Interlude 1, “Conquering Harder Problems with Abstraction” in the CS 210 textbook

Interlude 2, “Careers in Computing,” in the CS 210 textbook

You can read the comic on OCJ’s website in (available in English and Spanish), and order free copies. 2,000 copies of the comic were distributed through preorders alone!

Plus, because I’m late to the post: Last year I worked on Consumer Confidence Comics #3, “Navigating Debt Collection in Court,” created with Oregon Consumer Justice, written by attorneys Kelly Jones and Michael Fuller. As always, working with Michelle Luedtke and the rest of the OCJ team was a delight.

You can see the whole thing on OCJ’s site in English or Spanish, read the supporting articles, and request free copies to distribute in your community (!)

Plus bonus development sketches:

I took a break from posting in 2025, and loved it. 2026 I’m challenging myself to post, like, once a month. I’m doing my best to be inspired by the metaphor of posting as planting a garden, as described by wonderful cartoonist Erika Moen. Each post is burying a seed; reposting is turning the soil. (Erika is much more of a gardener than I am. She plants abundant, lush gardens. Two years ago someone else planted tomatoes at my house and I remembered to water them once a day that summer; this is all of the gardening I have ever done.)

Instead of focusing the cursor, blinking, poised to eat my words and churn them into internet soup, I’m going to imagine my hands in dirt surrounded by things I love, here to watch them grow!

In the spirit of planting a healthy garden, here is something that delighted me this month:

I am terribly late to this game but Listers is a documentary about bird watching. Fully and entirely about bird watching. Also completely worth your time.

Note the new (and improved?) font that’s handling the Spanish and English language versions with ease. (Made through Calligraphr again; desperately want to go in with a higher power program to fix the kerning between individual letter combos; the fact that Calligrapher doesn’t do this is my biggest complaint with the program).

Also, I have a newsletter now! It’s this blog, but it arrives in your inbox if you like that kind of thing (I would hate it but respect your different preferences). It’s powered by Buttondown. Based on cadence of past posts I expect to be sending you an email, like, quarterly.

I feel obligated to mention that if you’re getting this as an email, you could pop my URL into your favorite RSS reader instead. I recommend the reader NetNewsWire if you exist in the Apple family of products. The next solo comic I hope to release is a vision for the internet as a useful information ecosystem for me, specifically (my system relies heavily on RSS feeds and having friends who tell me about the cool stuff they find). Look out for that in the new year.

Bonus: excerpts from my house New Years card, printed at the IPRC:

And with that, on to 2025!

Read the whole thing on Oregon Consumer Justice’s site.

There’s an English and a Spanish version of the comic. The font I use for comics (that I made using the site Calligraphr) didn’t have the necessary accents for Spanish, so I whipped out a new handwriting font for the project. It’s rounder and has less personality than my usual one, and the letters are tilting forwards and backwards with no rhyme or reason.

…so after delivering the comic I remade my normal handwriting font, added all the diacritical marks I’ll need going forwards (knock on wood) and then made an italics, bold, and bold italics version. They need a bit more work, but keep your eye on this space: the next comic I release will have an all-new, possibly-indistinguishable-from-the-old typeface.

“A graduate of the University of Oregon Medical School, Marie Equi was a homesteader, activist, lesbian, mother, and physician. Throughout her courageous life, she fought for labor reform, free speech, women’s suffrage, family planning, fair wages, and peace.”

Ed Dorsch, “She Risked Everything for Women, Workers, and Justice”, Oregon Quarterly, January 17, 2024

Process notes: Equi’s daughter was a pilot, so I looked up images of pilots in the Oregon Historical Society digital archives and found these photos of Amelia Earhart visiting Portland.

Drawing Marie Equi felt a little like returning to the Tingle zine. The only tragedy: yet again I’m so close and yet so far from using this extensive and amazingly well-indexed archive of Great Depression and WWII-era federally funded photography.

Describing the project to Shay Mirk: “I’m working on illustrations of this woman who was a doctor and openly lesbian in the early 1900s–“

Shay: “Oh, Marie Equi? I made a comic about her.”

(A brief google later, found it on Flicker. It’s excellent.)