Hopkins Duo Brings Literary Touch to Comic Books

C.J. Renner is an author who favors early 20th Century writers like James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. Jim Clark is a painter and drawing instructor trained in the fine arts. But when the two Hopkins natives joined together to work on a project, they chose to create a comic book instead of a museum piece or novel.

The result is a work that offers readers a fulfilling blend excitement and insight into human connections.

"Hopefully it satisifies readers who are more used to being able to look at allusions and themes and whatnot," Renner said. "We want to make it a page turner and not just a time waster."

(Bonus points for recognizing the visual allusion on the cover of issue No. 2.)

The Colliders, which had a second issue come out Wednesday, tells the story of a worker at the Large Hadron Collider, a journalist writing about the particle accelerator and an assassin sent to stop the experiment.

"There's love. There's murder. There's time travel," Clark said.

Renner, 30, started working on The Colliders in a graduate-level graphics novel course about a year-and-a-half ago. He and Clark had already become good friends after meeting in an art class that Clark was teaching at the . So about a year ago, Clark, 36, started putting pencil to paper to bring Renner’s concept to life.

The team self-published the first issue in November and started shopping it around. It’s now available in nearly every local comic store as well as online.

Renner and Clark have already started work in the series’ next chapter. You can keep apprised of their progress on The Colliders Facebook page.