My suggestion, assuming my AotG followers ever listen to me, is to go here and do what you must.  Seriously, find some change in your pocket and put it somewhere that is worthy.  I find I can’t help but support incredible artists, especially those willing to tell a beautiful story for children and adults alike.  So hurry and add this to your ‘what I did in 2014 that was worth something’ list.

Ok, now that you’ve made the world a better place, I’ll do the same by talking a bit about the art of Travis Hanson.

Trav, as he’s known to me, decided he wanted to do a comic, but he didn’t have any place to put it.  Luckily for him, and so many creative people, the Internet gave him the opportunity to share his talent and vision, for free, with people across the globe.  Thus, a few years back, The Bean was born.  Fast forward to now and you’ve got Fifteen Chapters and 579 comic pages of incredible fantasy adventure all at your fingertips for ZERO dollars and ZERO cents!

Couple that with a gallery filled with every kind of incredible Watterson/Calvin inspired imaginative adventure and you can’t help but keep clicking page after page and image after image because you are truly transported to places that rekindle something inside that you might have thought you’d lost along the way.

That is the power of Trav’s work, to keep you imagining, to keep you young, and to make you believe again.  The level of inspiration here is epic, and I have to say my son’s room is ground zero for the incredible colors and black & whites I’ve managed to collect over the years.

Trav is someone who often says, ‘Find something you love, and dedicate yourself to it, and never let a dream stay out of reach.’  Words to live by, and certainly Trav has done so, starting with an empty page and then filling it up again and again until a full universe now spills out all over the digital landscape of the web.

I, for one, can’t get enough of what Trav has to offer, and I believe he’s still only scratched the surface of where he can go.  It’s my hope that I can go with him and I know there are many more seats available if you want to go as well.

Rarely do you get an opportunity to directly impact an artist’s life, but with Trav his door is always open, be it for commissions, free reading, or just a gift for a child who likes to dream like you did back in the day.

Thanks for reading and I’ll look for you all next week on Art of the Genre!

If you like what you read in Art of the Genre, you can listen to me talk about publishing and my current venture with great artists of the fantasy field or even come say hello on Facebook here. And my current RPG Art Blog can be found here.