THE SUPERHERO WE NEED: BRANDON CABLE’S RAT KNIGHT COMIC ART IN ROCHESTER

Well, this is a twist! How many comic book artists have you encountered in your life? When I heard of this exhibition, I thought it’d be fascinating to explore — because it’s so different from what we usually cover. Brandon Cable is a New Englander who hails from Connecticut and has drawn and executed art all his life. Even when he was quite small, the standard gift he received was paper, markers and lots of encouragement. He eventually found his way north to Manchester, New Hampshire, where he earned his BFA from the Institute of Art and Design at New England

College — in yes, Comic Arts! Who knew? Professionally, he is employed as a graphic artist. When he was in school, his college’s art collective, the Society of the Unified Artists, or SOUA for short, came up with an idea for creating rat superheroes as their mascot. “SOUA” sounds like sewer with a Boston accent, and Cable ran with the idea. He drew and digitally inked all the scenes and created a 44-page comic book. He published it in four parts on WEBTOON CANVAS, a website for creator-owned content.

For his senior exhibition, “Rat Knight” made its debut, where it was noticed by a representative from the Rochester Museum of Fine Arts, Matt Wyatt, who said it was the best art he’d seen in the show, and from that, it led to the solo exhibition, “Rat Knight in Rochester.”

I’m married to a writer. He writes fiction, so we live in vastly different genres. But James, who grew up in Nova Scotia in a small town on the Atlantic Ocean, was a huge comic fan as a young person. He’d save his meager allowance and money earned from weeding neighbors’ gardens, etc., and make his way down to the Rexall Drug Store in the mid-1960s as an eight- or nine-year-old and plunk down his coins for copies of now-classic comic books.

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