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 is episode 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