Spin, Weave, and Cut

Hastac Talk

2012-01-09T18:46:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year!

Fall of 2012 saw few updates to this site - but not because i wasn't making new comics. Rather the opposite, I was immersed in two big projects that i'll post more on soon, as well as lots of thinking on comics through the course I developed and taught this fall at Teachers College, Columbia U (check out the wikisite for articles and resources galore here: www.comicsclassroom.wikispaces.org).

I also attended a few conferences this fall to present on my comics dissertation. In these talks, I advocated for the inclusion of comics as legitimate discourse within and without the academy. A lot of fun and great responses. You can check out a pictorial version of my talk at HASTAC in December here: http://comicsclassroom.wikispaces.com/file/view/Sousanis+Hastac+VisualTalk.pdf.
HASTAC is a great group rethinking education and definitely worth checking out.

More to come - Nick

In Print: "New Maps" - Interdisciplinary Studies

2011-10-09T19:18:00.000-07:00

As with the recent "The Importance of Seeing Double," "New Maps" was created for the Association of Integrative Studies' newsletter for their October edition. They should be seen as companion pieces, and likely I'll find a way to integrate(!) them into a single piece as part of my dissertation. Wanna know more about the study of interdisciplinary studies? Check out the AIS website here. Good group. - Nick

In print: The Importance of Seeing Double

2011-09-14T20:46:00.000-07:00

This piece was created for the Association of Integrative Studies' newsletter Integrative Pathways March 2011 edition. It's also being reprinted in a textbook on integrative studies due out soon. I've got a related piece in the forthcoming edition of AIS's newsletter this fall. I'll post it after it appears in print. Interested in interdisciplinary studies? Check out the AIS website here. Good group. - Nick

On View: Seeing Red Feeling Blue

2011-04-22T21:14:00.000-07:00

Thanks to an invite from Gan Golan (co-creator of Good Night Bush), my piece about the ridiculousness of red states and blue states made during the run-up to the 2008 presidential election is now on view as part of the Po Boy Art Gallery's "The Comic Show/People's Art of Portland" in Portland, Oregon. (Info here: http://poboyart.com/). I haven't made it out, but if you're in the area before May 14, 2011 - check it out, sounds like a good show.

Creating "Seeing Red/Feeling Blue" was the impetus to launching this site and I'm pleased to have it out in the world again. - Nick

Hold Close (Tsunami Essay)

2011-03-26T19:54:00.000-07:00

In the midst of the initial batch of headlines coming out of Japan, I found myself viscerally compelled to respond in some way. Perhaps on the second or third night after the tsunami hit, I had jotted down some notes about an initial idea for this piece, before going to sleep. I couldn't sleep, and got up to put sketches down - that ultimately are pretty much what I ended up doing in the final piece. The piece kept changing throughout the process before returning back to nearly what I'd come up with that first night. There are no neat answers in this situation and as further horrors stack up, I find myself coming back to that last line over and over again "hold close..." - Nick

In Print!: Mind the Gaps

2011-03-10T09:53:00.000-08:00

Another piece sees print this month, this time "Mind the Gaps" (which I first posted here) specifically created for my advisor Ruth Vinz's (and co-author David Schaafsma's) text Narrative Inquiry: Approach to Language and Literacy Research. My piece serves as the final chapter, initially a sort of "fable for the future" (as Ruth terms it) as to where narrative inquiry might be headed. I wrote this bit of text to introduce it, some of which made it's way into the lovely introduction Ruth provides to my chapter:

In extending me this opportunity to contribute this coda of sorts, Ruth and Dave are demonstrating a firm commitment to the path staked out in the text, and an openness to new ways of seeing and re-presenting, an embracing of multiplicity of perspectives that is the future of narrative work.

Narratives are messy, composed of nested, overlapping elements, running in a multitude of directions. While time may or may not unfold linearly, bringing together multiple vantage points results in a dizzying web of complex connections. Comics are a language of juxtapositions, particularly well-suited to convey the richness and depth of non-linear, multi-layered narratives. By holding multiple threads and multiple trains of thought together, comics act as a sort of third-space – a place to let multiple stories and metaphors come together and interact in complex ways, while remaining navigable and readable.

But more than a powerful tool for juxtapositions, comics are a place where the visual and the verbal exist side by side. In comics, the visual is equal partner to the verbal, not illustrative of the ‘real’ thing or mere decoration, but integral to our thinking and our making of meaning. The resonance between visual and verbal modes creates for a higher order space, something beyond either alone.

