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ABOUT

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GRAPHIC DESIGN

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PAINTING

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PRINT MEDIA & PHOTOGRAPHY

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SCULPTURE

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VISUAL NARRATIVE

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@bu_visualarts

@bu_graphicdesign

@bostonpainting

@pmp.bu
@bostonsculpture
@buvisualnarrative

VISUAL NARRATIVE

www.sandeepbadal.com

@sndpbdl

he/him

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Sandeep Badal
PHANTOM IN A JAR

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Sandeep Badal is a visual storyteller from Kathmandu, Nepal, working in comic books, illustration, and filmmaking.

Phantom in a Jar is a story of a queer immigrant writer-illustrator based in New York, working on his debut graphic novel, who finds himself haunted by the entity of his recently deceased father. As he struggles to come to terms with his grief, the conversations he never had with his father when he was alive start manifesting into guilt, affecting his work and his relationships.

Interspersed with Vinay’s story is the comic book that he is working on, featuring a trans-femme superhero who starts questioning her role as a hero in a society that has suddenly started treating her like a villain. 

Phantom in a Jar explores the themes of identity and belonging, grief, guilt, and healing through visuals that explore the mundane and melancholic to the absurd and surreal. These themes intersect to create a narrative that delves into the complexities of human emotions and relationships.

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www.laflecheart.com

@laflechejeannette

she/her

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Lafleche Giasson
HEARTWASHED

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Lafleche Giasson is an artist and graphic novelist living in Boston. At age 17, she escaped a cult and is now doing the real work of healing from it. Her narrative work explores intergenerational trauma and complex post-traumatic stress disorder through compassionate visual storytelling. Lafleche’s oil paintings in portraiture and landscape have been on display in art galleries and sold to private clients by commission.

Heartwashed is a graphic memoir about a girl born in the fourth generation of a cult, a close-knit community of families bound together by the tenets of faith, loyalty, and obedience. To believe is to obey. To obey is to belong. To belong is to be loved. 

When Lafleche’s father is suddenly and mysteriously excommunicated, Lafleche, her siblings, and her mother are moved across the continent to restart life without him in the name of God. To survive in the cult, young Lafleche must detach herself from her love for her father. In a generations-old culture of psychological and emotional abuse, Lafleche is challenged to find a safe source of love and struggles to develop her individual identity without betraying her family. When her father returns seven years later to uncover the truth of his disappearance, Lafleche must choose between belonging and freedom.

A tender coming-of-age story, Heartwashed illuminates the heartache of loving and forgiving those who hurt us. This book does not take revenge; it offers compassion, and propounds that real love begins in honesty. 

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www.camilakerwin.com

@camilakerwin

she/her

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Camila Kerwin
THE LEADING CAUSE

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Camila Kerwin is a journalist who makes comics and radio. She is a regular comics contributor to the Boston Globe. Her work has appeared in the Miami Herald, Marketplace, NPR’s Morning Edition, and elsewhere. She illustrated WLRN’s Edward R. Murrow Award-winner, Class of Covid.

In 2020, for the first time in history, firearms became the leading cause of death for Americans under 18. The Leading Cause is a nonfiction collection of profiles of five kids who have died of gun violence or gun negligence.

The book does not belabor the circumstances of the kids’ deaths. Instead, it focuses on key moments that paint a picture of who they were as people. It also interweaves a historical narrative about how gun culture and legislation has evolved throughout US history, often in the background of the kids’ lives. It highlights key turning points and characters who have played a role in the proliferation of guns in the US, including the 19th-century formation of the National Rifle Association; the NRA’s dramatic transformation from a sportsmen’s organization to a gun-lobbying juggernaut; the backstory of former NRA president Marion Hammer; the 2008 Supreme Court case D.C. v. Heller, which concluded that the 2nd Amendment protected an individual’s right to bear arms, not just a state’s right to form a militia; and the systematic blocking of federal child access prevention laws and other gun safety policy.

