TBT to this comic I made in 2013 about growing up walking distance to nowhere.
Hoosier Valley
Shitty fortune
Never paid attention in divination class, now I’m just a shitty fortune teller.
Nav break
Working on environmental color with these post-apocalyptic road-tripping teens.
No plans ever
On hold
We’re all on hold with the IRS here.
Making comics
These last few months, I’ve been struggling to draw; every idea seems dumb and my hand has stalwartly refused to move good. Austin Kleon said once that problems of output are usually problems of input, so in a rare storm of good sense, I decided to read more comics.
Lynda Barry’s “Making Comics” came out this year, and it’s been sitting on my shelf. I read it cover-to-cover in a few days, and marked every exercise and prompt with a sticky flag. I’ve been keeping a version of Barry’s “compbook diary” and trying to complete a few other exercises each week. It’s been incredibly refreshing—since I started I’ve actually wanted to draw again!
Here are some drawings and diary images from this month that have made me feel like maybe I can still make comics:
Love letters from past me
Hey thanks, past me.
Quarantine and craters
The pandemic of a century
My latest comic is all about what we can learn from the 1918 Flu pandemic, aka the “Spanish Flu.” Written by Sarah Mirk and Eleri Harris, it goes through the challenges presented by the last once-in-a-lifetime pandemic and how we emerged on the other side. Read the whole thing here on the Nib!
Bad birding outfits
This weekend I re-learned, for perhaps the millionth time, that you can’t wear a crop top on a prairie.