Ian Williams, a Welsh doctor who makes comics under the pseudonym Thom Ferrier, is visiting for five weeks to collaborate on teaching, lecturing, writing, website developing, and comic-making. We met through his website, Graphic Medicine, and the first conference on Comics & Medicine in London two years ago.
The first week has been hectic! For the most part, we’ve been working in the mornings, then heading to Northwestern for teaching & meetings in the afternoons, then spending evenings in my studio. Between these activities we try to fit in some food, sleep, and exercise.
We started our collaboration with a few “Jam Comics.” The exercise is from Jessica Abel & Matt Madden’s Drawing Words and Writing Pictures. On a grid of nine boxes, each person has two minutes to do a panel, then you switch, doing the next panel of the other person’s comic. The end result is usually quite amusing, and it is a fun way to focus creative energy. The two main goals of these comics were to see how our visual styles would look together and for me to learn a new way to colorize in PhotoShop.
Here are our first two Jam Comics. Click to enlarge.