For this piece I sought to offer a “fable for the future” that emphasized this visual aspect in telling the story from a different angle. As I set forth to unravel what narrative inquiry meant and how best to present it to the reader/viewer, I was struck by the similarities between the process of doing narrative work as Ruth and Dave laid it out and life drawing. Unlike flat, snapshot models of research as “drive-by,” narrative and life drawing convey the dynamic relationships between living beings in their uncertainties and their complexity. And from this starting point, and a lot of play in between, the following piece emerged…

Anyhow, there you have it (in more words than the piece itself!). - Nick

In Print!: Maxine Says

2011-03-10T09:34:00.000-08:00

While I'm in a bit of a slowdown on comics-making (mostly due to my organizing the upcoming conference on Creativity, Play, and the Imagination at Teachers College), there's an upsurge of my work appearing in print of late. I thought I'd share a few links to the publications and to the work.

First up my piece "Maxine Says" from the Fall of 2008 (it originally appeared on this site here) appears in the Bob Lake edited "Dear Maxine: Letters from the Unfinished Conversation." As the title indicates, "Dear Maxine" consists of letters to Maxine from her former students, colleagues, reflected on her influence. My piece was made while I was taking Professor Greene's class, sitting in her living room with 30 other students (and not conceived for the purposes of the book, that came about much later). In retrospect, it seems a little daunting, making a piece about the legendary philosopher and then turning it in for an assignment - but her initial reception has led to an ongoing conversation between us, and I'm grateful that my initial audacity or more likely, naivete, made that possible. - Nick

of consequence

2011-02-15T13:25:00.001-08:00

Continuing my attempt at a weekly comics piece for Robbie McClintock's course... Not sure i'm going to make the weekly part. But still going to work through some ideas conceptually and visually as I go. - Nick

learning pathways (untitled)

2011-02-07T19:50:00.000-08:00

This term, I'm sitting in on my advisor Robbie McClintock's final course - a look back at his formative educational experiences. I set myself a small goal of making a short piece inspired by something that occurred in the class or the reading. I include the quote from Robbie to start it off, and then other ideas from the class and my own work (related to my dissertation) constitute this one. The first page references the Diego Rivera murals at the Detroit Institute of Arts and also connect to my 2004 billboard project - which you can read about here. This imagery came up again in my dissertation proposal, and likely will make it in some form into the actual piece. The second page offers a vastly different approach, one that is in line with a new piece done for publication a few weeks back, that i've yet to post, allowing it to appear elsewhere first. Been pushing a lot lately, since the Shape of Our Thoughts piece, on allowing the text to shape the imagery and the image to shape the text - seeing my role as one of mediator in the creative process. That leads to things like the second page, but the first page was fun in getting back to just drawing stuff for a (long!) while... - Nick

The Shape of Our Thoughts

2011-01-13T09:25:00.000-08:00

Subtitled, "a meditation on and in comics," "The Shape of Our Thoughts," is an exploration of how comics work, what their potential for conveying and exploring meaning is, and a tiny bit on implications for art/and comics education. It's intended as a journal article and culled from material from my dissertation proposal. As this visual-verbal essay embraces the visual as being integral to our thinking, the work proceeds in form as it does in content. The very compositions of each page function to develop the theorizing that is the piece. I sought to create something that addressed the ideas in its very shape throughout, and in doing so i was led to some places i hadn't expected to go in the least. Anyhow, enough words... - Nick

(After the pages themselves, i offer some behind the scenes commentary at some of the details inside.)

Notes:
P1:
So the story my grandmother "tells" here, is fictional. That is, i can't remember specifics of her stories but this tries to replicate them in spirit by drawing on elements from her life that are all true, and it could be a day that happened. Some specifics - she walked to catch the bus (my grandmother never drove), and no doubt was greeted by neighbor dogs. My mom and siblings all had beagles, so this is a nod to those, i'm guessing at least one neighbor had a friendly one over the years. Onward, she took me to the Fisher Building in Detroit on occasion, and i know she liked it quite a bit. The "detour" relates to the fact that i'm the biographer of Detroit artist Charles McGee - who ran a gallery there at some point, and i'm speculating on a possible meeting between them. Near Second and Forest Avenues, my grandmother's father, later her brother, had a shoe supply store - Kanners & Patrize Co (eventually). It's now the Green Garage in Detroit. I know from my mom, they used to watch the parade from there. Ok, getting to the Detroit Public Library where my grandmother volunteered - helping with wayfinding, shelving, etc. The encounters, including with the red tailed hawk are made up - but possible.

