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.
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 .
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 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:
- the history of the contemporary American West, specifically nuclear landscapes
2. everyday life with a brain injury and mental health issues
3. cute characters in awkward situations
I have an Etsy store where I sell stickers and my print comics, including The Desert Keeps Receipts, How to Visit Rocky Flats in 20 Confusing Steps, Snake of the Day,and Tomato Cafe. Some of my comics are distributed by Radiator Comics.
Here are some links to my comics:
I've given some talks about my comics work, which you can see below: