Introduction
Oli Knowles interviews the owners of the comics shop and art gallery, Partners and Son, on 6th St. south of South. Tim Marquet and Gina Dawson opened the shop, which is names for themselves and their son, in 2020 during the pandemic. It then closed, and re-opened. The interview covers why the couple, both artists, moved to Philadelphia, and their plans for the future. The audio recording has been transcribed and edited for length and clarity.
Oli Knowles: Tell me a little bit about Partners & Son: not the business, but you as partners and your son. Where did you start dreaming up what you were interested in doing together?
Gina Dawson: We started thinking about it when we moved and we both had regular jobs…you know, day jobs. We started thinking about what it would look like to have a comic shop. The idea was: wouldn’t it be cool if there was a space that had both art and comics in it?
Tom Marquet: The reason we moved to Philly was to open the space in response to what we could do and what we got more interested in doing.
Oli: Will you guys tell me a little bit about the kind of art that you both have made historically?
Tom: I was making comics and conceptual art drawings and sculptures. I did that thing that every guy does who gets access to a woodshop. I made very large wooden sculptures that I then had to move to places, and then eventually destroy. It’s stuff like that: using comics as a framework for all this other work.
Gina: I mostly make work for my own sanity. I’m kind of all over the place. Most of my work’s just about being an artist and trying to find time to make work.
Oli: When did you open the shop? What went into the decision for it to be pretty much completely comics, as opposed to other kinds of books? Or being a hybrid with other types of art?
Tom: When it opened it was actually less comics and it’s certainly more the standard now. I think it’s about the stuff that we show.
Gina: Oh, definitely. Really important to us to be able to have shows. You have an idea, and then you see what people respond to. We just stuck with our idea.
Oli: Why Philly?
Gina: The really beautiful thing about Philly is that it’s a major city, but it feels like everybody’s connected through a couple degrees.
Oli: What did you guys observe when you first got here and were in the process of opening the shop?
Gina: We just kind of were like, “We’re gonna open this and see if anybody shows up.” We knew there were cartoonists here. We knew that we just didn’t know them, you know?
Tom: We knew Box (Brown) was here.
Gina: We knew Charles (Burns) was here. Not that we were like, “If we build a shop, Charles Burns will walk in.” But Box Brown will come.
We knew there was a sort of scene here. We weren’t part of it, but we liked the work. We liked what people were doing. And then I met Megan Turbitt who is a Philly cartoonist and I love her. I met her, basically, through a friend before we ever opened the shop, and she had a baby, and we were like, “Oh, we’re gonna be friends.” It’s cool to have a mom friend that’s a person you would be friends with, even if you didn’t have kids.
And I was like, “We’re opening this shop.” And she’s like, “I’ll make sure people come to the opening.” And she did.
Gina: During COVID, we were open for six months and then we closed. So I think in this weird way, COVID actually was helpful because we knew we weren’t gonna have an intern, or a website where we sold stuff. We weren’t just posting things about the show that was on the wall.
And then we pictured being a brick and mortar. And then once it was clear that we were gonna stay closed for a minute, I was like, “Well maybe I’m just gonna start posting what we have in stock on Instagram and tagging the people that made it, or the publisher, and offering it up. If you want this, DM me and I’ll sell it to you.”
And after a couple weeks there were all these artists that didn’t know we existed, that were like, “Oh, you have my book in your store.” From all over.
Tom: I think the one real one that jumped out was this book by Ryan Travis Christian that had been published by Perfectly Acceptable. We had this one book, and the artist regrammed us and was like, “This is the only book I know of, only one of the market copies of this left.” And we were getting emails from everywhere.
Gina: I was like, “Oh, we have things that are actually out of print because we’ve had ’em for six months and we got ’em off of, like, the back shelf of a distro.”
So it’s the discovery: There is a customer or reader that’s elsewhere. I can count on two hands, maybe, the number of shops like what we’re doing in the United States. But because of that, you’re all sort of in conversation with each other. People handle things differently.
But once the people knew, then those shops knew we existed. And it’s a community.
