J. Marshall Smith is a cartoonist, illustrator, and educator based in Baltimore (making us de facto neighbors) who came up through the disciplines of painting and printmaking before finding his way to comics. And that background shows, because his work doesn't look like it comes from someone who learned to draw from comics, but rather from someone who developed a way of looking at things and then figuring out what comics could do with that. He's built his readership carefully and honestly – self-publishing collections of comics and art through Kickstarter, mailing drawings to his Patreon supporters, teaching, tabling at festivals, doing the quiet unglamorous work of caretaking that relationship between creator and audience. He recently tabled at the MoCCA festival in New York, launching a new collaborative comic called The Vanishing Man with illustrator Katherine Lams – about running into your bad ex in a nursing home, about frailty and memory and what we do and don't owe each other. But it's the topic of his debut graphic novel Testament, published by Bulgilhan Press (think bull-gee-lan) and available now, that brings him to the show today. Testament follows an android caretaker – designation: Testament – designed to tend to the members of the Order of the Abundant Grace of the Cosmic Christ during their monastic and scholarly existence studying a distant planet. As the all-female Order dwindles and only one Sister remains, Testament is left to reckon with faith, grief, memory, and the prospect of immortality in a solitary but spiritual infinity.

[This episode is number 834 in a series.]

CHAPTERS

00:00 – Intro 01:59 – MoCCA Festival Recap 03:35 – The Vanishing Man Collaboration 09:53 – Teaching Life And Time 11:51 – An Unprecious Art Philosophy 16:25 – Designing Testament Faces 29:04 – Origins And Faith Questions 36:40 – What's In A Name? 41:59 – Faith and Science 52:22 – Designing the Plots 01:02:31 – Revisiting the Setting 01:05:00 – What's Next Projects 01:07:37 – Freelance Life 01:28:21 – Outro