2025 Poster Session

The National Park Service graphic stories are a series of one-page “graphic-novel” style educational guides on proper landscape care and maintenance around historically sensitive areas. The guides are used to teach seasonal and temporary workers at parks across the nation who are just learning about these principles for the first time. While other mediums can incorporate visual tools, the graphic stories are an all-encompassing package deal by incorporating illustration and narrative concurrently. As a result, workers can seamlessly learn about and visualize tools and safety precautions they need to apply in the field. The side by side relationship between text and visual within each individual “comic panel” delivers an efficient and comprehensive understanding of skills in one go that can not be replicated in other mediums. This tool is a fresh, new way to look at education and has made training more digestible and engaging. While simple visual guides have been utilized by the field, educating others on technical skills through mediums such as comics and graphic novels is very new. These stories are an effective tool to educate the new generation of conservators, preservationists and technicians by interweaving narrative and the visual.

The project is a result of collaboration between two National Park Service entities and a freelance historian and illustrator (me). The Olmsted Center for Landscape Preservation and the National Center for Preservation Technology and Training conceptualized the stories and authored the narratives. I worked closely with these teams to illustrate and lay out the stories in a clear and dynamic manner. I was brought on as the illustrator due to my dual practitioner knowledge, being both an illustrator and historic preservation professional. Illustrated digitally, each story incorporates a cohesive color palette and brush stroke style for uniformity within the series. Exploring topics such as “Pruning Trees”, “Tool Maintenance”, "Mowing” and “Hazardous Tree Response,” I conducted copious research and reference material collection to ensure all the subjects I was illustrating were as accurate as possible as the guides are technical, first and foremost.

The initial phase of the project resulted in ten stories surrounding landscape care and maintenance around historically sensitive areas. More stories are in the works to continue this topic in addition to historic masonry and cemetery care and maintenance. As the National Park Service’s training programs utilize the stories on the ground and in the field, it is a prime example of how we can use comics/graphic mediums to educate when the subject matter is so inherently visual.