Comics

Dear Rodney

This is the story of two bungling roommates that communicate through passive aggressive, semi-legible notes. Follow Chollie on his misadventures as he fumbles through urban life with and without Rodney. 

Originally written by Cris Trout as a series of posts on Instagram (#DearRodney) and then adapted into a series of online comics by me. The comic book is a reworked version of those early comics (now in color!) with more adaptations of Cris’ scripts. Zany fun abound! Hopefully, you’ve never had roommates like these. You can buy your own print copy here or digital copy here.

Introducing It

“Introducing It” cover
“Introducing It” page 2
“Introducing It” page 3
“Introducing It” page 25
The “Copy Cat” game
“Introducing It” writing process
“Introducing It” page 6
“Introducing It” page 7

“Introducing It” is a graphic novel for early readers. The story is written exclusively utilizing sight words, sometimes called memory words, that children memorize rather than learn phonetically. Through repetition and the slow addition of these words throughout the book, in conjunction with visual context, “Introducing It” is a fun way to reinforce lessons and engage early readers. This project was conceived while assisting my oldest child through virtual kindergarten during the 2020/21 school year. During lulls in the school day we would play a game on a laminated paper with dry erase markers we called “Copy Cat”. I would draw/write something on one side and they would copy on the other, then we would switch. The character of “It” was born out of this game. In collaboration with my wife, Eleanor, we created this book and printed a run for that Kindergarten class. We’re presently trying to shop this book around, but I wanted to share a peek for now.

Superham

Imagine finding a treasure trove of drawings and comics that you made as a small child. That’s what happened to my friend Matt Sutter. He generously shared this bounty with me and I lovingly reimagined one of his childhood comic creations. I took some liberties by incorporating some addendums (within the graphic parentheses), otherwise the story is as it was written. This was a part of an anthology of artists riffing off of that same childhood comic.

Birthday Street

“Coolest Thing”
“Pally Boy”
“Rain Clouds”
“Ducks”

Birthday Street was a humor web comic that I had done with Kevin Cornell and Matt Sutter. We’d take turns creating comics based loosely on some element from the comic that had preceded it. This cycle would be parsed throughout the week and accumulated a lot of zany characters and unconventional directions. Sometimes we, as a group of creators, would cooperate and set up the next contributor with a decisive thread to help them with their comic. Sometimes there would be sabotage, where someone would throw a wrench in the gears. This push and pull made for a fun bit of play that also made for silly reading.