I moved from Baltimore to New York City in May 2001 and was accepted into the Design and Technology program at Parsons. My thesis project was to explore interactive layouts in web comics.
The initial shock of the attacks on 9/11 and the lingering anxiety weighed heavily on everyone and everything. Feeling mentally blocked, I had difficulty developing a narrative for my web comics. In the end, I made a series of scenes that reflected moods and moments that I saw around me.
Inspired by the work of Dave McKean and Bill Sienkiewicz, I experimented with different means of drawing and inking when making my panel art. I scanned my handmade art into the computer and got to coding. Ultimately, visitors to a Flash website were provided with specific, content-driven means of manipulating my comics’ compositions to reveal new juxtapositions of images and text.
My interactive, digital comics were well received by my classmates and professors, but my interest in them was waning. I wanted to make print comics. So, after I graduated, I started reworking some of the artwork I made for my thesis project into static, single-page comics. I called the collection Momentos.
Momentos was self-published in the second (2012) and third (2014) editions of my comics anthology Sketches and Streams.