Tom: The COVID silver lining element, the other part of it, is that for a lot of young cartoonists, COVID was a brief moment where they were actually making more money than they ever made before, but they were not going to work and they had time to make comics. There’s just a very obvious correlation in this burst of productivity from people who showed up at the shop after we reopened with material and with books.
Oli: Right, you didn’t have anything to do and you chose to make comics, so you just got radically better over the course of that period. Wow. We’re totally covering all the ground that I was curious about.
What are your future dreams for what you’re doing? Or even, maybe not dreams, but just when you think about the future, the next few years, the long term: What do you think about?
Tom: I think we’d like to publish stuff.
Gina: I think that’s really on our list.
Tom: We wanna see how things go with events like Philly Comics Expo. Not that it has to keep growing because that’s silly, but to just see where it finds its level and what additions we can do with it.
Obviously we have the show at Drexel coming up [Ed. Note: Philly Comics Now curated by Tom and Gina, ran at Drexel’s Pearlstein Gallery from Oct. 13 to Dec. 14, 2024), but that’s not like a recurring event. It’s good to flex a little bit. The hard problem of thinking about comics in a gallery context is rarely satisfactory. But I think it’s interesting for cartoonists ’cause they wanna see how other people read their work. I don’t know how regular people feel about that. I think it’s always a little awkward if you’re trying to read something on the wall gallery.
But for us, publishing is the main next step.
Oli: That’s interesting ’cause I was just thinking yesterday, “I wonder if those guys would ever get into publishing.” And then I thought, “Maybe they already are and I just haven’t noticed”
Gina: I think comics publishing is a hard business. The problem, if we would like to get into publishing, is that there’s things that have to happen because we would also then need to be able to have storage. We would need to have employees, if Partners is a steady thing. We just have to keep totally doing momentum. I’m always excited.
Oli: Do you guys do one person with Homer (Gina and Tom’s son) or one person at the shop?
Gina: Yeah, well, Tom has a full-time job so I work during the week and then Tom works on Saturdays. Tia (Roxae) works on Sunday, so we can have a day.
Tom: At this point I don’t think we can do it without her. She’s a really great cartoonist and she’s also really great to work with.
Gina: I think she knows a lot about what we sell. She’s really good at being an Ambassador for the shop. Really really knowledgeable. Particularly in areas where we’re maybe less knowledgeable. And that’s always helpful. There are sort of generationally different knowledge sets about comics. It’s like, if you grew up reading Inuyasha, you have a different base than if you grew up reading X-Men.
Oli: Oh, a hundred percent. Yeah.
Tom: That’s one of those scenarios in which you’re always learning from the people who come in the shop. They’re like, “Oh, do you have this?” You’re like, “No, I don’t even know what it is.” And then you try to find out what it is and let people lead you to a certain extent, and try to figure out what that thing is.
Oli: How long has she (Tia) worked at the shop?
Gina: December is two years.
Tom: Speaking earlier of goals for the shop, one of our goals early on was to figure out, as we started expanding, the days that we were open. Because when we initially started, we were only open Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Gallery-ish hours, artist-run space hours. You know what I mean? One of our goals after the first year or two was that we need someone to work on Sundays as we scale up the days, because we need a day where we’re both not working. Right.
Oli: That makes sense!
Gina: It’s for our family.
Oli: Oh, you guys, it was really great talking to you. Thank you.
Visit Partners and Son at 618 St. 6th St. Hours – Wednesday to Saturday, 12:00 pm – 6:00pm and Sunday, 12:00pm – 5:00pm
Oli Knowles is a Philadelphia-based cartoonist and storyteller. Their work consists of watercolor paintings and comics; both fictional and autobiographical. Their current stories discuss vexing and absurd moments in modern-day commercialism, while also touching on surveillance, relationships with loved ones, and personal identity. Their watercolor paintings marry outdated computer graphics with objects, faces, and plants to describe a collective moment, or a series of events over time.
Read Oli’s comic, Socialist Grocery on Artblog. Follow Oli on Instagram.