P2: The "comic" pictured on the bottom is a nod to Molly Bang's "Picture This: How Pictures Work" in which she tells Little Red Riding Hood through geometric shapes and color. I used this as an example to a class of 9th graders in how to tell superhero stories even if you don't think you can draw - imagine Superman and Batman as loose geometric shapes. Here's such a story of a world's finest team-up...

P3: I couldn't figure out a structure on how to hold a page intentionally fragmented together. In a conversation with my friend Jon, he mentioned an aversion to things Calder (mostly joking). I said, i'd make use of that somewhere. And the next day, it occurred to me this page could be a mobile - static pieces made kinetic.

P4: The resonance between word and image - the tornado is composed of text from the Wizard of Oz when the Cyclone arrives and from a wikipedia entry on the butterfly effect. (I also included the Tempest, but that disappeared by the final version).

P5: Thinking on "lateral thinking" here - i originally had this as 3 or 4 lateral/horizontal strips, but they had so much commonality - i wanted to connect them more directly. I tried this once, thought better of it, woke up the next morning and tried it again, and said why not? (Having spent days trying to figure out how to do it, i can answer the why not much better...) It is intended to be read vaguely upper left to lower right, hitting pieces along the way as one does. The far right column does connect quite directly - but i very purposefully wanted this to be readable in many different ways - to emphasize the point of sketching, of making connections laterally. Also, the math sketches are my dad's, would've liked to show a bit more of that alongside my own sketches figuring out how to make this piece. Another time...

P6: I told my dad about my idea for the final page, and he grabbed the latest issue of Scientific American which had an image of the brain as nodes for the cover. Tied in neatly where i was already going... - That's it, N

Dissertation Preface to Unflattening

2010-11-30T18:32:00.000-08:00

My dissertation proposal was handed in this week and defense is around the corner. I prepared this preface for it - which gives a hint at where i'm heading with the dissertation itself, "a visual-verbal inquiry into curiosity" - that is a comics narrative as academic dissertation. In starting this with a nearly all verbal approach, i set up the final definition on page 4 - pointing to the inadequacy of this approach. The page following, when it comes, will thus launch forth in full comics fashion. (And likely i'll reference Alice, saying, "what is the use of a book ... without pictures or conversations?") Look for excerpts from the dissertation in progress in the year ahead (and other comics as well of course!). - Nick

Five Critical Senses with professor Tim Eatman

2010-11-17T17:49:00.000-08:00

This piece was produced for and with Professor Timothy K. Eatman, of Syracuse University and the director of research for Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life. In the midst of a conversation in which Tim was taking me through his presentation on the five critical sense of engagement, i was struck by his use of his fingers to convey his ideas along with his words. Given my interest in working with visual metaphor in my work, I saw a lot of visual material in this and it also resonated with one of my first (and still favorite) "mature" works - "Show of Hands." And so one thing led to another, and I created this piece out of text versions of his talk, and he presented it in conjunction with his acceptance of the early career award from the IARSLCE. Ok, all that said, let's get to the work itself. - Nick

Mind the Gaps- Narrative Research as Drawing...

2010-09-22T14:17:00.001-07:00

This piece was created for my advisor Ruth Vinz's forthcoming book on Narrative Research, co-authored with Dave Schaafsma. Given that i just finished it and that it's going in a book, there may be some changes before the final, final version.

Essentially, it's a piece about approaching research using a metaphor of seeing, or drawing, or perhaps it's a piece on seeing through drawing, or a lesson drawing, or on art - or all of the above. I'm never too sure about these things. - Nick

My Evolution

2010-05-04T20:16:00.001-07:00

As a final project for Visual Explanations - thinking about the concept of visual analogies in comics with colleague Andrea Kantrowitz. Created this quick overview of how my process has developed over the last few years and what issues i'm interested in exploring in the medium. - N

Excerpts from my work include:

"Security"; "Show of Hands"; "Possibilities: the Rabbit page";

"Maxine Says"; "Bi(bli)ography"; "Journeys Past; Futures Forged"; and "A Cosmology of Ideas V1"

Excerpts from Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons "Watchmen" and

Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie "This is Information"

quilt of student stories

2010-05-04T09:18:00.000-07:00

I was asked by Erick Gordon head of TC's Student Press Initiative (SPI) to do a comic corresponding to the project they were doing in 5 schools with all English as a second language students. SPI works with schools and students to produce books of their own writing. This group of students came from all over the world - Bangladesh, Haiti, Pakistan, China - and most had been year less than a year. A lot of powerful stories that will be told in the five SPI books of student stories - and i wove together elements from a number of them here. - Nick

(More on SPI: http://publishspi.org/)

(Also, note p4 and p5 are a double page spread when it's printed. - N)

Sketching

2010-03-23T10:12:00.001-07:00

This piece is prepared for a project for Dr. Barbara Tversky's Visual Explanations course in collaboration with Andrea Kantrowitz. Full citations to follow.

