In April of this year (2025), I had the opportunity to collaborate with anthropologist Prof. Thomas Stodulka from the University of Münster on a call for submissions to an academic journal focused on comics and anthropology.
As the acceptance and publication of our work are still pending, I’m only sharing two pages here.
For this project, I created a custom typeface based on my own handwriting. The illustrations were made digitally but emulate a watercolor style. My aim was to evoke the feel of ethnographic field notes and to explore a way of presenting my work that merges both disciplines.
This piece is based on an article written by Prof. Stodulka, originally published in the book Affective Societies: Key Concepts, edited by Jan Slaby and Christian von Scheve (Routledge, 2019).
And here a first sketch of the second page so you can see a bit of the process.
Here’s one more teaser page.
As always, when reading academic texts, I take my own notes—this helps me enter into a dialogue with the researcher.
By working through the ideas they aim to communicate, I can engage more deeply with the content and later contrast my interpretation during a personal meeting. This process allows me to better understand the core message before illustrating the first pages.
This is the alphabet I originally hand-drew, then digitized and turned into a font for use on the computer with the software BirdFont.
While developing this project, I tried to address the subtle differences that make handwriting feel authentic. I carefully considered how letters like ll, ss, and ee appear in common words such as collect, process, address, or feeling. By allowing each repeated letter to vary slightly, the font captures the irregular beauty of real handwriting, rather than the mechanical repetition of standard digital type.
