Tim McLaughlin-

My name is Tim McLaughlin Jr. I grew up in Sharon, PA until my mid twenties. During that time I grew up in church, left church, dropped out of art school and then community college, picked up and dropped some bad habits, ruined a perfectly good friendship by turning it into a wildly unhealthy engagement and then watching that fall apart, occasionally dodged some minor warrants for a while, and eventually found myself back in church. I moved to Boston against my better wishes in 2008 in order to join a church planting team that had half a plan and about $20, which I knew I was being drawn to take part in. Since then, I’ve been kicking around Massachusetts, where I met my wife, Carol, who took away my smoking addiction and has given me three kids. Seemed a fair trade.

 

 

In 2012 I felt the call to enter ministry, and began training for that through whatever avenues I had available. Meanwhile, I had been toying occasionally with some ideas I had for comics, though I didn’t feel my art was up to the task. It was 2015 when I was finally convinced, partly by Carol and partly by the documentaries Dear Mr. Watterson and Stripped, to take the plunge and just try my hand at giving my comics to the world. Through my first project, Fatebound, I connected with the small press comics community and began to see the way that comics, especially webcomics, were undervalued as art forms. I watched in early 2017, while recovering from a failed church plant and sorting out what I should do next, as one group talked about putting together a podcast specifically for the small press comics community, but that idea fizzled out. Having recently found that I enjoyed working on a podcast through my contributions to Hexes & Bows (a podcast about tabletop gaming), I decided to just do it myself. Exploring Comics was born from that and launched its first episode in the spring, while I was also working on going back to school to get a degree in pastoral studies. Currently I’m a ministry student, a webcomic creator, a freelance writer, a husband, a father, and a podcaster, who spends his Sundays serving in one church and helping to plant another.

 

You can find all of my projects at http://www.temclaughlin.com