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A Meaningful Year of Comics Residencies

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The 2024/2025 school year was another special one. Thanks to generous support from the Ohio Arts Council, I was able to return to two career tech high schools, Springfield-Clark Career Technology Center and Tri-Rivers Career Center for semester and year-long residencies, respectively.

Before the residencies began I coordinated with the instructors to design a comics curriculum that supported the material they were teaching. For Springfield-Clark’s Computer Graphic Arts students, I led lessons in comics exploring how word balloons and panel contents use visual hierarchy to support clear composition. Tri-Rivers Interactive Media students learned how thumbnailing comics supported their storyboading for film projects. The kids can sometimes treat me like an exciting outsider, and I enjoy using my visits to validate that the things they’re learning have a variety of applications outside of school.

And the students explored a variety of approaches for comics-making. I describe my approach to teaching as using comics as a framework to remind everyone that they’re creative creatures. I operate under a broad definition of comics when I teach–as long as it’s sequential images, it’s comics. Some students drew on paper, some in Procreate, some in Adobe Illustrator. And some created their comics using Blender:

They made their own models, rendered them as images, and assembled them into comics pages using Photoshop.

This is all exciting enough, but we also had some outings to celebrate our work together. In early April the students at Springfield-Clark took a field trip to the Columbus Zoo, where we sketched together.

And this Saturday, May 3, the students from Tri-Rivers will be tabling with their new comics at both Thunderfury Comics and Birch Tree Bookery in Marion, Ohio, for Free Comic Book Day!

All of these rich experiences are made possible by the Ohio Arts Council’s TeachArtsOhio grant. This program allows educators to host a visiting artist for as few as ten days to an entire school year. The Ohio Arts Council pays the teaching artist’s fees, and the school provides the necessary supplies. This program has profoundly changed my life, allowing me to work in schools all over Ohio. The Ohio Arts Council and its partners also organize the Teaching Artist Roster, a handy directory of trained teaching artists representing a wide variety of artistic disciplines.

If you’re an educator in Ohio, I strongly encourage you to check out the grant opportunities at the OAC!

My deepest gratitude to the Ohio Arts Council, the instructors who invited me into their schools, and the students who navigated the barrels of ambiguity that comes with art-making! It’s been a really lovely year.

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Make Doctor Baer Everyone’s Favorite Hero! 🐻

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I’ve had my head down for the last six weeks, thumbnailing the next Doctor Baer story. Here are a few sneak peeks!

Thumbnailing is the most challenging and rewarding part of the process for me. Refining the moment choices and dialogue is a heavy cognitive load, but watching my cute heroes interacting is such a delight.

While I finish thumbnailing this book, you can help raise the first book’s profile by nominating it for a Ringo Award!

The Ringos—or the The Mike Wieringo Comic Book Industry Awards—are awards where both readers and creators can nominate their favorite artists and books. One of the things I love most is that they include fun categories like Favorite Hero and Favorite Villain.

If you enjoyed The Inscrutable Doctor Baer and the Case of the Two-Faced Statue, and have a few minutes to spare, I’d be so grateful if you could head over to the Ringo Awards website and nominate the book for:

  • Best Kids Comic or Graphic Novel – The Inscrutable Doctor Baer and the Case of the Two-Faced Statue
  • Favorite Hero: Doctor Baer – The Inscrutable Doctor Baer and the Case of the Two-Faced Statue
  • Favorite Villain: Gallus Lugubrious – The Inscrutable Doctor Baer and the Case of the Two-Faced Statue

Important note: The Ringos ask you to include the series name when nominating characters. So for example, when voting for Doctor Baer as Favorite Hero, please enter:
Doctor Baer – The Inscrutable Doctor Baer and the Case of the Two-Faced Statue. You can copy the text above and paste it into the nomination form.

Being nominated—or better yet, winning—would help more readers discover the book. I really appreciate your support in helping Doctor Baer reach a wider audience!

Thanks!

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Giving Yourself Permission to Create in Troubled Times

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The latest episode of the Tell The Damn Story podcast felt medicinal. In an emotionally fraught time in history, it can seem like a trivial thing to set aside space for your creative work. But Alex and Chris remind us that our creative work can be what fills us up so we can show up for the fraught times and spaces with more energy and strength.

If you’ve been feeling overwhelmed and powerless by current events, I strongly recommend you listen to this episode. Alex and Chris are what good looks like.

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Thumbnailing Doctor Baer

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I spent a few hours today doing one of my very favorite things. The next Doctor Baer story is officially underway!

