Earlier this year, Josh Neufeld received an Eisner Award nomination for his webcomic, Bahrain (which I reviewed here). Now, the webcomic has opened up an even bigger opportunity for Mr. Neufeld: the Knight-Wallace Fellowship, a grant from the University of Michigan “for a full academic year of sabbatical studies at the University’s campus, with twice-weekly seminars and other educational opportunities.” Robot 6 elaborates:

“My study plan is to extensively research Bahrain’s Pearl Revolution, which I did a short piece about for Cartoon Movement,” Neufeld said in an e-mail. “I plan on taking courses in the history of the Persian Gulf, Islam (specifically the Sunni-Shia divide), and the language and culture of the region. The ultimate goal is to produce a long-form comics-format book on the topic.”

I always love it when webcomics are used as a starting point for something even greater. Neufeld’s accomplishment is a pretty important touchtone in using comics in the field of journalism: “Neufeld is the first comics journalist to be offered this fellowship, and the second comics journalist to receive any sort of American journalism fellowship.”

Thought I’d like to try something a little different. I end up getting a stack of recommendations, and I have a hard time getting to them all. So I’m going to start tossing up links to comics that I haven’t yet read nor reviewed, hopefully giving them a little publicity in the short term. (It doesn’t mean I won’t get to ‘em eventually, though.) Every Friday this month, I’ll put up a link and a description of the comic via the “About” page.

Here’s the first one, which was shared to me — quite uniquely, I might add — via the Draw Something game.

Small Change by Drew Springer

“Small Change is a webcomic. Small Change has no set topic. Small Change updates every Tuesday and Thursday.”