Also included is the introduction that was left out of the final book. Enjoy!

I did this in 2010 as part of the official 24 Hour Comics Day, the last one we had at what is now the Root Cellar in Columbia. The idea was for each hourly page to reflect an hour in a day of Keeley’s life. Starting at the start time of the event, I was supposed to keep pace and draw in that hour the same hour as in the comic. I actually went ahead of schedule and got around six hours ahead so I could take a nap at around 5:00AM in my car. Still, I got a full day’s worth of comics drawn and I think it is a neat story revolving around Keeley’s dual lives. Enjoy!

If you want more, you can poke around the comics section and look for the other new(ish) stuff that is now there.

Update: I’m guardedly optimistic that the comics section is working properly. Give the link a click in the header!

While on the way to drop of medical supplies, the Enterprise investigates an odd planetary phenomenon. Spock and his away team crash land on the planet (of course) and are attacked by what appear to be giants offscreen. Examining a left-behind spear, Spock makes this observation:

Folsom is a real place in New Mexico, and Folsom points are a real thing. This type of stone spearhead is very important to archaeology because the discovery of one of these points embedded within an extinct bison’s skeleton was the first definitive proof that humans were in North America during the Pleistocene Period, over ten thousand years ago. It was nice for the writer of the comic to include this piece of real archaeology in the comic. The problem is that Folsom points actually look like this:

Also, they are this big (or, more apt, this small):

From the Royal Alberta Museum. Scale is in centimeters!

Since it’s unlikely that the Spock, the Enterprise’s science officer, would not be so wrong in his assertion, my only conclusion is that Folsom points really are giant (even for giants) and shaped like trowels in the rebooted Star Trek universe.

Deal?

Looking first at the presentation aspect, let’s focus on the background section of my defense presentation, the parts that lead up to the results and conclusion. Given half and hour, my goal was to present a summary of my research journey. The audience was primarily my committee of five professors, all of whom familiar with my dissertation. The sequence is presented linearly from general to specific: I started at the anthropological question I had, then a description of the theories underlying research in this question, then my hypotheses given what previous research suggested, followed by the geographic region I studied, and lastly the indicators of health I used to to test the hypotheses.

{The first slides of my defense presentation. Click to enlarge.}

This presents one possible logical flow of information. However, I found that this sequence did not work for my next presentation. One of my advisors suggested that the MCAAAE attendees would better appreciate a talk that focused on the health indicators, since the audience was more familiar with the underlying archaeological theory but did not know as much as I did about the use of health indicators in bioarchaeology. Examining the defense presentation, it was clear to me that the old order of information would not work for such an audience. I would break their train of thought when I transitioned from bioarchaeology (something less familiar) to the Andean region (a much more familiar topic for this conference!) back to the health indicators (another less familiar topic). Also, the two less-familiar topics are related. I chose to reorder the slides so the health indicators are described after the general description of bioarchaeology, and before the section about the Andean region.

{First slides in my MCAAAE presentation. Click to enlarge.}

This sequence would put the less-familiar topics together so, combined, they help clarify each other, and then head into a less involved section so the audience can digest the new information. I also changed the background so people who saw the defense presentation would not be staring at the exact same slides.

Long story short, the presentation was a success and I received several comments that my talk was easy to follow and kept their interest. Success!

I encountered the same type of decision making as I was working on comic pages. In the pages I was working on at the time, Keeley is involved in a chase scene with a villain. Keeley’s car is sent careening down and offramp, where it rolls to a stop in a field in the middle of St. Louis (which totally exists in real life!). Keeley crawls out of her car and is confronted by the villain. In the section I’m focusing on in this post, Keeley gets the upper hand and runs across the field, with the villain restarting the pursuit. I knew this sequence of events of course, but looking at the actual page of drawings, the panels are not clear:

Original version of Keeley #4, page 10.

In the fourth panel (the wide one at mid-page), Keeley is hitting the villain with her backpack and by the next panel, Keeley is several yards away and the villain is on her motorcycle. So what happened in between? The most reasonable assumption, and the right one, is that Keeley took off running while the villain got back on her motorcycle. But, for the reader, there are many other possibilities. Did she walk, run, limp, or do a backflip to her bike? Also, what happened to the guns the villain was holding? Without limiting these subtle but meaningful possibilities, the reader has to stop to consider the sequence of events and leaves the story (Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics and Creating Comics have good sections about panel sequencing and reader interpretation).

On viewing the page as a whole, I decided it did not work. I had to change the page to make the sequence of events more explicit in showing what I had in mind. The following shows the final layout of page 10, in progress with flat colors but no shading or lettering:

{Final layout of page 10, with flat colors.}

At the bottom row of the page, I added two small panels to show what happens in between the two original panels. In one, there is a closeup of Keeley running, with her saying something about her plan to get back on the freeway. In the second panel, the villain is shown stumbling to her motorcycle (a side-detail for the observant is that she is opening one of her motorcycle’s storage boxes to put one of her guns away to explain her pose in the next panel). This version, to me as I consider the audience, is a lot more clear and keeps the reader in the flow of events in this fast paced scene.

I enjoyed how two aspects of my life had the same lesson to teach me. As I worked on both presentation-making and comic-making in the past weeks, they really helped each other develop into something better than if I had worked on one exclusively. Both activities are continuing: I have to make a presentation for the SAA meeting in a few weeks, tailoring my talk to another type of audience, and hopefully I’ll have several pages of Keeley comics to show here when I finish coloring page ten.

Later in the issue, Cassie is gazing at an image of Zeus on a Grecian urn when a passerby remarks “Seems out of place doesn’t it… Greek mythology in a museum of natural history.” That line stood out for me because I do find it interesting that when many of these natural history museums were built, the prevailing mindset was that human artifacts should be housed under the same roof as dinosaurs and animal specimens. For example, large portions of the American Museum of Natural History are devoted to human culture. In contrast, the San Diego Natural History Museum leaves the anthropology to the nearby Museum of Man. I agree more with the excising of human culture from natural history because culture is to be not natural in the sense of being part of the natural sciences. In fact, if human cultural is natural, than the world natural loses its meaning.

As I was doing web research for this blog post, I found another interesting tidbit: the Natural History Museum in London actually doesn’t have Greek artifacts! Like the case in San Diego, there is another museum for human artifacts in London: the British Museum. So the comic actually fudges the truth to make the point that Greek culture is not natural history. Or, perhaps in the DC universe the Natural History Museum does in fact have a classical archaeology collection. Crazier things have happened there.

The one page introduction pairs two characters from different stories: Karie from Collegetown and The Epic of Karie, and Keeley from her own story. I thought it would be fun for them to introduce my section in character (those who have followed my blogs from 1999 may remember a similar format for my first website!).

I wanted to lower the bar by intentionally making the art bad so the reader would be blown away by the following pages. The editor of the book thought the page was too rough and asked me to at least ink it. By that time I had moved on to working on something else but I had no problem leaving the page out since it would make a fun blog post. And here it is! Click the thumbnail below for the larger version.

Fun fact: the photograph of me in panel two was taken from one of the reference images I took using Photobooth as I modeled a pose for Ray of Sunshine, featured in the Anthology!