Comics Work

Hi! My name is B. Erin Cole, and I am a cartoonist and historian. I have been drawing comics my entire life, but only started focusing on comics more seriously and self-publishing in 2017. I've self-published five comics since 2021, and have two more coming out in 2024. I have tabled at SPX, MICE, Thought Bubble and shows in the Denver area (where I live). I sell comics on Etsy and am distributed by Radiator.

Tabling at the Small Press Expo, 2022 (from The Comics Journal)

I got back into comics after getting a traumatic brain injury that temporarily affected my ability to write but not my ability to draw. I started drawing stories about a character named Little Brain to communicate with friends and family about how I was recovering. I shared them online on social media and in Facebook support groups for people with TBIs and got really positive responses – comics made the often-invisible symptoms and challenges of brain injury visible. I started drawing more comics about my everyday life using Little Brain as a character, and published a guide to living with post-concussion syndrome (I will be putting out a revised edition of this comic in summer 2024). I am currently working on a book-length memoir about having and recovering from my brain injury.

For my day job, I am a professional historian who works in museums and makes exhibits. As I got more comfortable with using comics to tell stories, I started incorporating comics and history. I drew a comic about working in museums that has been assigned in university museum-studies and public-history classes, and then I shifted to telling more history in comics form. My current project is a graphic history/memoir about growing up in and around the nuclear industry in Colorado, and I've published a few smaller comics as part of the project. The Desert Keeps Receipts is a story about visiting the Nevada Test Site outside of Las Vegas on a tour bus full of snarky historians. After visiting Rocky Flats, a former nuclear-weapons production site outside of Denver that is now a wildlife refuge, I drew a comic about the stories the site tells and fails to tell. Both of these have been published in print form. I am currently finishing up a comic about underground nuclear testing in Colorado and the west, which will be published in spring 2024.

I also do other comics, too – cute comics about cats and snakes and tomatoes and such. You need a break from brain injury and nuclear history sometimes. A few of these have been printed, and are suitable for kids as well as appealing to adults.

So, to sum up, my comics have three main themes: