Ed Harrington

The man behind the double act

You have almost certainly seen his work before you knew his name. A barbarian and a blue-skinned warlord sharing a milkshake. He-Man white-knuckling a bathroom scale while Skeletor smirks. Two sworn enemies squeezed onto one bicycle. The pictures travel far past the He-Man fandom, and they nearly always travel without a signature attached. The signature is Ed Harrington.

Harrington is a Richmond, Virginia illustrator who has spent his career as a graphic designer, most of it at the alt-weekly Style Weekly, laying out pages and building infographics by day. "Nothing Happened Today," the handle his art lives under, started life as a webcomic about two semi-cerebral drunkards who mostly just talk. When he moved to single-panel, near-wordless pieces, the name came with him.

His eye was trained on comics linework. He names Frank Cho, Jim Lee, Frank Miller and Jae Lee as touchstones, and it shows: clean, confident outlines, cartoon shorthand rendered with real draftsmanship. He works digitally now, in Photoshop with a Wacom tablet and a couple of custom brushes he built to mimic his own pen-and-ink, but the instinct is old-school. One of his art professors gave him a line he still repeats: "Your art isn’t precious." It is, he says, a liberating thing to believe.

The He-Man and Skeletor pieces are the ones that broke containment. Instead of another Grayskull siege, Harrington draws the two of them as an old married couple who happen to be a hero and a warlord: date nights, haircuts, gym sessions, bath time. The joke lands because he plays it completely straight, in the exact Filmation house style you remember, which is why a first glance reads as a lost 1983 cel and the second glance makes you laugh.