Matt Kish chased his Moby-Dick muse with the tenacity of Captain Ahab.

Matt Kish grew up with a head full of images – of comic book exploits and 1970s album covers, of children’s books and early video games like Kid Icarus, of monster movies and sci-fi paperbacks. They stayed there in his head, swirling around until he siphoned them out in a ceaseless fount of fantastical drawings, part comics, part modern art, symbolic and hieroglyphic, inscrutable but purposeful.

Now the images live outside his head.

Today Kish is 44 and works as a librarian in the Dayton Metro Library in Ohio. He spoke with the Weekly by phone from a stairwell in the library with a window view of the park outside.

“When I’m reading fiction, I’m seeing the action and characters in my head,” he says. “Seeing comics was like this explosion in my head, the images and the text, and they were working in sync together.”

He started posting his drawings on a blog called Spudd64.com, beginning with work he created in 1993. There’s work he did for hire – an album cover for David Krejci, a book cover for Seth Fishman. There’s also work he did for himself – distressed photographs, DIY comics and zines. He had never attended art school, but he could not stop drawing.

He had seen a graphic novel by Zak Smith, a page-for-page illustration of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, and he admired the “audacity” of it. He wanted to do that for a beloved book of his own. On Aug. 5 of 2009, at his drawing desk in a cramped closet in a room he and his wife rented in a shared house, he began to illustrate Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, all 522 pages of it, a page a day, 522 days – a project that began with wide-eyed aplomb but turned out to require the ascetic discipline of a monk.

“I had no idea it would turn into a book,” he says. “I was keeping it private.”

Until he started posting the illustrations on a blog for friends and family to track. Others caught on and encouragement flowed in. So did interviews and blog reposts. Another illustrator, Sophie Blackall, introduced Kish to an agent, and though Kish was only halfway through the 522 pages, that agent suggested a book. In 2011, Tin House Books published Moby-Dick in Pictures: One Drawing for Every Page.

Kish comes to Monterey Peninsula College on Thursday, April 17, to talk, as part of the school’s storied Great Books Program, on the subject of “The Marriage of Great Books and Visual Art.”

In the introduction to his book, Kish explains why he chose Moby-Dick (he had read the American masterpiece eight times at that point): “To me, Moby-Dick is a book about everything. God. Love. Hate. Identity. Race. Sex. Humor. Obsession. History. Work. Capitalism. I see every aspect of life reflected in the bizarre mosaic of this book.”

After a foreword, the illustrations begin, accompanied by snippets and sentences excerpted from the novel – one piece of text per each page of the Signet edition, illustrated in a wild array of styles, in colored pencil, collage, acrylic paint, ball-point pen, masking tape, marker. For canvas, he uses salvaged sheets of random invoices and diagrams which weave into his own drawings of Ahab, the whale, harpoons, religious symbols, sailors, robots, aliens, weather, oceans and monsters. Together, like that symbiosis of words and illustration of his revered comics, they make up an arresting array, page after page of art that evokes punk posters or Mayan symbols or street graffiti.

“I feel most comfortable with calling them illustrations,” Kish says. “I’m a self-taught artist. I’ve been drawing ever since I can remember. In my 20s there was a time when those who had earned [art] degrees felt they had paid their dues in art schools and I had no right to call myself an artist.”

He describes himself as a librarian first, but will accept illustrator. For a long time he had dreamed of having an art gallery show but had no takers because, he reasons, he’s not formally trained: “That made me sad because I always wanted the opportunity to see my work on a wall where people could see it,” he says.

When Moby-Dick in Pictures was published, illustrations from the book won him that dream – a gallery show in Portland, at Powell’s Books, the largest independent bookstore in the world.

“About 150 pages were hanging. I got to see the gallery first before anyone was in there. To see the work on the walls… to see the images related to one another, symbols repeated, themes working through multiple pieces in the gallery, I felt I had done something really successful, something worth looking at.”

BrainPickings.org named the book one of the 11 Best Art and Design Books of 2011. “Equal parts visual mastery and creative bravery” wrote The Atlantic. Two years and another book later (Kish illustrated Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness), and he’s still savoring the conversations. One topic that comes up often: How did he do it?

“It’s a long, complicated answer, but I can distill it down to a basic thing,” he says. “It sounds like a platitude, but it’s a true thing: I did what I love.”

MATT KISH speaks at the MPC Great Books Program 7pm Thursday in the Sam Karas Room, LTC, Monterey Peninsula College, 980 Fremont St., Monterey. Free. www.mpcfoundation.org/great-books-program/