About
Danny Zabbal
Freelance Illustrator & Cartoonist
3-195 Howard Park Ave.
Toronto, ON M6R1V9
CANADA
info@dannyzabbal.com
When I was a boy I wanted to be two things, an inventor and a stage magician. For most of my childhood my drawings were blueprints for elaborate contraptions and instruction manuals for magic shows. When I envisioned myself as an adult I saw a man with big bushy mustache swaggering down the street wearing a purple sequined lab coat and stove-pipe hat. Under one arm I would carry a crate of new scientific gadgets. Hidden in the lining of my coat would be my wand. In my childhood daydreams I aspired to be the embodiment of science and sorcery.
Sadly I never explored these careers; I never built a robot and I was too shy to put on a magic show. Make-believe was too sweet compared to reality. What was, and still is, romantic about those professions was their quality of transforming the mundane into something exciting. It’s the late night breakthrough that reshapes an old vacuum cleaner into a ray gun or knowing that within a top hat there is a bottomless vortex where the adept can pluck rabbits. That said, my work is an exercise in appreciating the banality of real life and trying to make it beautiful.
We all want to be fantasists in our spare time, all of us concoct different ways of escaping our world. For me, it’s a matter of inviting fantasy to be mundane. I like to ask superheroes, robots, monsters and wizards to live in the spaces between their personal drama. It’s a cyborg doing his grocery shopping or two vigilantes hanging out in the kitchen… the magical scientist walking down the street, on his way to, well, wherever.
I hope you enjoy my work.
dZ