Threads: a spinning fable

2010-02-17T08:35:00.001-08:00

This work was created for Dr. Ruth Vinz’s course on Postmodern Textual Practices. We were asked to draft a postmodern take on a fairy tale or myth. At the same time we’d been mapping out our definition of what postmodernism means. Mine includes a lot of developments in science and mathematics and music – sampling and DJ culture. (Wrote an essay on this back in my Detroit days: http://www.thedetroiter.com/JUN03/ArtCut.html). Anyhow, this riffs on my method of spin, weave, and cut, and takes that approach to discuss modernism and the turn to the postmodern through myths, fairy tales, and similar literature all “mashed up” with philosophical and scientific notions. Often given the referential nature of my work, I feel like providing a key to all the imagery. (I did this once with the Rabbit page from Possibilities (though note, the key is not provided on the website, sorry…) Due to just how much is pulled in for this one, I felt it would be fun to do so, show my hand and offer the equivalent of footnotes, or perhaps hyperlinks. So if you’re interested at looking behind the curtain – check it out below the comic itself. – Nick

Threads – the Key

Page 1: A single panel on an otherwise empty page!? Shocking for someone who likes to cram nearly everything he can in a 6.5 by 10in space. Was pleased to experiment with that and the similar emptiness of page three provide breaks between the more jammed even pages. The opening line is my take on “once upon a time…” The image is Atlas, specifically referencing Lee Lawrie’s statue at Lincoln Center. The “world” is partially a reference to the statue itself but also to Kepler’s sketch of the nested Platonic solids. I’d wanted to work in those rigid forms to accompany the text and this mashup allowed for that.

Page 2:

Panel 1: Greek myths are full of stories of locking away the primal, irrational, and chaotic in Tartarus (as with the Titans) or as this panel references – in the Labyrinth. Labyrinth imagery makes its way into a number of my pieces – as the double axe (also seen here) has come to be connected to butterfly and metamorphosis. (See A Conversation with Charles, Maxine Says, and A Cosmology of Ideas V2, for instance.) I pull some of my thinking here from Michael Ayrton’s “Maze Maker,” a novel about the creative process, as told through the story of Daedalus, the builder of the labyrinth and father of Icarus. The Minotaur is seen less as a monster in its own right but as some primal aspect of ourselves necessary to keep down in order to seek a more rational life. Theseus follows Ariadne’s thread up into the light, and my text is also meant to hint at Plato’s story of the shadows in the cave and escaping to enlightenment (here, the radiating ball of string.)

P2: Wonder Woman, and her lasso of truth. In the Bi(Bli)ography piece, through a coincidental juxtaposition in my layout, I started thinking about the connection between Ariadne’s thread, Wonder Woman’s Lasso, and the Yellow Brick Road as golden paths toward truth. That thread ended up becoming a partial genesis for this piece.

P2-5: Yellow Brick Road – a quest for knowledge, for heart, home, and bravery.

P6: The text is a reference to Descartes’ split between mind and body.

P7: Continental Drift Theory had a huge impact on how we think of the world and I sought to depict that here with images of earth as Pangae, Gondwana, and today’s configuration of the continents. (Also placing them as I did is also a reference to the way multiple earths are depicted in DC Comics’ “Crisis on Infinite Earths” for those keeping score at home.)

P8-11: “No fixed points in space” is a quote from Einstein picked up by Merce Cunningham as part of his approach to dance. Moving fast to keep in place is a nearly direct quote from Through the Looking Glass. The Cheshire Cat is joined with Schrodinger’s cat – and the idea of superposition. This would’ve been fun to explore more, and Alice’s cat playing with a ball of string almost made its way in (only the string stayed in back up at Panel 1.)

