symboliamag:

The theme of Symbolia’s preview issue is “How We Survive.”

This issue will explore survival, social adaptations, and evolution over the course of 5-6 stories that merge comics and illustration with prose, audio, and infographics. And we want you to become a contributor. 

We’re looking for insightful analysis, in-depth reporting, and exhilarating narratives that explore survival in the modern world. Read on to learn more about what we’re looking for and how to pitch us.

We will accept pitches for the preview issue from May 18-31. Fill out this form (also below) to submit a pitch. Ask us questions here.

Ideal pitches will focus on the following elements:

• Human stories of evolution and coping with change. While we love infographics and sexy data, it’s best to ground work in a person or community coping with an issue. 
• Insightful reporting and analysis of trends in science and technology that will dramatically shift our communities and economies. 
• Tell us how your story will best be told. What kinds of interactive elements would you like to incorporate? Options include small animations, audio, layered content, slide shows, etc. 
• Length. How many “pages” or “screens” do you anticipate this story taking? Please be clear about proposed length. We are looking for stories of appromately 8-10 pages or 1-2 pages. Symbolia will contain a mixture of bite-size morsels and meditative, exploratory work. 

Contributors will have a good degree of creative freedom. Symbolia is an opportunity to try something new. Symbolia’s creative director will work with creators to plot interactive elements. We welcome pitches from radio producers, comics creators, journalists, and graphic designers. Please let us know if you’re looking for a partner to help produce content.

Cartoonists who are interested in journalism, you really oughta think about contributing (for pay!) because I can personally vouch that Erin Polgreen, the lady behind this project, knows her fucking shit and will put out the best goddamn comics journalism digital magazine.

knowhomo:

Lesbian Comics You Should Know

1. Dykes to Watch Out For -   Alison Bechdel’s syndicated strip about lesbian and gay life (full strip now available in one book)
2. Girly - A comic about love
3. I Was Kidnapped by Lesbian Pirates from Outer Space - Just what the title says
4.  Jane’s World - Paige Braddock’s comic strip
5. simply sarah -  Award winning slice-of-life comic about love relationships and growing-up. Contains lesbian themes and a transgender character
6. DAR -  DAR! chronicles the six year long autobiographical story of Erika Moen, a lost 20-year-old lesbian artist-wannabe in college who falls in love with a boy in England and the evolution that her sexual identity undergoes before winding up marrying him as a queer 26-year-old full-time cartoonist

Aw man, that is some good company my comic is in :)

(Photoby Brendan Adkins)

Hey guys! This weekend is the Stumptown Comics Fest!

Come find me at table B-8 and get my brand new screenprint (hand printed, limited edition of 20!) and a copy of the #IsawU minicomic I did with Brendan Adkins! And riiiiiight next to me (literally, she is the table on my left), will be Dylan Meconis at table B-15, selling her limited edition screenprints that I printed for her! (Man, I am using a lot of exclamation points. BECAUSE I AM SO EXCITED.)

Plus, I will be doing some things away from my table too! Check this shit out:

My Talks and Signing Schedule:

Saturday
2 - 2:30, Signing at the Dark Horse booth, #107 
5 - 5:45, Speaking on the panel Dark Horse Originals: Genius Redefining Genre, Room B114

Sunday
3 - 3:45, Online Self-Promotion, Room B113

teahousecomic:

In the last few months several of our friends have said to us, “I do not know how you handle all of the crap you guys get on the internet.” Most of the time our response to them is, “We do our best to try to ignore it, but it is surprisingly hard.”

I’ll be honest. I was a nerdy kid and I was unpopular and picked on, but I’ve never been bullied the way I’m bullied because of Teahouse. And I’m not exaggerating that, we don’t talk about it much but it’s pretty brutal. I’m positive the same goes for E. And I think the worst thing is that most of it is relatively anonymous and incredibly personal.

We started Teahouse with a dorky sense of humor and an adoration of stupid melodrama. The comic exists because we desperately wanted something fun and different from our superhero gigs.  The book was never intended to be taken more seriously than any other BL stories out there because Teahouse is basically our love letter to the BL genre.

We come from superheroes for Christ sake. We just wanted to do a comic about dudes fucking cause THEY NEVER DID IN OUR DAY JOBS. *cry cry*

Teahouse became way bigger than either of us ever expected it to. We had no idea it’d blow up the way it did and with that popularity came a number of incredibly unpleasant surprises. 

