From Blacksburg to Libya

February 25, 2011 12:36 PM

Virginia Tech geography Professor John Boyer has already enjoyed local notoriety for his comic book styled super hero alter-ego The Plaid Avenger. His 2006 text book raised controversy for including cocktail recipes along with a bombastic writing style and caricatures of world leaders illustrated by Klaus Shmidheiser, an alumi. This week their collaborative effort received the ultimate compliment— Libyan protestors have used Klaus' image of Gadhafi in signs and effigies. Here's a video interview.
posted by fontophilic (9 comments total)

He's an instructor, not a professor. But cool stuff.
posted by Ironmouth at 12:48 PM on February 25, 2011

He writes like Stan Lee. I'm not sure that's a good thing.
posted by empath at 1:02 PM on February 25, 2011

Interesting. It was probably just the first pic they found on google. Reminds me of 2001 when pro bin-laden protesters used a picture of Bin Laden and Bernie
posted by delmoi at 1:17 PM on February 25, 2011

This ranks up there with the evil burt/osama bin laden posters from a few years ago. Which snopes confirms as true. Interesting.
posted by k5.user at 1:21 PM on February 25, 2011

Oh, holy shit. I go to Tech and one of my classmates interviewed him recently for her research. This is probably relevant...
posted by Tesseractive at 1:28 PM on February 25, 2011

Delmoi beat me to the Bin Laden/Bert comparison.

So I'll content myself by saying that I'm a graduate of Tech's Geography department, and it wasn't nearly that interesting when I was there.
posted by Naberius at 2:14 PM on February 25, 2011

If he knew how to write, it'd be the Argyle Avenger (alliteration. it's what's for dinner)
posted by oneswellfoop at 2:21 PM on February 25, 2011

The plaid comes from a (cheesy) line about how maps shouldn't look like neatly colored in shapes with distinct colors, but more like plaid-- things are more complicated than they may seem.

Having read Boyers text book, he realy could use an editor. His vblogs doubly so.

Mostly I wanted to share how these two are having a neat moment thanks to the internet and the interconnected world we live in.

Also, Klaus is a talented (and nice) guy who deserves some wider exposure.
posted by fontophilic at 3:10 PM on February 25, 2011

What a surreal experience that must be, to find your work on display in a spontaneous revolution half the world away. I'm pretty envious.
posted by endless_forms at 3:25 PM on February 25, 2011 [1 favorite]