Linework Exhibition Revisits Chicago’s Alternative Comics Community

A new exhibition at the Cleve Carney Museum of Art returns to Linework, the Columbia College Chicago comics anthology that brought students, alumni and established cartoonists into the same orbit — and became part of a wider alternative comics community in Chicago.

Chicago · Comics · Exhibition

The community around Linework

Opening September 24 in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, Linework: Chicago Comics and Community looks beyond a single artist or publication to the network of cartoonists that developed around the anthology.

Chicago’s place in American comics has been built through artists, publishers, classrooms and small publications as much as through major institutions. One of those publications was Linework, a comics and graphics anthology associated with Columbia College Chicago.

Now the Cleve Carney Museum of Art is returning to that history with Linework: Chicago Comics and Community, an exhibition opening September 24 and continuing through November 21, 2026.

Rather than presenting Linework simply as a publication from the past, the exhibition looks at the artistic community that formed around it and the different paths its contributors have taken since.

A publication, but also a meeting point

Linework developed within the Columbia College Chicago comics community under the guidance of cartoonist, designer and educator Ivan Brunetti.

The anthology brought together emerging and established artists and became a gathering point within Chicago’s contemporary comics scene. Its significance was not simply in the individual pages it published, but in the exchange that developed around them.

Some contributors were still developing the work for which they would later become known. Nick Drnaso is a particularly striking example. Years after his association with Linework, his graphic novel Sabrina became the first graphic novel to be longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2018.

Brunetti and a generation of Chicago cartoonists

Brunetti is an important presence in this story, but the exhibition deliberately widens the frame around him. Known for Schizo, his books on cartooning and his work for publications including The New Yorker, Brunetti has also spent years teaching illustration, cartooning and visual narrative.

In the context of Linework, that role matters. The publication created a point of contact between artists at different stages of their careers without turning itself into a showcase built around a single name.

Different paths from the same community

The artists gathered for the exhibition make the idea of a comics community more tangible. Their work does not belong to a single visual style, nor did their careers develop in the same direction.

What connects them here is a publication and a particular period in Chicago in which making comics, teaching them and putting them into print overlapped.

After six years, Linework returned

There is another reason the exhibition does not function simply as an exercise in nostalgia. Linework itself has already had a second life.

After a six-year hiatus, the anthology returned in 2024 with Issue Zero. The 148-page edition brought together work by students, alumni and members of the wider Chicago community who had not previously appeared in Linework. Its cover was drawn by Chloe Blair, with Brunetti serving as faculty advisor.

The return changes the meaning of looking back at the anthology. Instead of presenting a publication with a fixed beginning and end, the exhibition can place different generations of contributors within the same story.

Chicago comics as a community

Chicago has a long and varied comics history, but the Linework story operates on a smaller scale. That is part of what makes it worth revisiting.

A small anthology can be a first publication, an extension of a classroom, an informal archive and a point of contact between cartoonists. Years later, it can also show artists before later books, awards and careers changed the way their work was read.

Linework: Chicago Comics and Community returns to that moment: not simply to display finished pages, but to look at the circumstances in which a group of cartoonists found one another and began putting their work into print.