One of the biggest casualties has been our ability to interact with people and fans.  We used to be able to joke around and even engage in serious conversations (not confrontations) but we can’t anymore. I’m not sure when it happened, but at some point people started taking everything, regardless of whether or not it was an obvious joke, seriously. So we hardly interact with people anymore and it super sucks because we used to enjoy it.

There’s this interesting culture of hate on the internet. I don’t know if it’s just that people are angry and feel a relief in releasing their anger online in the form of anonymous online “hate justice” but it’s rough on the receiving end of it. I won’t lie. People seem to think that ugly opinions are the same as constructive criticism and it’s not but there’s no arguing with them about it. They’re not looking for reasons to like you, they’re looking for more reasons to hate you.

I’m 90% positive that most of these people would never say any of this stuff to our faces. I don’t think that it’s because they don’t have the balls, I think it’s because most people genuinely don’t like hurting people. When you say something ugly to someone’s face you see the hurt that you cause. The internet makes it easier because you can do anonymously, over a computer, and feel guiltless. They don’t feel like bad people because they don’t see the results.

So the biggest piece of advice I’ve been giving people interested in web comics recently: “Minimize your response to negative people period. Don’t even try to reason with them. Just ignore it or delete, try not to engage.” Every once in a while we’ll slip up and let something get to us or joke about something that we think is minor (always blows up in our faces, someday we’ll learn) but at this point, that’s how we try deal with all the crap thrown at us. “Ignore, delete, try not to engage.”

All of this is true, I give the same advice when people say they want to start an autobio comic. 

rendigo:

The Smut Peddler Pre-Order Project is now live!

What is Smut Peddler?

In 2003 a black-and-white, anthology minicomic called Smut Peddler was released by Saucy Goose Press. It contained “sex-positive, female-friendly erotic comics from the best and the brightest in the independent small press publishing world,” and participants included Carla Speed McNeil (Finder), Layla Lawlor (Raven’s Children) Sean Bieri (Jape), and Tom Beland (True Story, Swear to God). It was a fantastic series of comics, with three issues published before its extended hiatus. 

This project has pulled Smut Peddler out of the mothballs and once again gifted the world with quality filth, but in the format of a square-bound, standard-sized, black-and-white book. The new Smut Peddler contains over 350 PAGES of lady-driven dirty comics.

This pre-order event will not only put excellent comics in your hands, it will also determine the bonuses of SP’s authors. They’ve already been paid for their contributions, but the more money this Kickstarter makes, the more money they get.

Who’s participating?

• Jess Fink
• Carla Speed McNeil
• EK Weaver
• Ambrosia & B. White
• Kel McDonald & Ben Reily
• Diana Nock
• Rennie Kingsley
• Argetz
• Mary Magdalene & Mr. Darcy
• Amanda Lafrenais
• Lee Blauersouth & Abby Lark & Theo Lorenz
• Trisha Lynn & Erin Basie
• Steve Horton & Erica Currey
• Alice Hunt & Deanna Echanique
• Nechama Frier 
• Shari Hes
• Alice Fox
• Pupcake
• Erika Moen & Leia Weathington
• Algesiras & Dwam
• Blue Delliquanti
• Betty Jean Doe 
• Ursula Wood & Jennifer Doyle 
• Rebecca Ruby & Megan Furesz 
• Magnolia Porter
• Spike
• And a cover by Emily Carroll!

The Smut Peddler Kickstarter is LIVE! We have 23 days to raise $20,000 to make this porn anthology a beautiful, sticky reality!

What is really exciting for the contributors is that if the original goal is met, all additional funding is going straight to the creators as cash bonuses. This is, sadly, kind of revolutionary for an anthology and especially one that is female-focussed. I’ve always said, if people want more professional female comic creators, those ladies need to get paid. With cash dollars. Like a professional.

I posted previews for Easy, the story Leia Weathington and I created for Smut Peddler, back in January, but here is a refresher! 

