Comics and Community at Portland’s Helioscope Studio

 is a long way from Manhattan in the 1960s, but not when it comes to comic books. Back then, Marvel Comics impresario Stan Lee used the term “bullpen” to describe the legendary assemblage of comics talent that supposedly clocked in every morning at the publisher’s office on Madison Avenue: Jack Kirby, Jim Shooter, Steve Ditko, those sorts of guys. Lee spun the idea out for decades in the back pages of Marvel’s Technicolor superhero stories, leading generations of fans to imagine a big office building in Manhattan where all their favorite creators hung out, swapping ideas for the next Silver Surfer story arc over coffee and doughnuts.

A modern-day version can be found right here in the Portland: Helioscope, one of the oldest and likely the largest collective workspace for independent comics creators in the United States, producing some of the most notable and compelling comics work across the industry. And almost no one knows it exists.

The studio currently includes more than two dozen members from all over the comics scene. Their credits range from Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen, which took home a second prestigious Eisner at this year’s San Diego Comic Con to Let’s Talk About It, an illustrated sex-ed guide that’s been among the most banned books in the country. In between, there’s concept art for big-budget movies and video games, zero-budget zines, memoir, fantasy, true crime, surrealist erotica, and a wide assortment of difficult to define genres. Climate change YA? Check. Y2K bildungsroman? Check. Grizzly bear rom-com? Also check.

As with many Pacific Northwest endeavors, it began in a café. “Around 2001 a bunch of local cartoonists were getting together on a regular basis at the Pete’s Coffee on NE Broadway,” recalls Steve Lieber, an Eisner-winning artist and one of Helioscope’s cofounders. Despite the bustling convention scene, making comics is often a fairly solitary work-from-home affair. But, much like Stan Lee’s marvelous Marvel bullpen, there’s something to be said for human company and collaborative influences. “[We’d] show each other what we were working on,” Lieber says, “and remind ourselves what human company looked like.”

Both a coworking space and something of an urban art colony, Helioscope (originally known as Periscope Studio) has grown organically over two decades to facilitate the odd hours and unique demands of a professional comics career in the twenty-first century: Wacom-style tablets for digital work and commercial scanners for analog. Bookshelves overflowing with art guides, enormous library editions from legendary creators, and an assortment of unnameably obscure ephemera. A small arsenal of prop weaponry for reference photos, and usually a colleague or two willing to strike a dramatic pose with them.

There’s a station with a webcam and a boom mic for streaming art demos, an increasing necessity in the social media era. Batman 66 writer and improvisational handyman Jeff Parker built the current canteen out of reclaimed wood and Craigslist-udio’s long-running mentorship program

The mentees, typically two or three visual artists at the early stages of their career, function more like working apprentices than general interns. They pursue their own projects with full access to the studio brain trust and receive a small stipend to offset Portland’s increasingly unmanageable housing market.

For Lieber and the other studio elders, mentorship offers a way to pass on the often arcane institutional knowledge of comic book production to the next generation of young artists. The program is designed to bypass some of the “dreadful mistakes” that Lieber says most professional cartoonists experience in the early days of their freelance careers, from underestimating postage to “mission creep” on ostensibly easy gigs.

 the studio was formally founded in 2002, renting office space downtown for around a dozen comics pros, most of whom were doing traditional superhero stories for one or both of the “Big Two” publishers, Marvel and DC. The first location was a spot above a record store, “but then the furnace exploded,” Lieber remembers. Next were fifth-floor offices in a more professional office building downtown, but there were issues there, too. After hearing gunshots one day, Lieber remembers going down to the lobby to discover “a guy in the vestibule with, uh, his pants down, checking to see where [the] bullet went in,” he recalls. “Our building manager is showing around a prospective tenant [and says], ‘Look how fast the police got here!’”

Lieber credits Portland’s cheaper rental market back then for both the studio’s success and the wider influx of comics talent into the city. For any creative scene to thrive, he says, a city needs three things: a community of like-minded creators, a few supportive institutions, and the ability for emerging artists to get by during the lean early years. “[What] we had for a long time, and don’t have anymore, was affordable rent,” Lieber explains. He estimates monthly expenses in Helioscope’s early days were “well under $2,000” a month. Split 12 ways, that made for a comparatively easy leap to a physical studio space.

During that time, studio membership expanded from its original lineup of mainstream illustrators to more than 20 multidisciplinary creators from every corner of the industry. Lieber points to the arrival of Eisner-nominated graphic novelist Dylan Meconis in 2008 as the beginning of a shift towards more diverse creators and less traditional subject matter. “I came in right at the start of a huge tilt towards women and queer-identified people really playing a huge role in comics,” Meconis recalls. For many of those creators, independent or self-publishing offered more freedom than early-aughts superhero stories allowed for.

“Folks always had one toe dipped in alt comics,” Lieber recalls, “but we started getting a lot of people who not only didn’t work for Marvel or DC, they had no interest or aspiration to do so.”

One such creator was Erika Moen, coauthor of Let’s Talk About It along with her partner Matthew Nolan. “I was invited in as a onetime guest in the mid-2000s,” Moen recalls, and after that she began coming into the studio for lunch on a more regular basis. “And then I got laid off [from my day job] and someone said, ‘If you want to work on your [comics] projects, you can come in here and do that.’”

Moen has since spun her eclectic autobiographical webcomic into ohjoysextoy.com, a platform for nonfiction sex-ed comics and adult-oriented comics creators. Sex-positive work like Moen’s has been a lightning rod for conservative identity politics in recent years, so much so that Let’s Talk About It was featured on a Last Week Tonightepisode on the subject in 2024 in which host John Oliver described it as possibly “the most honest discussion teens get” on subjects like pornography and sexting. It’s also an example of the kinds of nontraditional comics storytelling that’s flourished in the Helioscope ecosystem.

Across from Moen’s desk, illustrator Ron Chan is sketching out an internal comic for a major video game developer that might never see a wider audience. Behind a stack of vintage Mad magazines, Parker is working on the next installment of a Lilo and Stitch middle reader’s adventure. In between, visiting creators and the studio’s mentees work industriously at a long workstation that runs down the middle of the room or, somewhat less industriously, discuss at the cluttered lunch table whether a caveman could beat an astronaut in hand-to-hand combat. Behind them looms a whiteboard on which someone has (jokingly) scrawled “[0] DAYS SINCE THE LAST NDA VIOLATION.”

It’s a suitably iconoclastic take on the comics bullpen filtered through Portland’s Y2K-era creative exuberance. And it’s all the more remarkable because the Marvel version never really existed in the way many fans imagined. Creative teams were known to work out of central offices during comics’ Golden Age in the 1930s, but by the 1960s the practice was dying out. “These days, most comics artists and writers prefer to work in their own studios,” Marvel’s then editor-in-chief Jim Shooter reported in 1982, and that’s only gotten more true in the internet age.

“It’s [usually] just everybody in their own little rabbit holes,” Meconis says. “But the  folks who started at the studio were like, ‘What if we made it? What if we did all hang out?” Two decades, dozens of creators, and hundreds of comics later, they know the answer—though the caveman vs. astronaut question remains unresolved.