Page 3: When the cord is cut, literally, I wanted to show our perspective falling like Alice down the Rabbit Hole. However I was concerned with how to bring the reader back up after a strong vertical sequence (which I was less than successful in doing in A Cosmology of Ideas V2), so I opted to give it its own page. This then left me with an odd number of pages, which for printing purposes I’m not a fan of, and so I opted to shift the proposed Atlas panel onto its own page – which I think gave it greater impact than it would have had as a tiny panel alongside the others. The fall not only references Alice’s fall, but the Great Fall text is a reference to Humpty Dumpty’s fall, which we’ll see the effects of on the next page.

Page 4:

Panel 1: Arriving on the scene to fix up Humpty Dumpty after his fall from the wall, are all the King’s Horse-Men. Having already decided to use a Spider-woman and a Mermaid in the piece, this compression of all the King’s horses and all the King’s men into one worked well. Plus I got to draw centaurs, which are really weird. Furthermore, I mashed this story with the Four Horsemen of the apocalypse, whose appearance here doesn’t spell the end. A hint that our fears from the beginning of things to lock away, might have been a bit rash.

P2: I’ve referenced Arachne before in Maxine Says, and given the threaded nature of this she was one of the few players I had in mind from the beginning. (Spiderman stayed out of it…) I saw Athena’s punishment as being seen as a gift instead, one of a number of reversals of perspective in the piece. “Fabric of relations” comes from Lyotard’s text on the Postmodern Condition. The image draws on Gustav Dore’s rendering of her in Dante’s Purgatorio.

P3: We see the Three Fates, the Grey Women, or Moirae – maiden, matron, and crone. Those who spin, measure, and cut the thread that is our lives (and for whom my website and method draws its name.) Neil Gaiman used them a lot in the Sandman and that serves as a big influence in using them here. Depending on where you read – their sight is ambiguous. Destiny or fate is often seen as blind, so while some accounts say that they share one eye between them, I went with the blind depiction here.

P4: Rapunzel lets down her hair – a braid of DNA connecting us to our past, as postmodern methods cut up samples of past works to make new. I touch on similar stuff (in terms of “cleaving”) in both versions of Cosmology of Ideas. The cycle of the moon also references the symbolism for the Three Fates – waxing, full, and waning, as the DNA becomes a coiled spiral, becomes waves – tides caused by the moon above. (Had hoped to do more with that connection – but not here.) The text borrows heavily from Ayrton’s Maze Maker: “Life is not a circle but a helix.” Worked well with the imagery that was already emerging, and liked the idea that the past doesn’t come full circle but a cycle of a different sort.

P5: Heraclitus’ words connect to the panel previous of past feeding present and the final panel on Chaos, as the Little Mermaid speaks to the merged creatures we’ve become, necessary for a world that’s constantly shifting.

P6: As this developed, it turned out for the most part I was working with stories featuring women – even when Theseus is depicted, it’s Ariadne that saves the day. Keeping with that, I read up on Pandora who seems to have gotten a bad rap. Her name properly translated means “all-giving” and the “box” actually means a jar of sorts. I used the image of a jar and hoped by referencing box in the text that the connection was clear. I wanted to connect what’s in the jar/box back to thing locked away in the Labyrinth, and in taking a different look at Pandora, take a different look at Chaos theory as well. And so what comes out is the fluid, nonlinear stuff that makes this world, and butterflies – symbols of metamorphosis and the butterfly effect – or a sensitive dependence on initial conditions. Even the smallest of things has an effect on connected systems. I think it’s a beautiful thought, and from the physics referenced by Alice to Chaos theory here, all of the narrative speaks to a world shrugging off a search for certainty and perhaps embracing complexity as complexity. – N

A Cosmology of Ideas Text

2010-01-22T15:05:00.000-08:00

A little text about the creation of the two versions of a cosmology of ideas, and a few more samples of the sketches/scribbles/notes that led to each piece. - N

A Cosmology of Ideas V2

2010-01-22T15:03:00.000-08:00

A second version of the cosmology of ideas idea - in slightly more traditional comic book format - in 2 pages. - N

Cosmology of Ideas

2010-01-06T10:59:00.001-08:00

A sort of comic, prepared for a catalog for a forthcoming exhibition at Macy Gallery at Teachers College. The subject of the show is studio practices, and so i focused on how ideas are generated, or born, in my notebook. It was in part shaped by a conversation with my dad on how stars form. Furthermore, the piece talks about not knowing where I'm going, and how ideas start to generate themselves as you assemble pieces - this is very much true with this piece, as right up until i finished it, i didn't know a lot of the various parts. It was pretty excited, and i'd like to share the details of how it came about if prompted.