Well, it was “officially” underway months ago when I was outlining it. But this stage, the second-draft thumbnails, feels like the most intense part of the process. Which means I feel a lot of resistance before beginning this part; but it also means that momentum usually kicks in once I get past that. So this is a real threshold crossed, and I’m excited about what’s happening on the pages. All of my cute friends are back and on an adventure! 🧸🐖🐢🐎🟢🔵🟣🟠

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Do you believe in Hug Magic?

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One of the moments I’ve had the most feedback from Doctor Baer readers is when Pickles claims she’s discovered Hug Magic. So it seemed reasonable to add something to the Doctor Baer store that celebrates the positive pig and her belief in the power of hugs!

You can now get your own I Believe in Hug Magic t-shirt via my Etsy store. Let your friends know that you’re with Pickles on this!

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Helping Kids Feel Seen Through Comics

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Though things in the world continue to get harder and harder, I’m taking solace in making art and participating in residencies that help young people understand how much they matter.

I recently finished my annual visits to Springfield, Ohio where I worked with teens and incarcerated youth through a residency hosted by Project Jericho. This year’s residency, titled Sketching the Soundtrack, invited Springfield Teens to create comics adaptations of their favorite songs.

Project Jericho, whose slogan is Art Changes Lives (and they really mean it), always concludes our residencies with a community celebration. This year the kids’ work was put on display in an auditorium where a silent disco was held. At the end of the celebration we watched video performances of the kids’ work.

Here’s the playlist:

Many of the teens who participated worked with tools and mediums they hadn’t tried before. So they were not only expressing vulnerability in sharing a song that meant something to them; they were going out on a limb making art that they hadn’t before. I’m so proud of all of them. This was a rich, meaningful residency, as it always is with Project Jericho. I say it over and over–they’re what health looks like.

And if you’re in the Central Ohio area, I have more comics workshops and summer camps opening up!

Registration is open for my six-week Minicomic Challenge workshop series at the McConnell Art Center in Worthington, Ohio. Wednesdays after school, starting March 19!

July 7-11 I’ll be leading another round of my Minicomics Camp at the McConnell Art Center in Worthington, Ohio.

July 28-August 1 I’m an instructor at the Buckeye Book Camp in Wooster, Ohio.

As always, you can find more info on my upcoming appearances and workshops on my classes page.

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Doctor Baer…Shoes?

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Yup! You can get sneakers with Doctor Baer-inspired designs on them over on my Etsy store!

It’s been a lot of fun designing apparel that’s a little more customizable than your average t-shirt. I feel like the Wisps sneakers look pretty neat. But what I’m really enjoying is making products that also build more lore into the world of Doctor Baer, like the Shoes of the Deathly Dance:

From the world of The Inscrutable Doctor Baer and the Case of the Two-Faced Statue.

These legendary shoes should not be worn by the fearful or careless! They are cursed shoes the mysterious Baba Yaga instructed a young farm hand to give to their wicked employer.

These enchanted shoes compel the wearer to dance fiercely until they meet their end–unless the wearer has a pure heart. You will know that the dancing curse is activated if the shoes turn green. If they stay blue and red, you are pure of heart and safe from the curse!

👟 Get the shoes here 👟

Like the talismans I’ve been making, it’s a fun creative exercise to create an in-world object that comes with the suggestion that it might have magic properties. It’s a nice, time-boxed way to playfully explore some of Doctor Baer’s world. I don’t need to tie these objects into any particular plot, but if they seem especially interesting, I can. And yes, it’s another way Doctor Baer readers can support me.

As a kid I was all over products like this. Whether it was superhero pajamas or the He-Man dress up set, anytime I could feel like I was participating in the imaginary worlds I loved was a good time. I guess there’s something to it like what makes Halloween so fun. But it was also the notion of interacting with an object from that world. I remember getting my first light-up lightsaber in 1984. It was a cheap knockoff purchased at a vendor stand at the state fair, basically a flashlight with a green piece of cellophane over the bulb, and an opaque white tube attached to the bulb end. I couldn’t cut through walls, and the tube got irreparably bent after a few swings, but it helped transport me into the world of space wizards and monsters on a warm summer night in my grandparents’ back yard.

These things I’m making might not deliver such core memories or emotional charge. But I’m having fun sitting alongside that kid while making them.

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Technology You Can Trust!

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It’s been a while since I’ve posted a new episode of my Transformers podcast, but Hoover and I are still making fun images that you can put on things like tshirts and mugs. And here’s the latest!

For those not familiar with the G1 Transformers episode, here’s the story of Doctor Fujiyama, the Famous Scientist!

And here’s Hoover and me talking about the episode on the Four Million Years Later podcast:

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