The Leading Cause adheres to a high journalistic standard of accuracy, verification, and an honest handling of evidence cited by both gun control supporters and gun proponents. Above all, it is a tribute to the lives of these five kids, and the loved ones they’ve left behind. 

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www.akosartwork.com

@ako.s_art

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Ariel Cheng Kohane
ḤAI NOON

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Hi! I’m Ariel Cheng Kohane. I’m a cartoonist, filmmaker, and rubber duck enthusiast from Boston. Most of my stories reflect my experiences as a half-Chinese Jew and revolve around biracial/multiethnic characters. When I’m not stressing over deadlines, I’m usually playing videogames, watching cartoons, or stressing over something else.

Ḥai Noon is a fictional story about Chinese and Jewish cowboys in 1880s America. The word Ḥai means life in Hebrew, and I used it to make a pun out of the Western high noon trope. Both Chinese and Jewish people greatly impacted American history during the Wild West era, but these stories are rarely taught in history classes, if mentioned at all. I wanted to highlight their incredible contributions to the nation we live in today. The cast of characters I built are more than just cowboys on an adventure; they’re individuals with hopes, flaws, and secrets. They can also be more than a little bit silly at times because I wanted the story to be fun as well as serious(ish).

I’ve selected character art and final colored pages for this catalogue. I hope you enjoy my work! L’chaim and ganbei!

@chaosbybelle

she/her

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Izzy Rousseau
SUPERFREAK

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Izzy Rousseau is a comic artist whose work is magical, macabre, zany, humorous, and occasionally uncomfortably sexy. Her comics feature neurodivergent women as main characters. It is her goal to create comics that break stigmas surrounding the stereotypes of how society perceives people like her. Izzy has been published in the award-winning all-girl comic anthology series, Dirty Diamonds and ran a successful Kickstarter campaign for her comic book, Metanoia. She hopes her newest comic Superfreak is also a hit!

Superfreak follows the plight of two teenage girls growing up in a not-so-distant future where superpowers are illegal (unless you have the money to be a villain). They discover that their crass, cruel, functioning alcoholic history teacher Mr. L is an unwanted vigilante whose mastery of his superpowers is piss-poor at best. They use the knowledge of his secret identity to blackmail him into taking them with him on all his misadventures. Along the way, the trust between the unexpected trio grows. Harper and Gia discover who they want to be in a world where injustice exists around every corner, while Mr. L learns how to be a better teacher and what it really means to be a superhero. Superfreak satirizes superhero tropes while addressing modern day issues including government and police corruption, classism, wealth hoarding, patriarchy, religious extremism, and discrimination.

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www.sadies.work

@goodjobsadie

she/they

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Sadie Saunders
SPILLED MILK, AND OTHER REASONS TO CRY AT WORK

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Sadie Saunders is a comic artist, barista, and designer who likes telling narratives that are driven by humor and create a sense of joy and unease. Using bright colors, wiggly lines, and an abundance of jokes, Sadie creates narratives that are hilarious and strikingly relatable.

Spilled Milk, and Other Reasons to Cry at Work is a graphic memoir about finding yourself through work and the people we surround ourselves with. Sadie is 20-something-year-old who, after a long struggle with her health, finds a barista job through an old friend she has a rocky history with. Confident she won’t stay long at this job, Sadie is surprised when Village Coffeehouse turns out to be a place with a complex cast of characters, including fellow artists, difficult customers, and an arrogant boss. Sadie must navigate a mixture of mundane and absurd situations with her newfound friends who challenge her to grow into a more confident and thoughtful person. By the end of her six years at the shop, she realizes that her little community functions as a transient space between people and where they’re meant to be.

Tying together themes of community, identity, and coming of age in your twenties, Spilled Milk contains twenty-four pages of finished artwork, additional pages of thumbnails and sketches, full chapter outlines, and a completed book pitch.