Also, this is a lead in to a true comic version of this, which will be completed in the next 2 weeks. Much of the same material, but as format shapes content, we'll see how it shapes up. Should be interesting to compare. - Nick

Little Boxes (Final Version)

2009-10-31T09:38:00.000-07:00

Created in conjunction with Graeme Sullivan's "Visual Arts Research" class at TC. Closely related to the recent "Bi(bli)ography" as well as a spiritual cousin to "In the Box/Out of the Box" from some time ago. - Nick

(note, this is a revised version which replaces an earlier - now deleted - posting.)

Little Boxes is also designed to be put together as a cube - or little box itself. Arrows around the page numbers both point to the direction to attach the next page as well as orient the reader on where to "turn" next. Here's an image of the cube from one perspective.

Bi(Bli)ography - Final Version

2009-09-06T14:51:00.001-07:00

At last - the final version of "Bi(Bli)ography: A Life of Privilege." This replaces previous, in-progress versions. I welcome your feedback. - Nick

Bi(bli)ography - text only

2009-05-03T21:09:00.001-07:00

Ok, it's been a long time since there's been a new piece. Not because i've not been working on new projects, but rather because of how each project has grown as i've delved into it. This is the case with the following - intended to be a two-page, quick essay, it blew up fractal-like as a response to the text essay "Voices." Anyhow, as a small insight into my process, I'm presenting a preview of "Bi(bli)ography" sans images. As i finish them, i'll be updating. I welcome any feedback along the way. Thanks - N

(A version of p. 8 before i put the text and panel borders in, with some of the rough sketches still underneath...)

Old and New again

2009-02-01T20:09:00.000-08:00

I'm in the process of adding some older short comics I made to this archive. To preserve the continuity of when they were created, they appear earlier in the blog posts, even though they've only been added now. - Nick

Children's Artistic Development Two

2008-11-21T05:40:00.000-08:00

The sequel to the first installment on artistic development in children prepared for Dr. Judith Burton's class on that subject. - Nick (You can find the initial one here)

Maxine Says...

2008-11-07T07:05:00.000-08:00

An essay on legendary education philosopher Maxine Greene. Learn more about Maxine here: http://www.maxinegreene.org/. (completed 11/7/08) - Nick

Seeing Red, Feeling Blue

2008-10-14T04:53:00.000-07:00

A comic about divisions and over-simplification in four pages. Created in October of 2008. - Nick

(Click on individual images to view at full size - and to print.)

Children's Artistic Development - Early Stages

2008-10-12T14:57:00.000-07:00

Comic made for Judith Burton's class on artistic development. - Nick (September 2008) (Click on individual images to view at full size - and to print.)

In the Box, Out of the Box

2008-02-05T08:43:00.000-08:00

This piece was first created literally out of a block (box) of wood sliced in 8 pieces (drawn on with a Sharpie) for an art fundraiser in Grosse Pointe, MI. It occurred at nearly the same time as a box show fundraiser at the Detroit Artists Market. Boxes and blocks were on my mind. In the fall of 2008, i traced photos of the work on the computer and relettered (also on the computer, thankfully), and rewrote page 5, as the context worked for the art show but not for it in this new form. It's not quite a comic, but it's related. Anyway, that's that. - N

Chrysalis

2008-02-02T08:43:00.000-08:00

This comic created in summer of 2007, was the first done entirely digitally. Mostly just a test of the tools, with the hopes of speeding up some elements of the process and making lettering legible! - N

A Conversation with Charles

2008-02-01T19:59:00.000-08:00

This piece was created in Spring of 2006 for an exhibition at the Detroit Artists Market. I am currently working on a biography of Charles McGee for Wayne State University Press - due out as soon as I can finish the text!

Possibilities: The Rabbit Page and more...

2008-01-01T20:12:00.000-08:00

This comes from the graphic essay "Possibilities" that accompanied Game Show Detroit (www.gameshowdetroit.com) Produced in the spring of 2005, it's 16 pages long with full color cover. I may add other pages from it to this archive at some point. - N

(Page 2 - the "Rabbit Page")

(Page 5)

(Page 11)

(Page 14)

Show of Hands

2008-01-01T09:09:00.000-08:00

This was created for "Defending the Tree of Liberty" part two - which was post-Presidential Election 2004. Along with the piece for part one "Security", i credit these pieces as getting me back into making comics after a rather lengthy hiatus. - N

Security

2008-01-01T08:49:00.000-08:00

This was created for an art show "Defending the Tree of Liberty" before the 2004 Presidential Election. Participating in this project (with short notice), helped get me back into making comics again. - N