'Baby Boom' (2023).
Martin Draax is a Dutch mixed media artist, active in several artistic disciplines. He writes, paints, creates music, designs sets, characters and clothing, does photography and animation, and often mixes these art forms. In 2023, he made his debut as a comic creator with the graphic novel 'Baby Boom', a satirical view on 21st century life in Amsterdam.
Early life and career
Born as Martin Pieter Kistemaker in Vlaardingen in 1968, Martin Draax moved to the Dutch capital Amsterdam at age seventeen, where as a youngster he was part of the local squatters movement. Between 1988 and 1993, he studied Graphic Design at the Utrecht School of the Arts (HKU), after which he began working as an independent graphic designer, art director, composer, director and deejay. Since then, he has been active in every thinkable art form, doing both applied and autonomous art, but always in his own, personal way. In his CV, Draax describes his work as "playful, colorful, skilful but always an invitation to think for yourself".
Magazine comic strip about police officers using mobile labs to test drugs.
Multi-talented artist
As a graphic designer, Draax has created posters, animated shorts and other event-related artwork for theater groups, musical acts like the Rosenberg Trio and the Amsterdam Klezmer Band, and venues like the Fort aan de Klop in Utrecht. He also provided layouts to magazines like Clinch, House and Schrijven. Between 1994 and 2010, he has created leaders, animated shorts, graphic design and music for several TV programs, for instance for the music documentary series 'Lola da Musica' on VPRO television. As a musician, he has been composer and guitarist with the "neo exotica" band The Spinshots, while he also did art direction and created video clips for the band. Several of the band's record covers were illustrated by Emanuel Wiemans. Since 2020, he has been working as a composer, designer and filmmaker for his own musical productions, for instance the 2021 single 'Multiple Reality Disorder'.
Promotional graphic design work for The Spinshots.
In 2012, Draax did script, direction, design, lay out and music for the animated short 'Deep Shit', a musical comedy in which two prominent members of the punk rock band Brides of Mayhem use the help of the devil to become successful, while being in a disproportionate rivalry with the singer of another band. Since 2018, he has been working with photographer Laura A. Dima on 'The Identity Machinery', a collaborative project that researches several stereotypes in which women are fetishized, while developing characters using those clichés. In addition, he is for hire as deejay Brother Boogaloo at events - he regularly deejays in De Nieuwe Anita in Amsterdam - and he was the organizer of regular life model sketching sessions under the banner 'Martin's Monthly Pin Up Parlour' (2017-2021). Between 2009 and 2019, Draax was also a tutor at the AKI School of Art & Design.
Artwork for Martin's Monthly Pin Up Parlour.
Comic Sexy dresses
Within comics circles, Draax was notable as designer for the "Comic Sexy" line of dresses. In production between 2013 and 2020, Draax and fellow managing director André Oosterman marketed a series of tailor made retro-style dresses, destined to turn their wearer "into a comic book heroine within a blink of an eye". The project started by accident, when Draax was designing a stage dress for Spinshots lead singer Flora Dolores. This 60's style mini dress caught on, after which Draax and Oosterman decided to turn it into a full-blown business. Between 2017 and 2020, comic artist Margreet de Heer had a Comic Sexy dress as her outfit when she was functioning as "Comic Artist Laureate of the Netherlands".
Selection of Comic Sexy dresses from the now-defunct comicsexyfashion.com website.
Baby Boom
In the past, Draax has created an occasional comic page for a magazine assignment. In 2020, he began working on his first graphic novel 'Baby Boom', about a female alien who is sent to earth to warn the people of a catastrophe. In a dystopian future, she lands naked in the city of Amsterdam, as a record cover with a naked couple led her species to believe that earth people wear no clothes. While Baby Boom befriends a young Moroccan woman who works in a garment workshop - she dresses her in a Comic Sexy dress - she tries in vain to get her message across. As in real-life, everyone uses her appearance for their own agenda. Feminists follow her example and bare their breasts, men want to abuse her and trendsetters want to use the alien woman to sell their products.
'Baby Boom'.
With this dystopian allegory, Draax painted a picture of our modern society, where no-one listens to each other anymore and opposites drift further apart by the day. His prediction of the future is a grim one, where mankind shall succumb to an overkill of information, continue to hop from one trend to another and go under on its path of nationalism and navel-gazing. A critical and satirical view of our modern society, Draax's graphic novel 'Baby Boom' (Hum!, 2023) is in many ways comparable to the 1968 pop art comic 'Iris' by Lo Hartog van Banda and Thé Tjong-Khing, which commented on the role of pop culture and consumerism in the 1960s society through a futuristic depiction of Amsterdam.
Self-portrait in oil paint.