I tell stories about monsters.

When I was a kid I loved the classic monster stories like those about Frankenstein and Dracula, or the mythological stories about Egyptian, Greek, and Roman monsters like the Minotaur and the Kraken. I also loved the stories about modern mythological monsters like those in Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings”, C.S. Lewis’ Narnia creatures, the Teen Titan’s Cyborg (Wolfman and Perez’s take on Frankenstein) or Raven (based on a daughter of the devil archetype). Frank Miller’s Elektra held a special place in my heart because she was a woman who chose to become a monster.

I write stories and compose music about these things because they provide a really flexible format to talk about difficult topics in a fun way. We need to find ways to communicate our ideas about the world in a way people can hear those ideas rather than getting bogged down in straw man arguments about political positions that one may or may not possess. These stories are my solution to that problem.

I got interested in music and comics in high school, I’ve done work circling both topics for years including teaching at music and art schools. I’ve written, played, and recorded music for stage and screen. I’ve designed, drawn, photographed, and video recorded images, ads, and stories for a ton of clients.

Though I’ve been threatening to do it for years, in 2018 I got serious about making original content of my own. The fruits of that labor began coming to fruition in 2019 with the publication of Man Grooves.

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Alan O.W. Barnes is a storyteller from Damascus, Virginia who currently lives in Knoxville, TN with his wife Kim and their daughter Keira.

Alan is over-educated, with masters degrees from Belmont University in Music Composition, as well as the Savannah College of Art and Design in Sequential Art (the fancy term for drawing comics).

Alan has made ads for giant companies and the fabulously famous. He taught at one of the largest art schools in the country (Ai), he has worked for accrediting bodies, designed curriculum for a host of colleges including the Atlanta Institute of Music and Media, Georgia Perimeter College, and the Art Institutes. He is now an Associate Professor of Digital Art at Johnson University.