Conor Stechschulte’s Talk Button

“People tend to focus on the new things a technology will make possible, but it’s what the technology can’t do that usually opens up creative horizons for artists,” says the Chicago-based cartoonist Conor Stechschulte. In 2022, Magnolia Pictures released a feature film based on Stechschulte’s screen adaptation of his graphic novel, Ultrasound. In this month’s installment of Drawn to MoMA, he created a science fiction story inspired in part by an enigmatic appliance in MoMA’s collection created by the artists Revital Cohen and Tuur van Balen. Stechschulte believes that comics are the perfect medium for the world-building work of science fiction: “Comics are great at being highly descriptive and visual about some element of a world while allowing others to be elided or simplified. This gives a cartoonist a lot of leeway to explore.”

Conor Stechschulte is the author of the graphic novel Ultrasound along with dozens of self-published comics. He adapted Ultrasound into the screenplay for a feature film directed by Rob Schroeder and released by Magnolia Films in 2022. He has exhibited his work internationally and teaches classes in comics, printmaking and self-publishing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.