See ALL the previews on my blog. And then back the Smut Peddler Kickstarter.

colleencoover:

Two years ago, former Marvel Comics bullpen member Steve Bunche posted a comics try-out page submitted to Marvel in the 1990s by an unknown hopeful. The page, while lacking in polish and technique, nevertheless had very clear storytelling, and, as Bunche notes in his blog post: “While this guy would never have gotten work in a professional comic as a penciller, I have to admire his talent for creating an instant classic of a non sequitor:”

artist unknown

You are not imagining this. Wolverine stalks through the wilderness, searching for we know not what, and finds the late Freddie Mercury, frontman of the band Queen.

The page has since been rattling around on the Internet, occasionally reposted and retweeted, chuckled over and admired by people like my studiomate Jeff Parker, which is how I originally became aware of it. And it just kind of got stuck in my head. For TWO YEARS.

The story as presented raises a number of questions. What is Wolverine looking for? Agents of AIM? Peace and solitude? Or, as my other studiomate Memorial artist Rich Ellis suggested: is he looking to find Somebody To Love?

And how and why does Freddie Mercury appear at the end of his search? Was his tragically fatal illness miraculously cured, perhaps by an alien symbiote? Has he just returned from sailing the Seven Seas of Rhye? Or more simply and perhaps most logically, has Logan found himself in the presence of the wordly manifestation of a literal God of Rock?

And so, I have decided to explore these mysteries by recreating the original story, correcting some of the technical blunders on the way. I invite other artists to do the same, by which exercise we may one day come close to the fictional Truth of the matter.

I am reblogging both to further signal boost this brilliant piece by my studiomate, Colleen Coover, and also make sure you don’t miss that final line at the end of her commentary:

I invite other artists to do the same, by which exercise we may one day come close to the fictional Truth of the matter.

You guys, Colleen fricking Coover is inviting you all to re-draw that original page of Wolverine discovering Freddie Mercury by an unknown artist.

She is starting a movement.

Will you answer her call?

stevelieber:

Wally Wood’s 22 panels That Always Work have been passed around like cartoonist samizdat for decades now, and this is a good thing. But keep in mind, they aren’t a lesson in how to make good comics, they’re something to keep handy in case of emergency. The emergency in question is when a writer has handed you a non-visual script. (Read this letter from David Mamet to his writing staff for more about such things.)

Comics are a visual medium, and work best when they use pictures to advance and enrich the narrative. Sometimes a script doesn’t do that, but an artist still needs to communicate the impression that there is something dramatic taking place. Tv and film have sound and movement to help accomplish this goal. In comics, we’ve got variations in gesture, lighting, and composition.

At six or seven panels a page, you can run through a lot of clever shots very quickly trying to keep the reader’s eye engaged. When you’re all out of good ideas, that’s when you need to break the glass and deploy some of Wood’s 22.

(Morning Serial at the Henry Art Gallery)

I’m back from my five day trip up to Seattle for the Emerald City Comicon and the webcomics talk at the Henry Art Gallery! 

I’ve posted a batch of my photos from the talk here on my blog.

From left to right: Sarra Scherb (organizer and moderator), Aaron Diaz, me, Dylan Meconis, Emily Ivie, and Evan Dahm

Thank you so much to everyone who came out to the Webcomics panel at the Henry Art Museum last night! It was a great crowd and a pleasure talking with everyone :)

NEXT UP: The Emerald City Comicon!! Starting today and running until Sunday here in SEATTLE!

Emerald City Comicon at booth 223, Friday - Sunday.
Washington State Convention Center, 800 Convention Place, Seattle, WA
Dylan Meconis, Jonathan Case, and I are sharing a radtacular booth together!

Dark Horse Comics: Powered By Creators
4-5pm, Room 4C1-2 at the Emerald City Comicon
I will be speaking on this panel along with Jeremy Atkins, Steve Niles (Criminal Macabre), Steve Lieber (Alabaster), Francesco Francavilla (Black Beetle), Sanford Greene (Rotten Apple), Ethan Nicolle (Axe Cop), Adam Warren (Empowered), Paul Tobin (Falling Skies), and Brian Wood (The Massive)

And though I will not be on this panel, I highly encourage all you aspiring freelancers and cartoonists to check out: How to be a Successful Freelancer (March 31st, 11am-12pm, Room 201 at the Emerald City Comicon)
Katie Lane (Professional Contract Negotiator) and George Rohac (Director of Operations at Oni Press) will be laying out crucial information you NEED to know about surviving as your business.

Hope to see some of you folks there!