, because I've always got my boombox going somewhere.” 

During this period in his life, Light stayed busy with his full-time job, his band and raising two kids. Somehow, in the midst of all of that, he managed to keep drawing. He always came back to it. “I would get up at four in the morning, go to work, come home, play rock and roll – the band was in my house for 11 years – my wife put up with it in the basement for all that time,” he added with a chuckle, “and then even after I would be exhausted and the guys would leave, I would stay up until midnight and draw and draw and draw.”

He finds inspiration for his comics from the people he interacts with. And he loves things that are ridiculous, which, he laughs, there is never a shortage of. He enjoys acrylic painting too. Often, he’ll take his easel up into the solarium of his home and paint. Windows look out onto his property and a gas heater is there in case the cozy space gets cold. Even now, “whenever I can, I sit down and draw,” Light says.

An easy person to talk to, Light’s energy for the things he loves is evident in the way he talks about them. He has no shortage of facts about what he’s passionate about, like when he starts talking about MAD Magazine. 

“They started in 1952, I believe, and started out as a comic book,” Light said, “ then morphed into a magazine in 1956. My parents’ generation read it, and then all those hooligans that came up through those years, like Weird Al Yankovich, all these people that were rebellious and anti-authoritarian, they grew up reading MAD because it was always questioning authority. The artwork in it was killer.” Light loves that publication so much he has a tattoo of the magazine’s mascot, Alfred E. Neuman, on his right shoulder. 

Getting published with MAD Magazine was always Light’s goal, “but it just didn’t happen,” he said. “But I never gave up submitting things to other comic book companies and newspapers.”

More important than getting published, though, is what his art can say to people. “If you can create something that moves somebody, that’s what it’s all about,” he said. 

This philosophy comes out of a conversation he had in his twenties with his late uncle, who’d gotten cancer from asbestos poisoning during his time as a construction worker. 

“When he was dying, he was like, Mike, no matter what else, go out and do whatever you love and make the most of it because you never know what’s going to happen.”

Mike added, “His words drove me to go do and see and be as much as I could. That was a major motivating factor for me. Gotta squeeze as much as I can out of things.”