Truth, Stranger Than Fiction: The Amazing Adventures of Babe Bean
(Cover Illustration)
11"x15"
2010
(Close up and gallery view: bottom image)

Truth, Stranger Than Fiction: The Amazing Adventures of Babe Bean
(Page 5)
11"x15"
2010
(Gallery view: top image)

Truth, Stranger Than Fiction: The Amazing Adventures of Babe Bean, is a work-in-progress which illustrates the life of Jack B. Garland (a.k.a Babe Bean, a.k.a. Elvira Mugarrieta), a trans man who lived in and around San Francisco at the turn of the 20th Century. The book will be a work of historical creative non-fiction, drawing as many facts as possible from careful research, illustrating the story through my own perspective as a genderqueer person looking at Jack's life over the distance of 100 years. Done in the style and color palette of the Ten Cent Heros (a.k.a "dime novels", the late-nineteenth-century precursor to Comic Books), the pages are drawn with brush and ink. While the pieces are intended to be finished and reproduced in book form, they were also created for the purpose of being displayed as individual pieces. The way this work fits with the theme of Chronotopia is that graphic narrative can be a unique medium for re-creating what we know about history while recording it through an intensely personal lens. I believe in comics and graphic narrative as a tool of survival and mode of time travel.

- Annie Murphy