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www.ellascheuerell.com

@ellaaudreyart

she/her

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Ella Scheuerell
WHO CREATED THESE BEINGS WITH EYES THAT LOOK AT EACH OTHER?

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Ella Scheuerell is a storyteller and cartoonist who creates with the mission of destigmatizing the conversation around mental health. Through emotive dialogue and poetic narratives, her stories tenderly explore the sometimes-uncomfortable truths beneath the surface of the lives of people diagnosed with mental health disorders, including her own experience with anxiety and depression. 

Despite the sometimes difficult or painful topics of exploration, Ella finds a way to maintain a vibrant levity and stability throughout her stories. Her artistic process visually symbolizes this balance: the use of raw colored pencil marks indicate that every mark on the page is an important contribution in the journey of one’s own becoming, bright watercolors provide comfort and light, and black ink lines ground each page in contrast. Moments of collage and mixed media encourage viewers to celebrate individuality and imperfection.

For her thesis, a graphic memoir in progress titled Who Created These Beings, Ella focuses on themes of family mental health, trauma, and resilience. In this true story, readers follow Ella through the pandemic and the pain of tragically losing her mentally ill uncle Chris to suicide. As she grieves in the midst of isolation, Ella finds herself facing her own existential questions about life and purpose, all the while drawing and writing as a mechanism of survival. The heaviness begins to lighten when Ella finds an enormous pile of hand-drawn, unpublished, shaky-lined cartoons that Chris left behind under his bed in a plastic bag, serving as a window to his sensitive and quirky soul. The pebbles and rocks that previously tripped Ella up in her mid-twenties begin to form a distinct and safe path as she traverses toward the new chapter of her thirties, guided by the invisible hand of Chris in every drawing and challenge she faces in finding love for herself. 

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@avanjivaze

she/her

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Avanji Vaze
VRINDAVAN HOUSE 

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Avanji Vaze is a storyteller, artist, and researcher. Her Indian influences give her stories a tone of folklore. Her work weaves complex themes such as empathy, identity, activism, and relationships with humor, lightness, and ease.

Vrindavan House is set in a utopian world taken over by sophisticated mushrooms that have solved humanity’s most pressing problems. The rich didn’t like this, so they left and the woke artists stayed behind. Seven artists cohabit together in this new world. Inevitably, they form a loving bond with one another. As their relationships grow, so do their complexities. This results in a labyrinth of emotions such as jealousy, affection, anger, and joy. They try to resolve this conflict by having a cooking competition to determine a winner to be the center of their polycule.

Inspired by her brief stint of living in a house full of lovable misfits in the midst of a global pandemic, this story celebrates the messiness of human relationships, adaptability, and community and poses the question: what do we create when there’s no audience to create for? 

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www.xinhui-wang.com

@xinhuiwang_

she/her

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Xinhui Wang
SUNFLOWERS NEVER FADE AT NIGHT

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Xinhui Wang is an illustrator and storyteller. She likes illustrating with color and texture and exploring different techniques and mediums. Xinhui’s works mainly depict warm stories, and she hopes to bring more warm feelings through her art.

Did you ever have any special dreams when you were a child? Sunflowers Never Fade at Night is about a girl’s illusory and beautiful dream and is also a story about healing loneliness. The protagonist is a girl who feels lonely. One night she has a dream. In that dream, she meets a friend, who is a star. They spend a wonderful time together and don’t go home until the sun rises. Childhood feelings are beautiful and fragile, and with the help of the star, the girl regained hope. The star protects the girl’s lovely dreams. During the journey, there are not only stars, but shy little animals, blooming sunflowers, and swaying grasses on the roadside as well. They bring her a warm and touching world in the dark, where they create many unforgettable memories together, and therefore they live in each other’s hearts forever. Everyone has their own dreams in their hearts; some are happy, and some are sad. Xinhui hopes this story can bring sweet dreams and hope to everyone.

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