With a breadth of experiences, artist and activist Duke Russell carves out a series of autobiographical comics

When you talk with Duke Russell about his life and art, he quickly changes the subject to his work on behalf of Anchorage’s staggeringly high population of unhoused residents.

“I was really driven to correct the situation as best I could and went in whole hog,” Russell said about his decision in 2022 to devote his time to serving people he saw as desperately needing help that they weren’t receiving. “I was at the Sullivan Arena when they were there. We were feeding two, three hundred people. I had a crew of six or eight volunteers. I had folks donating money and food. So it’s evolved into this amazing people’s army.”

For Russell, this latest episode in a long life of twists and turns is hardly surprising. As he has been documenting in a series of comic book autobiographies, two of which have thus far been published, he was mostly left to meet his own needs as a child with an alcoholic father forever on the move and a frequently absentee mother.

“My dad was a maintenance guy but also a pretty heavy drinker. I was just kind raising him in a way I guess,” Russell said of growing up in his father’s care. “Everything was kind of normal to me. Then once I of got out of my element I realized a bunch of stuff.”

Telling the story about getting out of that element and becoming a professional artist, a community activist, and now a producer of comic books, is the objective of his latest venture, he added.

Russell published his first comic, “My Paper Route,” in 2019. The story follows him through one childhood summer in Alabama in 1970, delivering newspapers with hopes of earning more money than he’d ever seen. Then he discovered that in order to get paid, he had to collect from customers along his route. If they didn’t give him the money they owed, which they often didn’t, he received nothing. During the story he encounters Girl Scouts, band camp students, high school football players, and others, all engaged in fundraising activities from which their organizations only received a small percentage of sales, while the companies providing the products they sold reaped large profits.

“Why do kids have to sell stuff for the big companies,” he asked, explaining how his job profited the paper he worked for, sometimes at his expense.

“Forever on the Run with Dad” is a more ambitious effort. While the previous book is a summer vignette, its follow-up tells the story of constant movement around Texas as his father sought opportunities that never turned into successes. One scene shows a late night chase after a stray calf with his drunken uncle sitting atop the hood of his father’s car. Another recalls when he was tasked with helping remove a stuck tractor from a mud pit.

“I was always kind of fighting that place in my family, and with the tractor scene in the second book, that was the straw that broke the camel’s back,” he said.

The comic also tells how he started making art, taking a class in school and stumbling on a nearby supply shop.

“It was a much more in-depth story I was trying to tell,” he said of the second book. “I have these fragmented memories. I put them all down and then I had to sew them all together into a quilt.”

The book ends with Russell and his father arriving in Alaska in 1970. The next installment, he said, will focus on their year in Aniak.

“It was real groundbreaking stuff for me, living in the Bush like that and having these folks basically help raise me.”

This ragtag upbringing goes a long way toward explaining who Russell became, a self-taught artist whose work focuses on his community — particularly the Spenard neighborhood — and someone more concerned with the underprivileged than the mainstream.

“I’m kind of an outsider artist,” he said of his status today, “but I’ve been here so long that people would probably consider me not an outsider.”

Russell has lived in Anchorage since the mid-’70s, and despite being the product of a broken home, he’s been with his wife for 45 years. In the intervening decades, he followed a nontraditional career trajectory. He had a job in a bicycle shop in his teens, becoming an avid cyclist and briefly training for the Olympic team. He’s been employed as a bartender, worked in restaurants, been a consultant, was a scenic artist for the Alaska Repertory Theater, spent time as a stay-at-home dad — his kids are another topic he frequently returns to — and worked on film productions, including the making of “Into the Wild.” He also stayed involved in a wide range of charitable causes aimed at improving the lives of those in need.

Through it all he slowly established himself as an artist, and as with all of his endeavors, working on his own terms. Early on he sold screen printed T-shirts and other items, developing a style rooted in popular art that slowly became unique to him. Unconcerned with the perpetually shifting trends emerging from art schools, Russell was drawn instead to street-level art that spoke to everyday people.

“I’ve always been saturated in Mad Magazine, National Lampoon, and all that kind of satirical editorial commentary,” he explained, adding, “how much money does a postgraduate degree cost? I could just buy a bunch of food and feed hungry people and learn just about as much.”

Russell painted what he saw around him in Anchorage, becoming known for this. Eventually his work found its way into galleries and museums, and despite investing minimal effort in garnering mainstream acceptance, he was awarded the 2022 Rasmuson Foundation’s President’s Award for both his art and community work, and received an honorary doctorate from the University of Alaska Anchorage the following year for the same reasons.

Russell struggled with alcohol for some years, and said sobriety was a necessary precursor for his move into autobiographical work. “All of this stuff with the comic book wouldn’t have happened if I was still drinking.”

Sobriety also lent him knowing compassion when he dove into bringing food and water to Anchorage’s unhoused, especially as their numbers snowballed during the pandemic and the city and social service agencies struggled to find solutions for the problem. Rather than work with groups and navigate the layers of bureaucracy that inevitably develop in any organization, he simply began delivering cooked meals and fresh water. In so doing, he built a small network of other likeminded residents who joined him in this effort. They’re presently working at the camp in Mountain View and have also assisted people in Cuddy Park, and at Third and Gambell.

“It’s such a powerful tool,” Russell said, returning as he so often does to the topic of unhoused Alaskans. “To use food as kind of a facade to show love and to show that people care. And do it in a completely unconditional way to where there’s absolutely no agenda, there’s absolutely no strings attached.”

And in words that perhaps describe his art and cartooning in addition to his activism, he concluded, “I think it sends out ripples.”