Greetings Loyal Airmen, and welcome to this week’s Flight Log. We start off this week with sharing a few photos from a local school appearance the Air Chief made two weeks ago at the Polaris Expeditionary Learning School here in Fort Collins at the invitation of arts teacher Ryan Grindel. We had visited Ryan’s class in past years along with comic artist Felipe Echevarria and once again, he joined us in this outing.

We spoke with two of Ryan’s classes back to back. In each hour, we broke the class in two groups. One speaking Felipe (see above) discussing comic art while the other half spoke with the Air Chief about writing.

Then after a half hour, we would swap groups. As ever the students were great, enthusiastic and eager to know more about what it was we did. We want to thank them all for having us, to Ryan also for sharing these pictures he took during the visit. Hopefully we’ll get to do it again next year.

Now for a super fun update on a project the Air Chief has been involved with. As most Loyal Airmen will recall, last Fall we taught a class on How To Write Comics & Graphic Novels at the Front Range Community College and had fie wonderful young writers as students. See image above. We had posted this picture at that time. Well before ending the eight week course, these five talented people each wrote a 5 pg script and the Air Chief went and recruited 5 professional artists to illustrate them. The idea being to publish a comic with their stories and it would be called FRONT RANGE TALES. So the artwork came in, first for Jon Bonjour’s tale, then Melisa Nguyen’s, then Aaron Powers, Adam Bruns and lastly Bransen Gage. All the while the Air Chief kept studying the comic pages looking for one image that might make a fun cover for this project. As it would turn out, the last art pages came in from artist Gary Kato who was drawing Bransen’s story FED UP.  (Bran is the young man in bottom row far left.) In that story was the panel above…and we fell in  love with it.  In the story our hero goes to a rather special hardware store that could only have existed in the Twilight Zone.  And so the Air Chief called upon his partner, artist Rob Davis to take that one panel….and use it as inspiration for our cover.

And here it is. As ever, Rob knocked it out of the ballpark and we’re delighted with it.  The comic itself is at the printers and we hope to have a small ceremony either at the college or local comic shop to debut it to these writers. You can well imagine how excited they are to see their first comic stories in print. We’ll be sure to bring our camera along and snap some pictures.

And there you have it for this week, Loyal Airmen, as ever thanks for stopping by and see you next week.

Ron – Over & Out!!