Zach Hackman’s carefully composed works are like “mini comics” in their detail and storytelling

On one level, Zach Hackman’s work is very intuitive; he tries to stay as “loose and doodle-y” as possible, letting his pen take the lead. However, on another level, it’s incredibly organised, with the illustrator focusing closely on how the shapes he works with “can interact and balance each other”. He enjoys finding the detail of an object or scene, and then neatly laying it out; like the internal cogs and mechanisms of a watch, or an aerial view of a desk in a state of structured disorder – complete with a pet cat and dog. “I‘m a bit over-organised in life – so it kinda makes me happy to see things arranged, but I also think it adds a sense of temporality, it makes every work its own mini comic in a way, it shapes the way you read the work,” he says.

Comics were a big influence for Zach in his early years, particularly the cartoons nestled inside his dad’s large Time magazine collection. This probably accounts for Zach’s close attention to character design, each of his figures imbued with a unique sense of personality. Zach has a lot of love for his characters; he often tries to depict them relaxing, or doing something they love, hunting for bugs outside, playing computer games or going for a ride on their motorbike. He also likes to indulge his own interests and hobbies, like climbing, or playing chess, trying to uncover “what exactly is appealing or aesthetic to me”. In one recent piece, Zach shows a divided chess scene, one played on a computer, and one physically on the board. A knight is giving a king a powerful upper-cut, the comic violence of the scene counter balanced by the chequered pattern of the chessboard and the vintage age of the computer – giving the scene an extra layer of narrative.