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Jeremy Mullins, 1976-2009
posted June 16, 2009
 



The comics educator, podcast creator and webcomics cartoonist Jeremy Mullins has passed away, according to several alumni and those of an awareness of that program. He died on Saturday from multiple injuries while climbing in the Catskills near Kaaterskill Falls. Mullins held an MFA from the sequential art department at Savannah College Of Art And Design (SCAD), where he won an outstanding thesis award in 2005 for his "Digital Delivery and the Empowerment of the Sequential Artist" and where he would teach.

A profile of his thesis says that Mullins was a political cartoonist who came to SCAD to learn how to tell stories with his art, and that his thesis was in part a response to worsening conditions in the comics industry. His webcomic, Sweetwater Is An Asshole, frequently depicted events that were comics-related or from the late Mullins' life related to comics, and he ran the school's Seqalab podcast. He previously worked for the Savannah Morning News.

Mullins was a popular professor who connected with his students by virtue of his personality, his heavily enthusiastic passion for the comics medium and his belief in the ability of his students to contribute to the art form. A mini-comic by one of his students given the educator at the end of a mini-comics class here. He spent the winter of 2009 in France, teaching for the school.

Former student Michael Jewell wrote CR: "He was not necessarily a comics celebrity, his career in teaching had even only begun, but I'm writing through tears to tell you that his presence has impacted a chunk of this generations' young cartoonists. He oversaw the birth of my first graphic novel last winter in the wind-swept valleys of Southern France and it breaks my fucking heart to tell you that he was just a week shy of seeing it finished. He was generous with all his students, but it meant so much to know that he believed in me."

Jeremy Mullins was 32 years old.