Outlook on Radio Western
Outlook 2026-06-22 - Through a Knight‘s Eyes With Cross Eye Comics Founder Doug Knight
After nearly eight years of doing this, we love it when there’s firsts for this program and our guest this week fits that bill in more than one way. His name makes him sound mid evil, but he has started his own indie comic book publisher Cross Eye Comics. So it is fitting, along with having experience as a tattoo artist. When most teenagers turn sixteen and go for their learner’s permit, Doug Knight got his first tattoo because once having been treated for a brain tumour, the usual teen milestone of getting a driver’s licence wasn’t an option. On this episode of Outlook we’re speaking with artist and comic book creator Doug Knight who joins us from less than an hour north of Toronto as we discuss the fun of navigating alternative forms of transportation, public transport, to travel for the work he does in educating, engaging, and provoking thought with his art. From fine art to public art, painting murals in Ottawa and working with the Museum of Nature to working with the students at the W. Ross Macdonald School for the Blind in Brantford, Doug has received Canadian creative arts grants to further the impact he wants to have on people of all ages through his art practice. He’s a dad, an artist, and he now also works with companies who make art supplies, to test their products for universal design for all possible customers and he’s worked with brands from London, England all the way to Australia. Knight shares with us his achievements, coming from a childhood often spent at the Hospital For Sick Children in Toronto and a lot of his work in the comic book world is inspired originally from his days in hospital, celebrating the doctors in his life he remembers and the brave children who must still go through it. With our own time spent at that hospital as kids in the late nineties, for our kidney transplants, we figure we might very well have passed Doug, going up in the big glass elevator or walking through the cafeteria with our family. This is an episode of taking the negatives and turning it into something good, a piece of art that speaks to someone, a child who can see themselves in a character from the comic book world, but in there he also throws in a few stories involving his low vision way of seeing the world (laugh-about-it-later stories) entering an adult entertainment shop when in Toronto to work on an art project , mistaking it for an arts supplies store or having his paints stolen alongside the Rideau Canal. His latest project is called "Through My Eyes,” water colour paintings of landmarks through his own eyes. Check out more of Doug’s work by going to his website: https://www.crosseyecomics.com/
