Over the last month I’ve been doing research for this graphic novel about my father’s childhood growing up in a work colony in Greeley, Colorado. My goal is to make it look and feel like Colorado in the 1950′s. I am scouring the internet and looking into books to find images to get a better sense of the history in this region. I’m looking at maps and trying to get a greater idea of what it was like in Northern Colorado during the middle of the twentieth century. I’m also concerned with fashion and what buildings looked like to make the backdrop more authentic. Most of all I am interviewing my father and his family to document their story.
I did get a chance to contact a woman named Sarah L. Brooks a school teacher that hosts this wonderful little website about the history of Greeley.
I also read this great book called The White Gold Laborers by Jody and Gabriel Lopez. This is a story of the Spanish Colony a private housing project built by The Great Western Sugar Company for Spanish/New Mexican/Mexican laborers to keep them from living in Anglo populated Greeley in the 1920′s.
The images of the Stoop Laborers and the Colony house in this blog post are drawings I made from the photo illustrations in “The White Gold Laborers” to get a better idea of how the comic will look.
