A Colorado electric cooperative communicator has found a colorful, creative way to deliver serious safety messages to members.

Delta-Montrose Electric Association’s Teresa Shishim is the creator of the Electric Strip, a cartoon featured in the Montrose-based co-op’s monthly PowerLines newsletter. The main character is Safety Crow, who swoops in unannounced to deliver safety tips to unassuming members in potentially hazardous predicaments.

“Safety is our most important core value,” said Shishim, DMEA’s creative services and marketing specialist. “The comic was a fun way to get some pretty serious messages out there.”

“As a communicator, I find that it’s easier to engage people if you ‘edu-tain’ them,” she said.

Until now, Shishim, an illustrator, graphic designer and watercolor artist, was neutral on comics and graphics novels. “I was never interested in them as a kid. But I do remember my grandma laid out Archie comics for us grandkids in her reading nook.”

Shishim hit on the format while sketching out ideas incorporating safety-related content from NRECA’s Straight Talk and Safe Electricity, an advocacy group in Illinois. One day, the comic idea just “popped in my head. I thought about transforming these messages into comics because they seem a bit more engaging.”

Topics of the cartoons have ranged from “Firewise Family,” about leaf burning, to “Merry and Bright,” about pre-checking Christmas tree lights, to “Stay Put, Unless…” about downed pole safety following a car crash.

Safety Crow is the strip’s breakout star and appears on T-shirts and stickers. Shishim created him as an homage to the creature’s ubiquity. “You see them hanging out on our power lines, and they’re so intelligent.”

The strip is featured on the co-op’s social media channels and is being compiled into hard copies to engage with youth audiences at career fairs and school safety days. This year, DMEA’s goal is to aggregate the strips by season and print four books. CEO Jack Johnston even appears in the spring version.

The co-op’s 2026 annual meeting has a superhero/comic book theme, where members will get hard copies of their annual report in comic form in their swag bags.

“We’re taking it to the next level.” Shishim said. “People love it. I talk to our employees and members in passing, they tell me they’ve seen it, and they think it’s awesome.”