Since teaching in Scotland in 2024, I have been working on a passion project called “Mind Yer Head.” For the 2024 ABQ Zine Fest, I printed some of these comics as a four-color risograph zine. Somewhere between travelogue, poetry, and fluxus comics, these comics dive into wild swimming, summer strawberries, and more.

Since 2022, I have participated in fourteen fifteen gallery’s annual “Fun-a-day” show, where you embark on a creative exercise for each day of January. My first project, diary comics (“Looking for a Charm of Finches”) grew into Unfiltered: A Cancer Year Diary. Here are a few more of those projects.

2025

This year I focused on drawing 31 daily comics. Many of them explore topophilia, or love of place.

2024 – Cancer Center Top 40

As an “artist-in-medicine” at the University of New Mexico Cancer Center, I initiate creative encounters with patients, their friends and family, and the medical professionals who serve them. In the waiting rooms and infusion suites, I facilitate drawing or poetry activities, offer art supplies to help pass the time and transport people, and spend a fair amount of time just chatting and listening.

One day, I asked patients to help create a Cancer Center “Top 40” song list. People told me the songs that pumped them up, that gave them the energy or courage to meet the day. They told me the songs that brought them back to a moment in time when they were happy. A song that was on the radio when they met their spouse. They shared songs that seem to describe what the chemo experience felt like. Some of the songs they shared are somber and reflective, vibrant and celebratory, or playful; some might seem like an odd selection or a perfect one, depending on your mood, the day, the journey. This series of abstract comics is a visual representation and a manifestation of “holding space” for the individuals I’ve had the privilege to interact with. Here are some samples.

In 2023, I wrote a haiku each day and illustrated it with a collage.

A daily practice of haiku and collage comics

More comics:

You can find “Mile High, Mile Deep,” a comic about the copper mining pit in Butte, MT, in the 2022 climate edition of Ecotone magazine. For this comic, I made my own homemade copper verdigris ink from a broken swamp cooler tube.

AUTOBIOGRAPHIX

From diary comics to graphic memoir, autobiographix encompasses the full range of nonfiction comics. Along with Nora Hickey, I edit a biweekly newsletter about this genre of comics at autobiographix.substack.com.

We post interviews with comics creators, reviews of graphic memoirs, research and discoveries about the history of autobio comics, musings about story and style, and share news about related events and opportunities. Sign up at the site to have it delivered directly to your inbox.

Autobiographix

Writing about Comics

“Troubling the Sequential Image: The Poetry Comics of Bianca Stone,” Studies in Comics (Bristol: Intellect, Vol. 13): 47-65.
“My Comics Collaboration with DALL-E,” Hyperallergic
“A Goalkeeper Scores: Kelcey Ervick Illuminates the Impact of Title IX in THE KEEPER,” Solrad.
“Memory Re-Drawn: Julie Doucet’s Time Zone J,” The Rumpus.
“Is Your God Not Cool with That? A Review of RAVE by Jessica Campbell,” Solrad.
“From Panel to Platform: Women Comics Creators on Instagram,” Women in Media: A Reference Handbook. Edited by Amy Damico. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO.
“Brooding, Obsessing, and Drawing: The Diary Comics of Keiler Roberts,” Another Chicago Magazine.
“When Ideals Meet Reality: The Contradictions by Sophie Yanow,” The Rumpus.

Comics Presentations