Monthly Archives: May 2019

Trifecta! The Bonnie Jo Campbell Comics Collection

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Not only are these comics a good way to get into Bonnie Jo Campbell, they’re also a good documentation of my journey from adequate to proficient in Adobe Photoshop.

May seems to happen so fast, I completely forgot to post this little gem to my blog: Bonnie Jo Campbell Comics: Volume 3 (Women and Other Animals) exists! We distributed some at the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature’s symposium earlier in the month, and then most of them are being held back until WW Norton reprints Women and Other Animals in 2020. However, if you’re a follower of this blog, you can totally order one (or more) direct from me. Just contact me through this blog (email address is on the About page) and we can exchange details. I also have copies of the back issues for sale.

Prices as follows: 1 comic=$4, 2 comics=$7, 3 comics=$10 + $3 postage.

I’m going to post my presentation from the SSML symposium this week, too. It was a really great experience for me. The organizers want my work for an anthology they’re putting together, and, even better, the comics themselves are going to be added to the comic book archive at MSU. It is the academic comic book collection. The definitive scholarly repository with over 300,000 titles. It’s the place to be if your research requires comic books. It’s a good honor.

 

Dream Big

summer 2019 bulletin board

Back to the basics here.

How can it be summer already? But it is. School here ends May 23rd, and I’m off to present my thoughts about Bonnie Jo Campbell Comics in Michigan, so I decided to clear this off my plate in a simple but elegant fashion before I left. I’ll do something fancier in the fall. I’m trying to dream big, like I did as a kid, and I hope the kids at this school are too.

The top font is called Indie. The bottom I just drew freehand.

Star Trekkin’

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Sometimes a picture is worth more than a thousand words.

I made this as a birthday card for an old friend of mine but I realize it is too amazing not to share with the general world. As anyone can see, I have drawn myself as a Gorn and my friend as Captain James T. Kirk from the original Star Trek series episode “Arena,” in which an advanced race forces Kirk and this lizard guy to fight to the the death in order to—get this—prove that violence is wrong. Something like that. I haven’t seen it in a while. To me, the OG Star Trek is the real Star Trek. I’ve seen some good portions of some of the other series and even enjoyed some of them, but there’s no substitute for the earnest camp and optimism of the original. Its understanding of sexism and racism were primitive, but its heart was in the right place.