SOMERVILLE NEWS
August 05, 2007

Somerville Cartoonist Raul Gonzalez & the Miracle Five

By Pam Rosenblatt
Somerville cartoonist Raul Gonzalez, at the request of the Somerville Arts Council, designed the posters, banners and T-shirts for ArtBeat 2007. The annual event took place last weekend, July 20 to 21, in Davis Square.
Elaine Bay chose the color schemes of the designs made for the ArtBeat 2007 theme, "ArtBeast," said Gonzalez.
Gonzalez has worked a lot for the Somerville Arts Council. He and Bay designed the set for UnionTube - a new Somerville Arts Council television production, promoting Union Square events and businesses. The grant-funded program will air on SCAT, Channel 3, over six months, said Wendy Blom, SCAT's executive director.
Gonzalez painted a billboard on Highland Avenue and a mural with Cerebot - his autobiographical cartoon robot character - in Union Square. He said he will paint three more billboards during the summer.

With all these projects created with his pen and ink, watercolors and acrylics, Gonzalez seems to be the superhero of cartooning in the Somerville area. And maybe he is. Not only does he create such superhero characters as Cerebot and Attorneyman - a character he created with Karen Katz, a consultant and former lawyer, for a three month greeting card project last year, but Gonzalez is also illustrating "Philosophical Tales" by Martin Cohen, to be published by Blackwell Publishing in February 2008.
Adding to his repertoire, he also is in charge of poster design for the rock bands Heloise and the Savoir Faire for Simian Records (owned by Elijah Wood) and Shepardess, a local band lead by Hilken Mancini and Emily Arkin, for Kimchee Records, he said.
Gonzalez main focus seems to center around his affiliation with the Miracle Five. Miracle Five is a group of five artists that stays in constant touch, developing ideas for individual art pieces and collaborating together to make exhibitions for galleries. In the past two years, the Miracle Five has had eight exhibitions. The group is currently planning its second exhibition for the RHYS Gallery in the South End.
"The idea for the Miracle Five came about when we were all invited to display artwork by Joe Shepard at ZUZUs in Central Square," said Gonzalez. "Since there were five of us, Elaine (Bay) came up with the name Miracle Five to describe our miraculous grouping. For our second exhibition at the Someday Café, I decided to create a poster envisioning all of us as superheroes and, in doing so, I created designs based on my fellow member either pre-existing designs or personalities. It wasn't until our third show at the Diesel café that we really began to utilize the characters as a prominent part of our artwork."
Besides Raul Gonzalez, the Miracle Five members include Bay, Ken Boutet, David Ortega and Rhonda Ratray.
Gonzalez also began creating large, detailed acrylic mock currency bills for gallery exhibitions. He selects one of the Miracle Five's persona characters' faces and draws it in the center of the oversized paper bill.
Born in El Paso, Tex., Gonzalez is the only Miracle Five member who is a self-taught artist and cartoonist. He spent much time in Juarez, Mexico, a city bordering El Paso.
He began drawing at the age of 9. He didn't pursue cartooning seriously until he was in high school, at which time he started to attend cartooning conferences.

Over the years, many cartoonists influenced Gonzalez's work, especially the standard comic book artists and some underground artists.
"When I first started reading comic books, the only things that I was introduced to, and primarily it was because of a news rack, were superhero stories," said Gonzalez. "But when I found a Chester Brown story in a comic book store, his stories were much more personal than that. They were autobiographical. They tended to be rather embarrassing in terms of the situation. They were coming of age stories. Some of those things that we go through during our adolescence can be quite embarrassing."
Currently, Gonzalez teaches freehand drawing at Boston Architectural College. He teaches basic drawing and comic book classes at the Museum School and comic book classes at the Brookline Art Center. In Spring 2008, he will teach an in-depth comic book class at Emerson College.
"I really feel that it is one of my responsibilities as an artist to help people understand the ideas that they have and also help them understand how to execute their ideas," he said.

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