Drawing Conclusions: The Haunting & Galvanizing Power of Mr. Fish

THE CACOPHONOUS CLANK and pleasant twinkle of windchimes lightly suspended from the porch translate the suburban Philadelphia breezes as we arrive at Mr Fish’s home to talk about art and responsibility. As a child, he took up drawing to express the way he processed the world around him visually, in a family of witty verbal communicators and provocateurs. The beauty of a line rendered in tenderness can often be found within stark and bloody graphic horror in Mr Fish’s art. It can be familiar and nostalgic at first glance, with a quite twisted edit or razor-sharp bit of copy denying the viewer the luxury of complacency. There’s a neatness in his cleanly-bounded cartoon cells and crisp vintage-style poster borders but the rug is always pulled from our comfort. And rightly so.

THROAT is proud today to showcase the work of Dwayne Booth, who creates under the moniker ‘Mr Fish’, because he shows the world what it means to respond to the calling of ethical agitation, never settling; using his gifts and talents to translate his bravery. We’re very much here for it. Responding to the outrages and injustices he sees all around him by subverting familiar forms with riffs on genre and stylized artforms makes Mr Fish’s oeuvre work that belongs on walls and displayed in frames sparking reflection and connection, not limited to digital boxes.

If you’re not yet familiar with Mr Fish’s style, well, it’s something slippery. None of us can really “know” it because as much as he subverts and reworks (drawing on literature, propaganda, youth and pop culture, and fine art, eclectically) he also produces wildly original works in the mix, too. “I don’t ever want to become somebody who has a ‘brand’ of style”, he laughs, resisting pigeonholing in the service of a life that simply “operates in contempt of bullshit”. Because “truth is messy”, he refuses to “codify… to say now I understand the meaning of life and I know how to exhibit myself in the world, and now I can rest and adhere to this? No, that’s not interesting to me.” With no formal art education, Mr Fish reflects on how he persevered with drawing because, “I just kept surprising myself,” and as a child, started signing his work with the pseudonym (a name for a pet bird, which his mother rejected) to avoid confusion with the leading New Yorker cartoonist.

While Mr Fish’s artistic resistance has fought on many fronts that are of interest to him over the years, from fossil fuel industry crimes and indicators of fascism, to the illusion of American democracy and hypocritical, autocratic leaders, it’s really been since late 2023 that his voice has become acutely more urgent than ever before. That’s when his livelihood went on the line for his beliefs too, bringing protest art into the site of campus protest. The “shit soup” that our ideas about democracy and were rendered by the 2024 election (to reference Fish’s Campbell’s can Warhol wormhole) compounded frustrations about other dissonances playing out in the United States. The vastly different reaction to the horror unfolding in Gaza versus responses to the invasion of Ukraine just prior. The mass disenfranchising performed under a banner of protecting “freedom”. The misappropriation of the term ‘anti-semitic’ to silence dissent against a rightwing ethnostate’s leader and obscure the widespread complicity of western politicians. The artist calls these “unforgivable moronic equations” and “mind games”. He’s utterly agonized by how preventable the brutality seems but utterly clear in his moral line of sight.

Art Makes Anguish More Accessible and Actionable

Mr Fish scaffolds resistance through persistently pointing at the systemic ills and core issue connecting these overwhelming horrors: greed. Mr Fish’s conscience was shaped early – perceiving the tension between the reliance on and repulsion for tourists amongst the community around his family residing at the Jersey Shore, and noticing the intersections between the fights for racial justice and gender equality that raged in and around the 1970s of his youth – and he was drawn to the energy of Philly, associating it with the joyful liberation of Sesame Street’s urban setting. For a young artist to oscillate between anti-war protests and colorful puppetry, obsessed with the many forms that speaking out could take, set him up for a life bridging the truths of our world in conflict and its potential for harmony. He calls out the corrupt in such a clear-eyed way: be honest, it’s about the money. He doesn’t romanticize his artistic process either: “you don’t feel like a magician, there is an element of chore in creating”. Mr Fish today navigates media with many channels, versus the megaphone and broadcast model. Running a Patreon tiered subscription service, Substack full of fresh content, collated essays, engaging social media accounts and a website are all things an artist is expected to coordinate to be visible, vocal and viable alongside the showing, selling and publishing of their actual work. Mr Fish however, also spent 11 years as a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication. He taught hugely popular courses entitled ‘WARNING! Graphic Content: Political Cartoons, Comix, and the Uncensored Artistic Mind’ and’ Sick and Satired: The Insanity of Humor and How it Keeps Us Sane’. Mr Fish was due to teach a new one named ‘The Underground Press of the 1960s and 70s and the Future of Mass Communication’ but his contract was terminated in March 2025. Financial constraints were officially cited, but Booth has spoken out publicly about the subtext he found so troubling. He described a campus “gripped” by fear and paranoia and a university “capitulating to threats from MAGA thugs and bullies to pull funding over DEIA, academic freedom and free speech issues”. MAGA-linked outlets had savaged his art work and linked it to his teaching practices, in a galling “conflation”.

Advocating for students’ rights and for Palestinian liberation in his art without compromise is consistent with a clear moral code that doesn’t sanitize or sugar-coat or get co-opted, even when it’s commercial. There’s a disarming, grounded humility to the man and his ideas about the conditions for flourishing. Mr Fish works from his home office and studio: music, art and literature (Coltrane, Goya, and Vonnegut are prime examples) abound; cultural memorabilia displayed everywhere; warm natural wood galore; his wife and children milling around. “I am generally an optimistic person!” He reminds us, “I do have a great deal of hope because I’m surrounded by people I love and care about, and know they feel that for me”. When probed further about the circumstances of being fired from lecturing at Penn, he’s quick to point out that more than his own suffering, he’s deeply concerned for the students being detained, prosecuted, denied graduation. Mr Fish traces this all back to the dollars at stake, too, with politically inconvenient staff hastily becoming “sacrificial offerings” when funding is put at risk, rather than a comprehensive and human conversation being had.

Talking about substantive issues in the “short, fun, bite-size” forms which often dialogue is reduced to in our contemporary culture, is infuriating, and Mr Fish is keen to distinguish cartoons (“originally just the term for preparatory sketches” that now means so much more) and his other treasured artforms as negotiations, as motivating tools for dissent. Just as his first forays into drawing in elementary school were dragging white chalk over black construction paper, a definitive mark made always seems to shower dust all over the floor. All the risks of your positionality meet the viewer’s context for interpretation to spark the frisson and possibilities for art to be more than pleasing to the eye, and to achieve soul-stirring empathy. “I’ve always got to make sure the piece of art I’m creating is communicating the brutality… And artists will remain vulnerable and susceptible to great pain from other people who don’t think on our terms”, he concludes on the burden and toll of these confrontations. A line and the dust; cacophony and twinkles.