My Big Fat Notebook on the cover of Publisher’s Weekly!

Holy crow! The educational book series I helped illustrate, The My Big Fat Notebook series, is the cover story in Publisher’s Weekly this week!

I’m freaking out a little bit!

A State of the Comic Address

Hello, everybody still reading here! I wanted to take a minute out of this wonderful three-day weekend to say hi and acknowledge that yeah… there haven’t been any new comics in quite awhile. In fact, there haven’t been any NEW comics from me since mid-December, making this the longest break from writing about my classroom that I’ve ever taken in my career as a teacher! It feels absolutely crazy to me.

New comics are coming. I should lead with that. I have a sketchbook of ’em sitting right next to me. I want to build up a decent reserve of them, inked and scanned, before I start regularly posting again.

I don’t know that I am comfortable going into the whys and wherefores of this dry spell – certainly moving to the new position has had something to do with my sudden lack of productivity. I alluded to this a bit in a comic over the holidays and I plan on articulating some of my work frustrations in future strips… but while I”m in the thick of things, it doesn’t seem like exactly the right time.

That’s not to say the horizon is completely empty. Far from it! I still have my regular gig for Ohio Schools Magazine I’ll be keeping up with. I also have the two books I illustrated for Workman Publishing coming out in a few months. This are really exciting comic-adjacent things I’m going to be talking more about in upcoming weeks… but the fact remains, most of you come here for the 9-5 of a working teacher and I simply don’t have those comics directly in the pipeline as I write this. I hope I’ve built enough of an audience here to be a little patient with my slow output. In the meantime, there are archives of the last five years of teaching comics available here for your perusal.

I hope the next time I’m posting, it’s some new strips! Everyone hang in there:)

Not Teaching Comics: I’ve never seen Downton Abbey

With tonight’s premiere of the final season of Downton Abbey here in the US, I thought I’d take the opportunity to rerun this weird comic I did about the show a few years ago.

I still have not seen more than a few minutes of Downton Abbey at a stretch.