Town & County: Process & Publication

Hardscrabble Cafe presents TOWN & COUNTY: Process & Publication, a retrospective of artwork created for comic series “Town & County” written and drawn by Alex Nall.

Swing by on Saturday, March 1 to toast the release of the latest volume, ”‘Town & County No. 5,” alongside the opening night of the exhibition, at Inside Town Art Collective (1954 S. Troy St. Chicago IL 60623) from 6pm to 10pm.

Sketches, notes and doodles will accompany original art on display from all five issues of “Town & County,” cataloging the methodical and diversified techniques typical of Nall’s introspective writing style and intensive illustration process.

Amongst the self-referential ephemera and veritable records of the fictional, small town world Nall has envisioned, opening night at the gallery will also feature Bugs’ Tavern, a local watering hole in the “Town & County” universe and a mini-market of Hardscrabble Cafe’s publications.

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“Town & County” is a self-published comic book series that follows the fictional lives of two-hundred residents living in rural Township 828, located in Victoria County, Il. Their stories intertwine between each issue (as well as in other comic anthologies) and are told in a variety of drawing styles and literary motifs. At times an homage to the vacant Midwestern landscape of the cartoonist’s youth, as well as a broad character study featuring a cast that includes doting grandmothers, a widowed football coach, a nameless drug pusher, abandoned children, beloved animals, and even ghosts, Nall’s work examines American culture between the 1980s and the mid-2000s, mixing neighborly affection and human cruelty in-between issues. Town & County has been profiled by the Chicago Reader, The Comics Journal,  Living the Line, Gutter Boys, and Four Color Apocalypse.

Nall has been self-publishing for over ten years and with his wife, hannah larson, runs Hardscrabble Cafe, a hobby risograph practice out of Inside Town. He is a longtime organizer for Chicago Zine Fest, Chicago Alternative Comics Expo, and has run a variety of comics programming throughout the Chicagoland area since 2012. He is an 2022 Ignatz Award nominee and a two-time nominee for Best Cartoonist in the Chicago Reader. He works at a library.